Station arm pulls Columbus module from cargo bay
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: February 11, 2008
Atlantis astronaut Leland Melvin, a former college football star drafted by the Detroit Lions, used the international space station's robot arm today to carefully pull the European Space Agency's Columbus research module out of the shuttle's cargo bay.
Working with careful deliberation, Melvin, assisted by outgoing station astronaut Dan Tani and his replacement, Leopold Eyharts, slowly inched the 28,200-pound module out of the cargo bay at 2:56 p.m. using a grapple fixture that was attached to the bus-size laboratory earlier today by spacewalkers Rex Walheim and Stan Love. It was the first step in a carefully choreographed sequence of maneuvers to move the module to the front of the station for attachment to the right side of the Harmony connecting module.
"Columbus has started its trip to the new world," Tani quipped as the Canadian-built robot arm slowly pulled the module free.
"All right," one of the spacewalkers replied.
The 22.5-foot-long Columbus will add some 2,600 cubic feet of volume to the station after it is pulled into place by motorized bolts. Built by EADS Space Transportation, Columbus was launched with four European science racks and one European storage rack in place. NASA later will install five racks of its own. The European Space Agency has spent about $2 billion building Columbus, the experiments that will fly in it and the ground control infrastructure necessary to operate them.
"The laboratory modules are why we're doing it," NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said last week. "On the space station, it's really two things. It's a place to learn how to live and work in space, which we need to do, and for a long period of time before we go to Mars. It's also a place to do the research we would like to do in a better way than we've been able to do it in the more confined places we've flown in before.
"So now, more than a fourth of our laboratory capacity on the station as a whole is going up on this flight. It puts the Europeans into human spaceflight in a visible and permanent way. As you say, it makes the station a truly international collaboration, just every thing about it is good."
While Melvin and Tani worked to move Columbus into place for attachment to Harmony, Walheim and Love took a moment to recharge their spacesuit oxygen supplies before moving up to the station's main solar power truss. They plan to set up tools and make preparations to replace a nitrogen tank during a spacewalk Wednesday. The tank was used to pressurize the station's ammonia cooling system and a replacement was launched aboard Atlantis.
CGI image of the ISS after the installation of ''Columbus''
A spacewalk was conducted today by astronauts Rex Walheim and Stan Love, members of the STS-122 Space Shuttle crew, to install the new Columbus module onto the International Space Station. 

The spacewalk, or extra-vehicular activity (EVA), began at 14:13 UTC, with the astronauts leaving the ''Quest'' airlock of the Space Station, and starting work to install an attachment point on top of the ''Columbus'' module, to allow it to be moved by the Station's robotic arm. This was completed at 19:00, about an hour later than planned, owing to the installation taking longer than expected. ''Columbus'' was lifted out of the payload bay of ''Atlantis'' at 19:55 UTC, by the Space Station's robotic arm, Canadarm2. Astronaut Dan Tani, controlling Canadarm2 from aboard the ISS remarked "Columbus has started its trip to the new world". At 21:29, ''Columbus'' soft-docked with the Space Station's ''Harmony'' node, and the module finished bolting itself in place by 21:44.

Meanwhile, the astronauts performed some tasks to prepare for the next spacewalk, which is currently scheduled for Wednesday. They loosened bolts holding a nitrogen tank in place on the port truss segment of the Station, ahead of its replacement. It was originally planned that they would also disconnect pipes and electrical connections, however these objectives were delayed to Wednesday's spacewalk, due to time constraints. The EVA finished at 22:12 UTC, having lasted seven hours and fifty-eight minutes

This marks the 102nd spacewalk as part of the International Space Station programme, and the first of three planned for the STS-122 Shuttle mission. It was originally planned that German astronaut Hans Schlegel would perform the EVA instead of Stan Love, however he was unable to do so due to an undisclosed medical problem.