Shuttle Discovery Docks Safely With Space Station

The space shuttle Discovery docked successfully Friday with the international space station, and the two massive spacecraft locked in orbit without benefit of radar for the first time in five shuttle trips to the $60-billion science outpost.

Because of an antenna failure aboard the shuttle, Discovery commander Brian Duffy had to perform the delicate docking operation without any radar, instead using an optical system called the Star Tracker to tell him where the station was and how fast he was approaching.

“This is the first flight we’ve ever done a no-radar rendezvous and it worked extremely well,” lead flight director Chuck Shaw said.

Discovery’s seven-astronaut crew left the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday on a mission to add two new segments to the space station, a joint project of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and a host of European nations.

Since the launch, Discovery had been chasing the space station, with Duffy and pilot Pam Melroy periodically firing the shuttle’s rockets to bring it into the same orbit as the outpost.

Duffy approached the station from behind, flying to a point about 500 feet below it and then executed a slow semicircle around the station and docked with it from above.

“We have capture,” an astronaut radioed after the shuttle’s docking ring had secured itself to the station.

It was the fifth time a U.S. shuttle has docked at the space station, an intricate maneuver that has come to seem routine.

“It’s a magnificent ballet and it’s a very slow ballet,” said veteran shuttle commander Jim Halsell. “It’s easy and it’s difficult at the same time.”

Easy because Duffy has been practicing the docking for three years, difficult because in the last 30 feet or so, as the two spacecraft are preparing to bump into each other, no one wants anything to go wrong.

The radar was lost because of a failure with the KU-band antenna, which also sends visual images from the shuttle to Earth. The KU-band is not expected to work for the remainder of the mission, Shaw said.

Space enthusiasts will have to make do with still images as astronaut Koichi Wakata uses the shuttle’s robot arm to insert spacewalker Leroy Chiao through the girders of a new space station segment.

After the docking, the astronauts began to make their way into the Unity module, in which they are preparing to receive the first of two new segments today.