So, Who's Watching The Place?

The two-man crew of the international space station will venture outside the craft at the same time this week, despite earlier concerns that the exercise was "a risk not worth taking," The Washington Post reported on Monday. The Post cited NASA documents obtained by the newspaper.

Ground controllers are to fly the empty space station, while British-born NASA astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri conduct the spacewalk, leaving no one inside to monitor systems directly or assist in a crisis, the newspaper said.

According to the Post, the Russians have made about 50 such spacewalks, but this would mark the first for the U.S.-led space station. The spacewalk planned for Thursday was scheduled to begin about 4 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) and was supposed to last five hours and 40 minutes, the report said. The work that Foale and Kaleri will perform on the spacewalk -- deploy and collect science experiments -- is not urgent but would have to be done eventually, NASA officials told the newspaper.

According to a July review of spacewalk plans, station managers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston initially opposed this week's spacewalk and recommended that it be put off until shuttle flights resumed and the station had a three-person crew, The Post said.

"Crew Safety and the vehicle while they are performing EVA (extra vehicle activity) without an crew is a risk not worth taking specially if the EVA tasks are not critical" to maintaining the space station, according to the NASA review quoted in the article.

The report said the Russians refused to sign on to the document unless the spacewalk was planned for as a requirement. Citing NASA sources and documents, the newspaper said the Russians insisted on the need for the spacewalk to fulfill their contracts with the Japanese and European space agencies and bring in money to their cash-strapped space program.

FMI: www.nasa.gov