IT COULD be described as the most expensive plumbing call-out in history.
Each launch of the Space Shuttle costs about £30 million, and last night, as the Discovery docked with the International Space Station, it carried one vital part – a replacement pump for the orbital outpost's toilet.
The shuttle Discovery floated
into the station with these words: "Someone call a plumber?"
"Yeah, we got it," the shuttle commander, Mark Kelly, assured station flight engineer Garrett Reisman as the two greeted each other in orbit.
The space station toilet, housed in the Russian-built Zvezda module, is disposing of solid waste, but the urine collection system is not working properly.
Every three flushes or so it must be manually flushed with water, which takes two crew members about ten minutes.
The primary goal of Discovery's mission, which began on Saturday with liftoff from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, was to deliver Japan's £500 million Kibo laboratory, the cornerstone of that country's 20-year effort to join in as a permanent player in space exploration and research.
At 37ft long and just over 14ft wide, Kibo, which means hope, is so big that Discovery didn't have room in its cargo bay for its inspection boom, a piece of equipment that doubles the length of the shuttle's 50ft robot arm so that cameras and sensors can inspect the ship's wings and nosecap for damage.
A spare boom has been left at the ISS by a previous shuttle mission.
Astronauts Akihiko Hoshide and Karen Nyberg, working from inside the station, are to use the station's robot arm to pluck the 16-tonne Kibo lab from the shuttle's cargo bay and attach it to the Harmony module, which serves as a connecting node for several station components.
