By Xinhua
Beijing : NASA gave credit where credit is due, saying the successful return of the shuttle Endeavour was the culmination of a global effort to bring the International Space Station (ISS) one step closer to completion.
A French astronaut, veteran European Space Agency (ESA) spaceflyer Leopold Eyharts, also returned to Earth aboard the U.S. shuttle after a long-duration stay aboard the ISS to commission Europe’s Columbus laboratory. But it was the mission’s Japanese payload, a storage compartment for Japan’s school bus-sized Kibo laboratory, which rounded out the multinational ISS partnership in space.
“It took years to make it happen,” NASA chief Michael Griffin said after Endeavour’s return. “If you look around, there really isn’t, any more, a U.S. human spaceflight program or a Russian human spaceflight program.
“There is a world human spaceflight program centered around the building, and then later the utilization of, the International Space Station,” Griffin said. “We hope once we get that under our belt, that we’ll go on to the moon and then to Mars.”
Just before Endeavour landed, the ISS and Europe’s first unmanned cargo ship Jules Verne passed over the shuttle’s runway from orbit. The cargo tug, the first of up to seven ESA Automated Transfer Vehicles, is on a shakedown cruise and is set to make a pair of test approaches at the station over the next week for a planned April 3 docking.
“I can’t think of a better day, or ending of a day, than to see those three wonderful pieces of hardware,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.
NASA plans to launch 10 more shuttle flights between now and 2010 to complete space station construction before the agency retires its aging, three-orbiter fleet. One side trip, a planned August flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope, is also on the books.
In late May, NASA’s shuttle Discovery is slated to launch the massive primary module for Japan’s Kibo lab, though the mission will likely fly a few days later than its initial May 25 target due to delays with its external fuel tank, the agency said.