Shuttle, space station link up

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The space shuttle and space station hooked up Friday after a round-the-world chase, making for the biggest crowd ever gathered together in orbit — 13 Earthlings.

Endeavour docked at the international space station as the two craft soared 220 miles above the Australian coast.

Once the hatches popped open, the seven shuttle astronauts floated into the space station, one by one, and embraced their six station colleagues. It was a bit of a mob scene, a floating jumble of dark shirts, beige pants and shorts, and white socks.

“Welcome,” said the station’s skipper, Russian Gennady Padalka, positioned at the entrance.

“Thirteen is a pretty big number, but it’s going to be an outstanding visit for us,” said shuttle commander Mark Polansky. “We are just thrilled to be here.”

Besides being the biggest space gathering ever, it was the most diverse: seven Americans, two Russians, two Canadians, one Japanese and one Belgian. Twelve men, one woman. Four medical doctors. And engineers and pilots galore.

The station doubled in size, people-wise, at the end of May, and this was the first shuttle visit since then. Although 13 people have been in orbit before, they were scattered in separate spacecraft. The old under-the-same-roof crowd record was 10.

Their first team effort comes today, when two of the shuttle astronauts venture out on the first of five planned spacewalks to help hook up a porch for Japan’s space-station lab. The porch will be used to hold outdoor experiments.

Endeavour’s astronauts had barely settled in when Mission Control informed them that a piece of space junk was threatening to come too close and that the shuttle- station complex would have to move into a slightly higher orbit later in the evening.

Earlier Friday, as it was closing in for the linkup, Endeavour performed a back flip from 600 feet out so the station crew could photograph its entire surface and uncover any severe launch damage. Endeavour’s fuel tank lost more foam insulation than usual during Wednesday’s launch, and some of the smaller pieces struck the shuttle, leaving a series of minor dings.

Space-station residents snapped and beamed down a few hundred digital pictures of Endeavour, a routine procedure put in place after the 2003 Columbia accident. Shuttle program manager John Shannon later said no significant damage had been found spotted, although the analysis was continuing. An inspection by the shuttle crew Thursday found the wings and nose — the most vulnerable spots — to be intact.

The bulk of the lost foam peeled away from the central area of Endeavour’s fuel tank in 6-inch strips, six minutes after liftoff when it’s too late to pose any threat. That part of the tank normally does not shed like that, and NASA has assembled a team to figure out what happened.