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CNN Saturday Morning News

Inside a Space Station Mockup

Aired March 09, 2002 - 09:02   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: For more on the Hubble telescope repair mission and a look at what's coming up, CNN space correspondent Miles O'Brien is at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Hi, Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE CORRESPONDENT: Kyra, this is the place where the crew does a lot of the training for those spacewalks. This building and some others, of course. And, you know, that was five difficult spacewalks. Matter of fact, NASA says it was the hardest string of spacewalks ever attempted off of a space shuttle.

In the end, the Hubble is left with more power, a camera that is 10 times stronger than anything that was on there, another camera that was down for the count has a new cooling system and may be up and running, and a better steering and pointing system.

So all in all, a week of good, hard work that paid off for that shuttle Columbia crew, who we just talked to just a little bit ago.

Now, look behind me here. I'm right in the middle of the space station mockup here. That's a thing called the crewpola (ph). Don't look for that any time soon, though, NASA's got some budget troubles with the space station, and that's not currently on the flight manifest.

We can talk to our guest about that a little bit later as we take a little tour of this mockup. This is -- you're walking into a place called the Node. It's sort of like the connector on Tinker Toys, and the pieces of the space station kind of fit onto it.

Susan Helms, who spent nearly six months in space on board this space station, the real thing, will be with us to take your questions and calls. We invite you to send them now to WAM, W-A-M, @cnn.com, and we'll give you that phone number in just a little bit, so stay with us for more from the Johnson Space Center -- Kyra.

PHILLIPS: All right, Miles, we'll look forward to it.

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