Astronauts’ Return Date Extended

The astronauts aboard the international space station will spend an extra month in orbit because of robot arm trouble, pushing their mission to a U.S. record-setting 189 days.

NASA decided Thursday to bump the crew’s ride home from May to June so the visiting astronauts can replace a balky wrist joint in the space station’s mechanical arm. The additional 3 1/2 weeks are needed to train the shuttle astronauts for the repair work and add the spare joint to the mission payload.

American astronauts Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch and their Russian commander, Yuri Onufrienko, moved into the space station in early December and logged their 106th day in orbit Thursday. Space shuttle Endeavour was supposed to lift off with their replacements on May 6; that launch is now scheduled for May 31.

That will keep the three men in orbit until June 12, beating NASA’s current space endurance record by a single day. Shannon Lucid’s 1996 Mir mission lasted 188 days; she still will hold the world’s space endurance record for women.

Even at 189 days, Onufrienko won’t come close to surpassing his country’s space endurance record: an incredible 438 days set by Russian cosmonaut-physician Valery Polyakov aboard Mir in 1994 and 1995.

The space station residents were notified of the shuttle delay shortly after the decision was made, but had had a hunch they would be staying up longer than planned because of the robot arm problem.

NASA can work around the problem with computer software for the upcoming space station construction mission by Atlantis, due to lift off April 4 with a 44-foot girder to be installed on the orbiting outpost.

But managers want to fix the station’s robot arm as soon as possible after Atlantis’ flight, by having shuttle astronauts replace one of three wrist joints in the 58-foot Canadian-built crane.

The joint malfunctioned several weeks ago.