Expedition 16

Mission details

Expedition 16 set several firsts for the International Space Station. It was the first mission where two crew members had previously served on an expedition, and the first time a former commander, Malenchenko, returned as a flight engineer.

Whitson became the first female commander of an ISS expedition, and with STS-120 also commanded by a woman, Pamela Melroy, two female mission commanders were in orbit at the same time for the first time. Whitson had started a Friday night movie night on her earlier expedition to help the crew relax, and she planned to continue that tradition for Expedition 16. Anderson added some fun to daily planning conferences by quizzing the ground team on various topics, and Michael Lopez-Alegria had done something similar with movie and music trivia.

STS-120

The mission’s first big goal was met on 26 October when the STS-120 crew delivered the Harmony module, attaching it temporarily to Unity and adding more than 2,500 cubic feet of living space. During the third of four spacewalks, the joint crews moved the P6 truss from its position atop the station to its final location on the port side. After STS-120 left, a series of spacewalks and robotic moves shifted the Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA-2) from the end of the Destiny lab to the end of Harmony.

Configuration of Harmony

On 9 November, Whitson and Malenchenko performed the increment’s first spacewalk to get the docking port ready for relocation. On 12 November, Whitson and Tani used the station’s robotic arm to detach the docking port and move it to Harmony’s forward port. Two days later, they used the arm again to relocate Harmony from its temporary spot to its permanent position on Destiny’s forward port. On 20 November, Whitson and Tani completed a 7-hour, 16-minute spacewalk to equip Harmony in its new location, finishing all tasks and three extra get-ahead jobs.