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Atlantis astronauts board space station
( 2002-04-11 09:30 ) (7 )

The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the International Space Station on Wednesday, its seven-member crew prepared to resume major construction on the US side of the orbiting outpost for the first time in nearly a year.

For the three men already living on the station, these were their first visitors since an earlier shuttle crew left them behind in mid-December, 117 days ago.

"It's great to see these guys. They look wonderful and the station looks like it's in great shape," shuttle commander Mike Bloomfield told Mission Control after entering the orbiting laboratory.

The combined crew of 10 astronauts will spend a week together in joint operations, installing a new truss segment on the station, 44 feet (13.4 meters) of what eventually will become a 360-foot (109-meter) span holding an acre (0.4 hectares) of solar panels to power future laboratories on the station.

Nine of the astronauts are American and one, station commander Yury Onufrienko, is Russian.

Atlantis astronaut Jerry Ross was the first to report sighting the international station, the largest spacecraft ever to fly, from about 50 miles (80 km) away.

"ISS is in view," said Ross, a spacewalker on the Atlantis crew who set a human spaceflight record on Monday with his seventh launch into space.

LIGHTS ON IN THE WINDOW

From about 5 miles (8 km) away, Bloomfield spoke to Onufrienko by short-wave radio.

"We can see the lights on in the window. We'll be there shortly," Bloomfield said.

It took nearly two days for Atlantis to catch up with the station after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The intricate orbital rendezvous involves a number of rocket firings, first to put the shuttle into the same orbital plane as the station, then to slow its approach so that the two come together at a rate of just inches (cm) per minute as they fly in tandem at speeds of some 5 miles (8 km) per second.

The station crew will not return to Earth until early June. For crew members Dan Bursch and Carl Walz, that will mean a new American endurance record for time in space, breaking the 188-day mark set by Shannon Lucid when she lived aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1996.

Onufrienko will come nowhere near the Russian record, though, as tours of duty for Russians on Mir sometimes lasted more than a year.

On Monday, Atlantis astronauts are set to make the first of four spacewalks to install the $600 million truss segment.

It comes with a $190 million rail system so a small trolley can carry the station's large robotic arm from site to site as construction on the station continues. A handcar for astronauts will be added later.

This first segment of the rail, costing about $4.5 million per foot (30 cm), easily could be the most expensive railroad ever built.