Preflight Interview: Jim Reilly

The STS-104 Crew Interviews with Jim Reilly, Mission Specialist.

Q: Jim, I'd like to start by asking you to tell us why you wanted to become an astronaut.

A: I was like most of the folks here, I think, when they wanted to become astronauts. It happened early in my life; I was about nine years old. And I have a connection that I was able to make just recently, not too long in the past, with the guy who actually started it all off for me, and that was John Glenn. He was on his third, or just gotten his approval for his third orbit, when I was sitting in a dentist's chair and the dentist asked me if I wanted to be an astronaut, and at that particular moment I thought that was better than what I was doing, and that pretty much started it. I was one of the kids that wrote to NASA and had a pile of stuff my mother kept trying to throw away, and I kept recovering. And I just kept that dream alive. And as it turned out…the only way to get into NASA as an astronaut in the earlier years, through the early '70s certainly, was primarily becoming a military pilot, test pilot, and then an astronaut. And at that time the Vietnam War had ended, the pilot ranks were being shrunk, and I had a different change in my career path. And so I went off and became a geologist and worked there for seventeen years in the oil industry…but I never forgot my dream and in 1985 put in an application and just kept working at it. And so what I tell kids now is that whatever your dream is, don't ever give up, because you never know where it's going to take you and you might actually, even though it's through a back door, like mine, you can eventually get your way into what it is you're really looking for.

What, for you, what was the career path that led here? You mentioned a couple of steps-fill them in for us.

Well, I started primarily -- I went into geology. I was…if I couldn't fly for the military I was going to fly as a civilian, I figured I would go off to the airlines and I needed to get a degree so I wanted it in the sciences or engineering. So I picked geology because I liked geology, though you couldn't find a job to save your life at the time. So I continued on with that, and when I finished my bachelor's the guy that I was working for, the professor, by the name of Marty Halperin there at University of Texas at Dallas, asked me if I wanted to go to the Antarctic and I thought, sure, that would be great. So I spent three months in a remote field camp in west Antarctica working as a member of a thirty-member team in the expedition mapping and surveying a portion of west Antarctica that had not been previously studied in great detail. Completing that, I was working on my master's and got a job in the oil industry, found out that I found that to be fairly challenging work; that eventually turned into a seventeen-year career in the oil industry, and as part of that I was able to do a lot of work with submersibles out in the Gulf of Mexico. We were looking at communities of organisms there that live on the oil and gas seeps and the chemicals that are derived from breakdown of the oil and gas, and it's very similar to finding something alive on Mars in that it's very different from what we are normally accustomed to seeing as far as what's within the food chain, for example, here on the surface. The communities that live in the chemicals don't have any photosynthetic component in their food chain. You know, of course, everything that we see and everything we're familiar with, up until about 1974 generally had a, always has a photosynthetic component: the grass that the cows eat, for example, that makes the milk, and it's everything basically that we eat is a, had a photosynthetic component to it. But these organisms are completely different, and they had a chemical component and no photosynthetic component whatsoever. So we were working on those and so I got a chance to work in submersibles in the oil industry doing that, as well as doing my paying job, which was looking for oil and gas in both international and in the Gulf of Mexico.

When you look back across those years and those different jobs and whatnot, who do you consider the people who were, or perhaps still are, the most significant influences in your life?

You know, when I get a chance to go talk to kids in school, particularly the ones in middle school and sometimes in high school, more in the middle school ranks, those are the kids that are through that kind of gee-whiz profile and they're now kind of in that, they're just about to start to turn that almost, well, this is what I'm going to do with the rest of my life kind of position…what formed, what were the greatest influences on me were really two things, and they were the ones that, they were the people that always supported you, and then there were always the ones that said you couldn't do something. The ones that supported you were the ones that believed in you, that made you believe that you could actually do it. There was always that teacher that says, you can do this, you know, it's not that hard; your parents, that are always there to support you and get you the things that you need, that give you the tools so that you can advance. But there's, from my perspective, I look back and after having thought about this now for a few years, there's that other side -- there were those that said, you can't do that -- because that challenged me to do it, just to show them. But the other side was that if you didn't have that component that believed in you, that said you could do it, you'd never be able to do it. So now when we go out and talk to kids a lot of what I really try to get to the kids is, don't listen to the ones that tell you, you can't do it, other than you're going to prove them wrong, because you can do anything you want, and as long as you believe in yourself there's no way that they're going to ever, ever tell you, you can't do it. The only person who can make you not do something is yourself, and if you tell yourself you can't do it, then you can't do it. So, it really, there's the two parts there.

And you mentioned a few moments ago that you got a chance to meet somebody who was very influential in your life. What was it like to meet, for you, to meet John Glenn?

That was well, in a broader sense just working here is the fulfillment of a dream, but actually standing and getting a chance to talk to John and Annie and tell them how this whole thing got started, you know, is really pretty, pretty special. And of course John's a great guy -- he's just a phenomenal, friendly, open individual, and was just a lot of fun to talk to. And, it was really, it was one of those highlights of your life -- you know, when I look back on the rest of my life, you know, there's going to be a few things that really stand out: meeting John Glenn, who started this whole thing; the day that I reported for work here at NASA as an astronaut on March 6th; all these little things are going to pop up…you know, meeting Neil Armstrong and getting a chance to say hello to him, too, and just getting the opportunity to work with your heroes. You know, this is something you just can't duplicate anywhere else.

Your first space shuttle mission was a visit to the Mir space station back in 1998. Do you think that the experience of having trained for and having flown a space station mission has benefited you and your current crewmates as you get ready for this mission?

In some ways I think it has. You know, you get the opportunity to go through the whole rendezvous profile that we'll be flying very similar when we visited Mir; the transition that you make as you go from a single spacecraft and joining with a second one to become a much larger complex at which point all the transfers need to take place, all the logistics between the two vehicles all have to occur. All that was good training. Everything we did with Mir in that regard, in Phase 1, basically set us up for Phase 2, and that included not just the direct result of the training, which is things like the logistics and the rendezvous, but in being able to know how our Russian crewmates think and how they work, how their ground function, how their ground operations work, how those two separate systems, you know, bringing our two separate systems together occurred in the Mir program in Phase 1 has helped us in Phase 2. And I think it's going to be something that, that's almost an indefinable advantage to have going into a station mission. But just knowing where the headaches are, for example, transferring all that stuff through a thirty-three-inch diameter tube, you know, going from one state, from one vehicle to the other, that's all helpful. But from the broader aspect of going to Mir it was one of those gee-whiz moments when we were floating in Mir doing a press conference and had the opportunity to look out the window and then realize that I am standing in what was a Soviet spaceship, and ten years before if somebody had asked me if I was ever going to do that, I would have just laughed at them -- it would have been impossible. But things have changed, and things have gone completely full circle. And with the deorbit of Mir the other day it was a bittersweet moment to watch the station come back to Earth because it was one of those things, it was a big piece of space history. It defined the Soviet and Russian space programs for fifteen years, and then for the last four-and-a-half years, it's been a defining moment between our two programs that joined us going into the International Space Station. So there's a lot of threads, if you will, that all kind of weave a fabric of Mir into what we're doing today that are almost indefinable but very, very tangible.

On the subject of training, by the time STS-104 launches it will have been four years since you and Mike Gernhardt were assigned as space walkers for this assembly mission 7A. Has that long period of time been extra helpful or extra hurtful in getting ready?

I think for us directly, well, Mike and I have had the opportunity to basically watch this vehicle grow from the, from its earliest stages, when it first showed up in Huntsville as a shell, and so we've been able to effect changes in the way that we're going to do our task and the way some of the components have been designed so that, one, it makes it much more efficient for us to conduct the operations that we need to activate the airlock, as well as it gives us the opportunity, if nothing else, to go to space with the corporate knowledge on this is exactly what we expect to see, this is the way it was designed, the way we saw it designed, these are the things we've trained with. That has been an advantage. It would be a bit more difficult for us, for example, if we came into it within a year or so and basically everything was built; by having us actively involved, the operator actively involved, in the design and the construction of the module, then we know how it works, we know what it looks like, we know where the problems are. And, so we have an advantage that others might not have with that long lead time.

Let's talk about the mission. Let me get you [to] start, if I could, by summarizing the goals of STS-104 -- what is it that this mission is designed to do?

STS-104 is essentially a simple mission. You know, we're taking up the airlock and we're going to activate it as part of the International Space Station. We're going to add the module that will allow routine space walks from the International Space Station without a large consumable cost. The Joint Airlock has got the capability to recover most of the air that would otherwise be lost to space when going to vacuum for an EVA. And most other airlocks, including the one on the shuttle, we basically exhaust the volume of the airlock out to space to get to vacuum, and then we just use air from the shuttle to repressurize the airlock. In the case of the Joint Airlock, we'll actually pump that air back into the station so that it can be, continue to be used by the International Space Station crew and the equipment on board and rather than losing it to space. So it allows, since air and water and food, of course, are all high, prized, precious commodities for the station, that's one of the things that we can save in the future for the station crews.

Let me get you to talk some about what this is as well as what it can do. Talk about the Joint Airlock and its major components -- and where it goes on the station.

We're going to position the airlock, actually, it's going to be kind of an interesting operation because it's going to be picked up with a robotic arm, which will be the first real use of the Canadian-built space station robotic manipulator system, the SSRMS. That's going to pick up the airlock from the shuttle payload bay; the shuttle arm will actually be basically standing back and providing another means of providing video to the station crew while Susan and Jim Voss pick up the airlock out of the payload bay, bring it around, and then they'll drive it up to the Node 1, which is between the Lab and the FGB, and they'll position it where it will be robotically attached to the Node on the starboard side. So it'll be just immediately below the solar arrays on the starboard side of the vehicle as it's flying. And what we're going to do then, Mike and I will go up, of course, and as soon as it's installed, then we start setting up on the first EVA to position the four High Pressure Gas Tanks, and we'll have two oxygen and two nitrogen High Pressure Gas Tanks that will provide the metabolic oxygen, for example, for the crew and for any payload support, to the entire station as well as provide oxygen support to the EVA suits, the EMU EMUs that we'll use on orbit and also the station crew will use on orbit. On EVA 2, we'll put on two of those tanks, an oxygen and a nitrogen tank, so that we will guarantee the capability of the airlock at the end of EVA 2, and then on EVA 3 we'll position the other two remaining tanks so that we end up with all four tanks on board.

The airlock itself, along with these four tanks that you just described, is, it's one piece of equipment but it's really considered to be in two compartments, I guess, is that…

Correct. Yes, it's basically composed of two, one large-diameter and one small-diameter shell. The larger diameter is called the equipment lock, and it's basically where all the support equipment for the EVAs and all of our stowage and where we'll check out our suits, we'll get suited up, will all take place in the equipment lock. The smaller-diameter portion of the module is the crew lock, and it's just like the shuttle airlock -- in fact, it's almost identical in its structure to the one that we have on the external airlock on the shuttle Atlantis -- and what it's designed to do is basically be the portal for us to space from the space station. We'll actually close the hatch between the equipment lock and the crew lock, isolate that, pump out the atmosphere down to about five psi in the crew lock by way of a depress pump -- it's a Russian depress pump that's been installed in the equipment lock-and then from there we'll depress the remaining five psi to vacuum through the crew lock hatch. And then Mike'll open the hatch, and then we'll go out, on EVA 3, for example, we'll do the first EVA, or we'll plan to do the first EVA, out through the crew lock.

You said that the airlocks, the airlock on the shuttle and the crew lock on the Joint Airlock hardware, are roughly the same; if you could compare a space walk using the airlock on the shuttle to one on the station using this new compartment, what do you think would be some of the differences that we who are watching you would notice through the use of this new hardware?

The…probably the most abundantly obvious thing will be our orientation. When you come out of the shuttle airlock, you're coming out into the payload bay, so you're basically coming out into a shell of the vehicle itself. And so there's the shuttle all around you, and so it's going to be quite a…it'll be a big impact to come out through there but you still have this mass of the vehicle around you. When we come out of the crew lock on the airlock, the Joint Airlock on the station, you're basically stepping out into space, looking straight down at the Earth. And that's going to be quite a different sensation I think. And so you're liable to hear one or two of us say something about the view as we come out of the crew lock. As far as the mechanism itself and engineering aspects of it, they are very similar so a lot of them, the mechanisms will be very similar to what we're already used to going in and out of the shuttle airlock. The only difference, really, is that the umbilicals that we use both in the crew lock and the shuttle airlock, we actually will stow them into some pouches on the sides of the crew lock on the ISS airlock, whereas we have racks to hang those things on in the shuttle airlock. But, otherwise it's a, the systems are very similar…a slightly different panel layout…but the big impact is really going to be stepping out and looking down at the Earth going by beneath your feet or being the first view you see is coming out and looking at basically space and the Earth underneath you.

Is…the hatch actually opens pointed down toward the Earth, right?

Right. Yes. It's the very first view we'll have when Mike opens that hatch will be looking down to see the Earth traveling below us. That's going to be quite, quite a view.

Does the use of the station's airlock have any particular or dramatic changes in your preparations in terms of prebreathing time or how you depressurize or then repressurize the airlock at the end and the beginning of your space walks?

In fact what we're hoping to do on this flight is to demonstrate the capability of a change in our prebreathe protocol, and that's basically the purging of our bodies of nitrogen. Because we'll go to about a 4.3 psi absolute pressure in the EMU where we're normally at 14.7 here on the Earth, of course, but where the partial pressure of oxygen is increased because we're running 100% O2 in the suit, but what you have to do before you go in there is you have to go through a depress protocol, and basically in the shuttle what we've been doing is going for twelve hours or so down to about 10.2 psi and then we go on a prebreathe prior, just prior to in the suit where we breathe a hundred percent oxygen. Well that's a difficult thing to do: you can't really depress the entire station to 10.2 psi, it's too much of a volume and of course as we've talked already, the atmospheric components that, the air, the oxygen and nitrogen that form the atmosphere in the station is a very expensive commodity to haul to space, so of course we want to preserve that. So there's two ways of doing it. One is to close off the EVA crew in the equipment lock, depress the equipment lock down to 10.2, and do the same protocol that we have done in the space shuttle. The problem with that, of course, is that you isolate those people from the rest of the station, and if that's being done by the station crew right now, which consists of three people, that effectively puts a minimum of two people and maybe all three on the other side of a sealed hatch from the entire station, so obviously that's not the best way of going about it. So, what Mike Gernhardt, my partner here, has worked on, since he's got a background in commercial diving, has come up with [an] exercise prebreathe protocol where we actually prebreathe 100% oxygen for about two hours, and then as part of this prebreathe protocol we go through an exercise regimen that's designed to drive the nitrogen out of our blood faster than it would be just by basically being at 10.2 and breathing a short-duration O2 purge. So basically it's putting on O2 on a mask and we stay on it for two hours, go through an exercise protocol to help free up any trapped nitrogen that's in our bodies, and then we go off into the suit. That has the advantage of keeping the crew in the station volume as part of the station crew. And so we're hoping to try that -- it's currently being reviewed right now, we hope to have it approved for flight.

The use of this airlock in that way presumably then would allow the hatches between the shuttle and the station to remain open more than they have been in the early flights, yes?

Potentially. If we changed our protocol for the shuttle flights as well, then certainly we could move this protocol into the shuttle to where we wouldn't have to ever basically close the hatches. You know, the crew could basically go on the two-hour prebreathe on the shuttle with the masks and do it the same way they would on the station, and so conceivably you could have both vehicles always open. You wouldn't have to close the hatches a day prior to an EVA, for example, so that you could depress the shuttle to 10.2 psi, which is effectively what we're going to have to do on our mission.

To do all of the things that we're about to talk about, the first step requires bringing the shuttle and the station together on orbit. Talk us through the plans for the rendezvous and docking with the station and what you are going to be doing as part of the team on board Atlantis.

My part of that job's pretty simple; I don't have any of the hard stuff to do. Steve and Charlie, Janet, and Mike have that. My primary job on this, on the rendezvous portion, will be the same as what I had on STS-89, when we rendezvoused with Mir, and that is to perform the hand range and range rate sensor activities which is a handheld laser, basically the same type of laser that police departments use for clocking us on the highway. Basically we're using the same device to measure our distance and our speed as we approach the International Space Station. So from at least about five-thousand feet out and probably farther out, I'll start working the range and range rate calculations so that we always have one good piece of data that we can consider solid as we approach. That's one of about three different primary tools that we use to calculate that information and to calculate our trajectory, but it's the one that no kidding, we can look at and say, yes, I'm pointing at the station and yes, I think we're about this far, and yes, it's giving us a rate of a certain value. And we'll compare that with our radar data and then there's the state vector data, and then there's another laser system called TCS which is also installed in the shuttle, and we'll be comparing all that information together as part of our rendezvous profile.

The profile that your crew will be flying is similar to what's been flown on the previous couple of missions.

Similar. We'll actually be docking in the same way that 102 just did, or very similar to it, in that we'll fly up to a position underneath the station and then we'll travel around in about a quarter-circle up to where we're right in front of the station on the velocity vector, and then we'll dock as we come in on the velocity vector. And so we'll be attached to the forward end of the Lab as the vehicle's flying through space; we'll be attached to the forward end of the Lab, and from that point is where we'll actually do all of our work. Susan will come down and pick up the airlock and air tanks and everything else from that position.

Well before all of that happens, on the day that you dock, all of you are scheduled to be spending the first couple of hours with what the timeline calls a "dry run" of the airlock installation. What's on tap here? This is something you practiced already on the ground, why the need to practice it again once you arrive?

It's just like flying a mission, you know, we take the T-38s somewhere, you know, we'll sit down, we'll talk about exactly where we're going and what we're going to do and who's going to do what, and just make sure everybody's on the same page with the same information. And, it'll have been, you know, three months since we've seen Susan, Jim, and Yury, and so we'll want to sit down with them again and say, OK, this is what we're going to do, and this is what we're going to say, and this is what we expect to have happen at each of these different steps, so that Susan understands exactly what we're going to say -- Charlie, who's going to be our IV crewmember is going to know exactly what we're saying, and so that everybody basically on that triangle -- which is Mike and I on one end and then Charlie on one and Susan and Jim on the other -- we all know who's talking about what and at what point so it's very clear and very concise, and then we know exactly what's going to happen. And also the sequence -- you know, we'll walk through the entire sequence of steps so that we're very clear. And so there'll be as little explaining to do as possible while we're out there. So we'll try to just walk through everything we're going to do one last time.

The first of the three planned space walks on this mission is scheduled for the next day. You mentioned some; tell us what everybody's going to be doing. Who's playing what parts?

On the first space walk Susan and Jim, of course, are going to be in the station; they're going to be the robotic operator 1, which is Susan, and robotic operator 2, which is Jim. And they're going to be set up to pick up the airlock. As soon as Mike and I have finished configuring the airlock doing some steps to get it ready to be unberthed from the payload bay, then Susan and Jim will drive in the SSRMS and attach it to the airlock and then pick it up out of the airlock at which point Mike and I will have left -- we'll actually go back into the airlock at that point. During that same period in the orbiter, Janet Kavandi and Steve are going to be acting as R1 and R2 for the shuttle arm, and we use the shuttle arm in the first part of the EVA 1 for me to get on the arm, and Janet'll drive me around to do some of the configuration work that we need to do, which will be installing guideposts, for example, that Mike and I use as the guides when we bring the High Pressure Gas Tanks down onto the equipment lock shell. And she'll be driving that around with Steve as the backup. Charlie is going to be our IV crewmember, he's going to be more or less the conductor. We're going to be talking to him a lot as we're going through our steps, and we'll keep him briefed on exactly where we are and what we're doing, because he'll be going down the checklist inside for us…you know, this and this and this and this. And he'll be watching for, make sure that we don't miss anything, and so we're always double-checking back and forth. And then he'll be the one that'll be talking back and forth to Janet and Steve as we're making our rounds outside, so as I ask Janet to come aft in the payload bay for example, on the arm, Charlie'll be the one that will actually answer us. So it'll sound kind of strange: you'll actually hear me talking to Janet and hear Charlie's voice come back. But that's the way it's going to work. Yury's going to be the station Commander watching basically the whole big picture, along with Steve on the shuttle, and those are the two guys that'll be working it. Hopefully, they'll have very little that they have to say because we'll have pre-briefed everything beforehand.

Then, take us out with you and Mike on this first space walk, and what are the milestones and the tasks that you two are going to perform during this several hours?

As we first come out, Mike will, the first thing we have to do is basically pick up our tools and get ourselves set. We'll configure the shuttle arm so that we can put the Portable Foot Restraint on the arm, which is what I'll use to ride the arm. We'll also put some covers on there, which we put on, on EVA 2, on the airlock, we'll put that as one bundle on the arm and then there's another bag that's got some of the tools and things that we'll, that I'll be using, I'll hang that on the arm. And then we drive the arm over; while I go pick up the Portable Foot Restraint, Mike is then going down to get ready to remove some covers off of the airlock so that it will be ready for berth. As I go down the side with the Portable Foot Restraint, Mike is going back and what he does he's got two PFRs set up in the aft part of the payload bay, he'll be removing a very large shower cap-like device -- well, we actually call it the "shower cap" -- and what it is, is a contamination and thermal cover that covers the CBM, the joining mechanism for the airlock to the station, with that thermal cover. And it's a pretty big, it's like a, the best way to describe it would be like a, about a twelve-foot diameter, about an eight-foot, eight- or nine-foot diameter, Mylar balloon, you know, that he's got to pick up and carry it off; it's very similar to the one that Bob Curbeam took off on the Lab. After he completes that then he'll be taking off some contamination covers off the seal ring that forms the metal-to-metal seal with the Node, and once those are complete, by that point, I have been in the, I'll get in the arm, get in the PFR on the arm, drive back and then we have some guideposts and other attachment devices for the tanks that I'll be installing on the top of the equipment lock as you look at it in the payload bay. And once those are in place, then I'll go down, drop off the bag with the remaining items that will be installed on EVA 2 on the side of the crew lock, along with the covers which I've already installed; we'll then pick up the contamination covers and the thermal cover, the big thermal cover, bring all that stuff back and stow it in the tool stowage assembly, which is on the starboard side of the shuttle payload bay. Once that's complete then Mike and I basically get out and we give a "go" for unberth of the airlock, and that's when Susan and Jim pick up the airlock and take it up. In that period Mike and I are back in the shuttle airlock -- we get back on shuttle power and oxygen -- until the crew, or until the airlock is up and just about ready to be berthed. And once it's close then we'll egress the airlock on the shuttle again, then we'll climb up the stack of the Lab to the Node, and we'll be up there in case that Susan has a problem with mating the airlock. This will be the first time that the operators will not have a direct mating cue -- in other words, they won't have anything to look at like a centerline target that verifies exactly the alignment, so this'll be the first time that the Space Vision System, the SVS, which is the digital targeting software, will be used as the primary means of docking a module. So if there's any problem with that, Mike and I will be up there to give them external cues, but we don't expect they'll have any problems with that. So by the time we get there we expect that the airlock'll be in place. Mike will then attach some launch-to-activation cables, which will power the heater strings for the airlock, and while he's doing that I'll be picking up some Articulated Portable Foot Restraints, APFRs, and I'll be positioning those APFRs for our EVA 2, so when we're getting ready to dock our first tank. And that will be basically the end of the EVA; once that's complete then we'll go back down the stack to the shuttle, ingress the airlock, and that'll be the end of that first day outside.

As you've described it, the real heavy lifting in this whole operation is being done by the Expedition crew, using their brand-new space station robot arm. Can you tell us about how the capabilities and the characteristics of this new Canadarm are going to be utilized in this operation?

The most obvious one is, if you look, if you were to look at the way the workstation is constructed inside the Lab, the U.S. Lab, they don't have any direct visual cues -- everything is done off of video or digital information. So Susan'll be working, if you will, blind: she won't be using her eyes as a visual cue, directly, from her to the outside. The arm operator, Janet, for example, Janet and Steve on the shuttle, will always have the windows to be able to look out of for a lot of it but Susan will never have a window so she'll be looking at all of her cues from a video and robotic sense. The other part, or the interesting thing about the SSRMS, the Canadian arm, that makes it so unique for the station is that, as the station grows, it's going to be, of course, the primary means of doing anything outside as far as heavy lift, as you pointed out, and of course we've got an awful lot of heavy lift to construct the station. And so they'll be moving that arm around, and an interesting thing about it is that it can mate up with another grapple fixture, get power and data from that new grapple fixture, and release the other end, and so basically it has the opportunity to inchworm across the station to do whatever task needs to be done. But on our flight, they'll actually have the arm, which will be extending basically all the way around, or three-quarters of the way around, the Lab, to position the airlock on the side of the Node, so that's going to be pretty dynamic.

For the two days in the timeline after your first space walk, you've got a lot of work scheduled inside the shuttle/station complex. Talk about what kinds of jobs are on the agenda here; how do they fit in to the overall completion of the task?

Well, as part of installing the airlock, of course, we have to get it powered up to provide all the services that support it and be able to check all those components out before we leave, and so that's basically what happens is once we get it mated then we can start working in the vestibule -- and that's the space between the airlock and the Node -- and making the connections, the same types of connections that were made recently on the Lab when it was attached. And we'll be looking at power, data, fluid lines and we'll be reconfiguring some of the launch valves that are designed to release any excess pressure inside the equipment lock, and we'll replace those with ventilation valves and fans as part of the whole package. Once that part is complete and we open the hatch, one of the very first things we'll be doing after that, once we get power on the module, is we'll be moving that hatch that formed the external seal to the equipment lock and moving it to the crew lock, and then that'll be the other half of our two hatches that isolate the crew lock as the vacuum part of the component. It'll keep the equipment lock at 14.7, and then the crew lock will be that, that's the part of it that we'll take to vacuum. That's one of the very first tasks that we'll have to do once we get inside. In addition to that, of course, we'll be starting up all the equipment for the first time on orbit on station power. Checking out all the battery charging assemblies, everything that's going to be used for routine operation for space walkers on board the International Space Station. That's part of it, as well as bringing up the cabin air assemblies and the whole service structure that'll support the module as a component of the space station.

After a couple of days working inside, it will be time for you and Mike to go back outside. The second space walk of the mission, again out of the shuttle airlock, and again with the station's robot arm playing a major role in what you do. Talk us through this day -- what are we going to see all of you accomplish?

It'll be very similar to the first one as far as what each individual will be doing. We'll all have the same, basically the same tasks: Susan and Jim will be on the SSRMS, and in this case what they'll be doing will be picking up two of the High Pressure Gas Tanks from the payload bay and then bringing them up to within a few inches of the equipment lock, where Mike and I, who will be in foot restraints on the equipment lock, will then take the High Pressure Gas Tank from the arm and then we'll do the last fine alignment of that High Pressure Gas Tank, and then we'll bring it down to where it, the latches can then go into soft dock. Once we have it on soft dock then it will be permanently installed on the station from that point on for each one of these High Pressure Gas Tanks. So our plan for that day is, once we come out, we will actually go up the Laboratory, on the Lab slide wire which will be the first time that we'll have used that -- we'll inspect the slide wire once, come back down, and go back up -- then we'll get positioned for the tank handoff. And then once the tank is delivered, then Mike and I will put that first tank on. Mike will go back down to release the second tank, and then as he's down I'll be reconfiguring the APFRs, the foot restraints, for the second tank. And, it's going to be tank 1 is the first one we'll put on, and then we'll put on tank 4 so that we have an oxygen and a nitrogen tank on the equipment lock. And while he's on his way back, additional tasks that need to be done, like attachment of the Orlan communications cable that comes from the Russian segment to the equipment lock, I'll do that as part of one of the tasks because I'm, as I'm still up on the equipment lock. Then as soon as the arm is close with the tank, and we'll get what we call the ten-minute call, that they're ten minutes away, then Mike and I will get ready in the APFRs again, we'll release a thermal cover that's over sections of the tank, or a section of the equipment lock, through which radiant energy will then be used to keep the tanks warm so that they can stay at reasonably close to the temperatures of the station, we'll release that MLI blanket, as we call it, we'll take the tank, and then we'll put it on the airlock, on the equipment lock.

To, let me clarify -- the tanks themselves, they're coming up with you in the shuttle, right?

That's correct. All four tanks are on pallets in the forward part of the payload bay. And, they'll, of course, come up two of them on EVA 2 and two on EVA 3.

And the handoff that you referred to is you and Mike taking a handoff from the station's robot arm.

That's correct. Yeah. We'll tell, when we get it where we want it, we'll give some cues to Susan, and some guidance, so that we can try to get it as close to lined up as we can, and then once it's lined up then we'll say, tell Susan that that's "go" for ungrapple so that Mike and I will have this tank in our hands. It weighs about eighteen-hundred pounds here on the ground, and we'll just use fingertips to control this, which is one of the more unique aspects of being in space is that you can do almost anything with just your fingertips on large masses like the High Pressure Gas Tanks. Once the arm is backed away, then Mike and I will coordinate between the two of us and then once we're ready then we'll say, OK, we're going to bring it in, and then we'll bring it in slow. Once it's down then Mike locks the latches and then we start opening the valves and checking out the pressures on the tanks and activating that portion of the equipment lock and the supply system.

And the two of you had a hand in developing the guideposts that are going to help you bring it, bring each of these tanks in where it's supposed to go.

Yes. And actually Mike, who had been working on that as one of his earlier tasks before we even got assigned as part of the Astronaut Office, had more to do with that than I did. He was working with some of the engineers, and that's one of the nice things about the way we, with that long length of assignment is that we've gotten to know all the engineers that have worked on it, and so we can call them and say, hey, this is what we think we ought to do and how about changing this design to make this easier, or, you know, it's given us a really good working relationship with the people that are actually designing and building the hardware. And so by being able to take that guidepost, it has made what would have been a very difficult task significantly easier and much more reliable than it would've been if we'd been trying to do on four latches rather than the three latches and the guidepost. By being able to put it into the cone first on the guidepost, that allows us to get the last bit of alignment out, which will put those latches right down where we want them.

There's a third space walk scheduled for two days after the second one, if everything goes according to the plan, and that'll be the first…it could quite likely be the first space walk from the Joint Airlock, from the new hardware. Any special feeling about being one of the guys that gets to do that?

That'll be great! That's, as I was mentioning earlier, you know, there's going to be certain little landmarks in your career in life as you look back, you know, when you're older, and that, I know, will be one of them. You know, it'll be someday when I'm standing out on the lawn with my grandkids, you know, watching the station go over and thinking, you know, that's, I got a chance to work on that, and I got to be the first, one of the first guys to go out through the equipment lock on that, and the crew lock on that. So that'll be, that'll be pretty spectacular. And, the other part of it is that, you know, it'll be great to know that, that everything's working and that we've been able to check out the thing so that we know the airlock is functioning as expected and that we've been able to test it completely before we leave. And it will also be an honor, you know, just, having the, to having the honor to be the first ones out will, is going to be really spectacular.

Is that the reasoning behind having two shuttle astronauts do a space walk from the station airlock -- to make sure that it's working?

I think the primary reason, the primary technical reason is, of course, to make sure that everything does function as expected, and that's the reason why we're doing it from the crew lock. The other aspect of it is that there's the whole, as we talked earlier, the prebreathe protocol will be a station protocol; if we have the opportunity to do that we'll be testing more than just the equipment, we'll be testing the entire EVA flow, basically, all the preparations required, all the prebreathe requirements, everything from the start to the finish of an EVA, before we finish. So in addition to just checking out the mechanical components that we'll be bringing up, we'll have the opportunity to actually go through the entire test flight, if you will, of what an EVA will be like for the station crewmembers in the future.

Tell us what's planned for the third space walk, but also, are there any significant differences to the way you do the space walk by virtue of the fact of where you're starting?

The real, the only real differences are…from the station, you're operating with a slightly different CO2 scrubbing mechanism. We'll be using METOX canisters, which use a reagent that can be reactivated on board the station, and so we'll use those as part of our EVA contingents for the EMU, for example. Normally we'll use lithium hydroxide canisters, which are almost a, basically a one-use type device, from the shuttle, but on the station, of course, every pound that goes up is expensive and so you try to regenerate everything you can, and so we now have a METOX regenerator, which'll allow us to use those reagents as the scrubbing mechanism for the EMU. The other significant difference, of course, coming from the station will be that you're right at your work site, so we won't have as far to travel. You know, we'll come basically right out the hatch and we'll be ready to go to work, and so it'll all be right there. And as we mentioned earlier, as I mentioned earlier, the other thing is just going to be you're stepping out of another vehicle, and so you're going to be looking out onto, you know, there's our home in the shuttle, which will be one direction, and there's the home for our crewmates, the station, in the other direction, so we're going to have quite a view coming out of there. But the other aspect of it is, is just, we'll be out, we'll be going to work and doing the same task that any space station crewmember will be doing in the future coming out through that, through the crew lock.

And, on this particular day, the main job is to install the last two of the high pressure…

Right.

…assemblies.

And, we have…we'll have one O2 and one N2 tank still left to install on that day, and so we'll come out and we'll basically…Mike will start with releasing the tank from the payload bay of the shuttle again; in the meantime, I'll be configuring the work sites, getting ready. And again we'll do this, basically the same task we did on EVA 2, and that is we'll remove the MLI blankets, the thermal blankets, from the equipment lock when we get the ten-minute call, and then we'll put the High Pressure Gas Tanks on the equipment lock, activate them, check them out with the pressures inside and make sure that the systems are working properly, configure for the next tank, put the next tank on, and then we'll have some final cleanup steps where we'll go around and reconfigure things for the orbiter for the payload bay as well as cleaning up our work sites and getting them ready for the next crews to find the tools that they need for their EVAs. We'll be positioning those on the toolboxes, for example: we have the APFRs that we've been using, we'll put those on the toolboxes that are on the crew lock, which will form a, effectively a toolbox, a set of two toolboxes, for the station crew, so that they'll always be in a standard place so that when you come out, whoever it is, no matter what increment they'll come out and find the tools in the same place every time. It's like having somebody go find a wrench for you in the garage; you know, we'll have a standard place for everything.

You're scheduled to conclude a solid week's worth of docked operations on the following day. Once the hatches between the shuttle and the station are closed for the last time, describe what's going to happen as the shuttle departs from the station and then probably flies around it.

Well, we're hoping to fly around; I hope Charlie gets the opportunity to do a little flying -- he will have worked hard enough to certainly have earned it. But as you say, that's exactly what we'll do is we'll undock and then our plan is to fly around the station, as most missions have done. It gives us an opportunity to provide photo documentation of the exterior of the station, over a time period, so that every mission's coming back with a new set of documents so that you can look at the condition of the station outside -- the same thing we did with Mir -- as well as if there's any question of where stuff might be that documentation can be used by folks here on the ground to document exactly where something is relative to where somebody thought it was, and so that, that can always be used by the next crews that are going up. In addition, it's really good, it's a good skills time for Charlie; you know, it gives him the opportunity to fly the orbiter which he doesn't get much time to do on the mission as the Pilot; the Commander does most of the critical actions. But in this case the Pilot gets to fly it, and Steve'll be taking a back seat. And, I expect, of course, as hard as Charlie works, he's going to be perfectit'll be a flawless flyaround. The completion of your mission marks the completion of Phase 2 of the International Space Station program, the "some assembly still required" phase, and will launch the beginning of the scientific research phase. Tell me how you see the science that's to be conducted on board the International Space Station contributing to our lives here on Earth and our efforts to explore beyond Earth, and how you feel about being a part of that. That's a really complex question to answer, but there are several parts to it; the best one, of course, is what's it going to do for us-you know, that's something we get asked a lot, of course, when we do public relations appearances. The station, of course, is going to be a flying laboratory, and it's going to be one of the first truly dedicated scientific laboratories in space. There have been, you know, Skylab and Mir and some smaller efforts, but this is the first time that we've actually taken and designed, from the ground up, what will be a flying laboratory, which its primary reason for being there is a developmental task; not as much an exploratory task as a developmental task. And what, the kinds of things that we'll be doing on board will be looking to develop the techniques in space that we can't do here on the ground but we can export to the ground. So that we can look at the physics of small particles, for example, in a weightless environment where, if you were to try to do that same experiment here on the ground, gravity overprints it and basically causes settling and permutations of a system so that you can't see what's purely happening within the system itself. And, putting it in zero-g, of course, you take out that gravity effect, and now you can start seeing the smaller forces that come into play. And that, of course, can come into play for anything from the physics of colloids or essentially smoke, if you want to look at it in that way, or what happens in the crystallization of dissimilar materials. It gives you better capability to grow for example, protein crystals, the basic building block for us and everything that attacks us or attacks our food or our animals; by being able to look at those protein crystals in zero-g, it gives you the capability of growing them as large as you want to in a pure sense, whereas if they were here on the ground, being 95% water, they tend to be very weak, they tend to collapse, you don't get a good idea of the structure. What does that mean to us? To a pharmaceutical company, for example, if they knew what that protein looked like, they could design a drug to attack the specific reactive site on that protein that causes that virus to invade your cell, for example. So, you can then build a blocker to that particular protein that attacks that protein on the virus, and then allows that virus to basically go dormant. And that's a very simple sense of what you can do with it, but that's the kinds of things that are going to happen. By doing the raw research in space, where we can build these things large enough to where we can start imaging them, then we can start bringing back that information to the ground. You can start designing drugs, for example, that then do not have the side effects associated with most pharmaceuticals and you get those drugs out on the street faster. And there are a number of drugs out right now, something on the order of twenty different drugs to date in clinical trial, just from the work that was done on the shuttle. So we'll be doing that kind of work. Another one of the experiments that we will be doing will be fluid combustions and that's looking at how combustion efficiency of different fuel and oxygen mixtures occur. We can't really get a good sense of that because the gravity effects and the density effects draw flame away, and so you don't get a very good combustion front. But in space, of course, you get a very well-defined and very discrete diffusion front around a flame. What does that mean to us? In, here on the ground, if we…there's approximately 85% of all our energy requirements here in the United States, for example, all have combustion as its prime mover; you're burning fuels of one form or another-oil, natural gas, coal. Most of those processes, even though that are efficient, if we were able to make a one-or-two-percent increase in that efficiency could mean several hundred million dollars of an impact to our country as a whole. You know, it's little things like that in the aggregate [that] make a huge difference to what happens to us here on Earth. Now, the second part of the question is, what does that do for us for exploring other, going out from here. Space station, of course, will be the place where we, where we test out some of the materials and processes and the habitats, for example, that may eventually take us to Mars, take us to the moon, back to the moon. You know, there's an awful lot of work yet to be done on the moon. As a geologist, there's just an awful lot of information there that we have just touched, just barely gotten a touch. The moon looks like the Earth did in its very earliest form, and the Earth has been recycled so we have a very, very poor record of what things looked like early on. And we have just a few spots on the moon that we were able to collect samples from with Apollo. So we'll be looking at those processes and techniques that we can use to provide a sustainable habitat, for example, on the moon. Now, we'd go to the moon, that takes us to Mars; we go to Mars, we get an opportunity to look, perhaps, back into time and see what life in its earliest form looked like. We don't have a very good record of what the simplest forms of, earliest forms of life here on Earth looked like, but Mars looks like it was at one time wet, it looks like it had the potential for life, and some of the work that's been done here at Johnson Space Center would indicate that there are fossil indications of early life on Mars. So, of course, as we learn to live in space on the International Space Station for a long period of time and regenerate as much of our environment as we possibly can, that of course gives us the information that takes us to the moon and to Mars. And so hopefully, in our lifetimes, I'd like to see us do both of those things, and if I'm really, really fortunate, I'll get an opportunity to work on at least one of them.