The space shuttle Discovery roared off its launch this past week and
easily outpaced the rising sun as it streaked across the sky on its
way to deliver a new crew to the International Space Station. The
ISS Expedition-2 crew includes two hams, Russian cosmonaut and
Expedition-2 Commander Yuri Usachev, UA9AD, and U.S. astronaut
Susan Helms, KC7NHZ.

The shuttle weighed more than 4.5 million pounds on the launch pad,
as it was all set to deliver three humans and about 10,000 pounds of
supplies to Alpha.

Astronauts began unloading about two tons of equipment and supplies
from a new Italian-made cargo module docked to the station as this
edition of ANS was broadcast. The $150 million module, named
Leonardo for Italian master Leonardo da Vinci, is a significant
development in space station design, said NASA.

Once emptied, the module can be packed with drained batteries,
broken hardware and other debris from space station life and returned
to Earth when Discovery departs the orbiting outpost. Early Russian
and American space stations had limited capacities for receiving cargo,
essentially whatever the astronauts brought with them.

Shuttle Discovery will remain at the station until this weekend.

Expedition-1 Crew Commander William Shepherd, KD5GSL, capped
his more than four-month tour aboard the International Space Station
with a ham radio chat with students at his Arizona high school alma
mater. Shepherd spoke briefly to students at Arcadia High School in
Phoenix as the contact was fit into the schedule at the request of
KD5GSL.

The ARISS program contact was the last for Shepherd and the
current ISS crew.