After layoff, NASA ready to build space station

For more than three years, the International Space Station has floated half- built above the Earth. Maintained by a skeleton crew, the station - an assemblage of modules and girders - has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost.

 

But now construction, which has hung in limbo since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded after the Columbia disaster in 2003, is scheduled to resume. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off Sunday, carrying a bus-size segment of the station's backbone that includes a new set of solar-power arrays.

 

Since the project began in late 1998 with the joining of two U.S. and Russian modules, 16 nations have slowly put together a structure that weighs more than 400,000 pounds, or 181,000 kilograms, with a habitable volume of almost 15,000 cubic feet, or 425 cubic meters. When completed, it is to weigh almost a million pounds and have a cabin volume of more than 33,000 cubic feet, larger than a typical five-bedroom house.