The first two crewmembers to don spacesuits will be ISS flight engineer Sunita Williams and ISS commander Michael López-Alegría. Beginning on Wednesday, January 31, 2007, both astronauts will take three spacewalks over a nine-day period to attach the Boeing-built Destiny Laboratory Module to a new cooling system hauled up by the STS-116 crew of Space Shuttle Discovery in December 2006. All three spacewalks will last approximately six hours. The other two ventures outside of the station occur on Sunday, February 4 and Thursday, February 8.

Destiny, launched on Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-98) on February 7, 2001, is the main research laboratory for U.S. payloads at the ISS, and it is the first operating orbital research station since Skylab flew from 1973 to 1979.

The two spacewalkers will disconnect ammonia cooling lines and then connect the Destiny to its new cooling system. Other space duties include photographing a solar panel scheduled to be folded up on the next Shuttle mission in March 2007 (STS-117) aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis; hooking up an Ethernet cable between the Destiny and a Russian segment; and removing no-longer-needed insulation from the station.

Indian-American astronaut Sunita “Suni” Lyn Williams is a member of the NASA astronaut corps. Her current ISS assignment was possible when she flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery to the ISS on December 9-10, 2006. Williams is the second woman of Indian descent to have been selected as a NASA astronaut.

Spanish-American astronaut Michael “LA” Eladio López-Alegría is a three-time NASA Space Shuttle crewmember (between 1995 and 2002). He returned to space in September 2006 when the Russian Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft he was aboard docked to the ISS.

Later in February (most likely February 22), López-Alegría and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin will take a fourth spacewalk whose purpose is to activate the space station’s new cooling system. They will also remove a jammed antenna from a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft so that it will be able to undock from the station in April 2007.

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Vladislavovich Tyurin graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute with a degree in engineering. Besides performing his assigned duties aboard the ISS, Tyurin is also pursing graduate work that concentrates on mathematically modeling the mechanics of flight. Previous to being a member of the Expedition 14 crew aboard the ISS, Tyurin worked as an ISS Expedition 3 flight engineer from August to December 2001.

Before these four spacewalks, only four other spacewalks have been conducted by ISS personnel without a Shuttle crew present. Space Station flight director Derek Hassmann says, “This is the first time that we’ve tried a series of (spacewalks) of this magnitude.” Upon completion of the spacewalks López-Alegría will become the most experienced NASA male (and overall) spacewalker and Williams will become the most experienced NASA female spacewalker.

Additional information about the Expedition 14 crew aboard the International Space Station is found at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html.

To track the flight of the ISS, please go to: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/.

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