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By Traci Watson, USA TODAY
The residents of the International Space Station will soon be able to fire up lots of new electronic gadgets, thanks to two giant solar panels for the station that astronauts successfully unfolded Thursday.
The panels and the girder to which they're attached are the first major additions to the station in nearly four years. NASA officials were enthusiastic about restarting work on the half-built laboratory orbiting 200 miles above Earth. Construction is going "better than my wildest dreams," space-station program manager Michael Suffredini said. "We're ecstatic." The girder and solar panels were delivered to the station by space shuttle Atlantis, which also carried a crew of high-altitude construction workers. Friday, two Atlantis astronauts will make a spacewalk to unpack a girder panel that will help regulate the temperature of the equipment. They'll also install several antennas and unsnarl a tether wrapped around a power cable. Unfurling the new solar panels, each more than 100 feet long, was not guaranteed. Similar panels stuck together during installation in 2000. An unplanned spacewalk was required to fix them. On Thursday, the panels unfolded perfectly, thanks to changes in the unfolding method that disabled a chemical on the panels that caused them to stick together. "Big day on space station," said astronaut Pamela Melroy from Mission Control in Houston. "Congratulations." "We're very happy to get the arrays deployed today," replied Atlantis commander Brent Jett, who also commanded the 2000 shuttle mission when the panels got stuck. The panels will double the station's power supply and make it possible to add rooms to the station. Though the panels are producing electricity, that power won't reach the rest of the station until a rewiring job in December. A well-fed construction crew is a happy construction crew, so Atlantis brought not only the girder but also a rare treat: cups of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Never before has the treat been served on the station, where most of the food is precooked and eaten from a pouch. In July, shuttle Discovery dropped off a freezer for storing research samples. That allowed NASA officials to send the ice cream "to help out (the crew's) happiness quotient," Suffredini said. The cups rode to orbit in an insulated bag and came from Blue Bell, a Texas dairy with a cultlike following in Houston, where the station crew trained at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
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