April 30, 2003

Hang Ten
Credit: ISS Expedition 6 Flight Engineer Nikolai Budarin

April 30, 2003: On April 8th, astronauts Ken Bowersox (pictured above) and Don Pettit emerged from the International Space Station's Quest airlock for a six and a half hour space walk. Their mission: "to get ahead." They performed a variety of maintenance tasks--many ahead of schedule--to make things easier for their replacements Yuri Malenchenko and Edward Lu.

Normally three people live onboard the ISS--lately Bowersox, Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. For a while, though, there will be only two. A two-person crew needs fewer supplies, and that's good while the heavy-lifting shuttle fleet is grounded. Malenchenko and Lu arrived on April 28th onboard a Russian Soyuz TMA-2 spacecraft. They'll keep the ISS going for the next 6 months.

Hanging out in the picture above are Bowersox's feet and the suitcase-sized Materials International Space Station Experiment--better known as MISSE (pronounced "Missy"). MISSE is peppered with samples of advanced materials; they're being exposed to the ravages of space to see how they fare. Super-spaceships that replace Soyuz capsules and space shuttles might be made of far-out building blocks identified by this experiment.