Spacewalk Improves View from Space Station Lab

Two spacewalking astronauts hung a window shutter on the sparkling new Destiny science laboratory Monday, providing an unparalleled view of Earth from the international space station.

As soon as Thomas Jones and Robert Curbeam Jr. placed the aluminum shutter on Destiny’s 20-inch porthole and hooked up a gearbox, the station’s residents cranked open the shutter from inside.

The shutter is needed to protect the window against damage from micrometeorites. The window had been covered with insulating material before the shutter was installed, and no one could look out.

The porthole, 6 inches thick and made of four panes, is the finest optical-quality window ever built into a spacecraft. Astronauts and cosmonauts will photograph and observe the Earth through the window, using high-powered cameras and telescopes.

The first picture, naturally, was of the two space shuttle Atlantis spacewalkers. Space station Alpha’s commander, Bill Shepherd, called it “an awesome, awesome shot.”

“He’s talking Oscar,” shuttle pilot Mark Polansky told the spacewalkers, who burst into laughter. The spacewalkers and station residents waved at each other from opposite sides of the window.

Jones and Curbeam were not supposed to install the frying pan-shaped shutter until the third and final spacewalk of the lab-delivery mission, on Wednesday. But they were running so far ahead of schedule that they squeezed in some extra chores before returning indoors.

During Monday’s seven-hour outing, the spacewalkers also installed the electronic base for a massive robot arm that will be added to space station Alpha in April, and strung a slide wire along the length of the 28-foot lab for use by future construction workers. And they wired up a shuttle docking port on the end of the laboratory.

Astronaut Marsha Ivins, the shuttle’s robot-arm operator, performed the bulk of the work in attaching the docking port to Destiny.

The port was removed from the space station on Saturday to make room for the $1.4-billion laboratory, considered the centerpiece of the orbiting complex and delivered by Atlantis. Ivins parked the port in an out-of-the-way place on the space station.

As the spacewalkers toiled outside Destiny, work was going on inside to get it up and running. Shepherd and his two Russian crew mates confirmed that all the exterior connections were good.