Spacewalking astronauts are rewiring the international space station in a two-part process scheduled for Thursday and Saturday. Rewiring the orbiting laboratory changes it from relying on an interim power system to establishing a permanent one that can begin accommodating more laboratories and ultimately lead to the completion of the space station. “This is the major milestone,” said John Curry, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) flight director for the space station. NASA and other space agencies will be able to increase the number of crew members aboard the space station-now at three-and other such expansions, he said. “Now you're limitless.” Two space shuttle Discovery astronauts, who performed the mission's first spacewalk on Tuesday to install a two-ton $11 million addition, were scheduled for another spacewalk Thursday to reconfigure the power system controlling one half of the space station by rewiring connectors from a temporary solar panel to the permanent ones. The third spacewalk on Saturday will repeat the process for the other half of the station. To prepare the station for the change, astronauts spent much of Wednesday retracting the temporary solar panel to make room for the new ones to begin rotating with the movement of the sun, generating as much power as possible for the station. The retraction went far enough to allow the new panels to rotate, but it did not proceed fully, as NASA had hoped. The half-retracted solar array is structurally stable and poses no risks, and NASA engineers are working to find a solution.
