International Space Station’s New Room with a View

by Roy Mark

Endeavour lights up the night sky as it lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With only four missions left to the ISS before NASA mothballs the shuttle fleet, the liftoff also marked the last nighttime manned spaceflight launch for quite some time. The liftoff occurred after a one-day weather delay.

In a very unique setting over Earth’s colorful horizon, the silhouette of the space shuttle Endeavour is featured in this photo by an Expedition 22 crew member on board the International Space Station, as the shuttle approached for its docking on Feb. 9 during the STS-130 mission.

As the Endeavour nears the International Space Station it is photographed by a crew member of the station during rendezvous and docking operations on Feb. 9. Backdropped by the blackness of space, the Tranquility node can be seen in the shuttle’s payload bay.

In the grasp of the Canadarm2, the cupola was relocated from the forward port to the Earth-facing port of the International Space Station’s newly installed Tranquility node. With the installation of Tranquility and cupola, the space station is about 90 percent complete.

Floating just below the International Space Station, astronaut Nicholas Patrick put some finishing touches on the newly installed cupola space windows last week. Patrick was a mission specialist onboard the space shuttle Endeavor’s recently completed STS-130 mission to the ISS.

Endeavour pilot Terry Virts opened the windows of the newly installed cupola one at a time, giving spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick an early look into the International Space Station’s room with a view. The cupola’s fully opened windows look down on the Sahara Desert in this image that was “tweeted” from space.

Darkness enshrouded space shuttle Endeavour as it touched down on Runway 15 at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After 14 days in space, Endeavour’s 5.7-million-mile STS-130 mission was completed on orbit 217.