How does the return of Shuttle flights, how is that critical to the future of the Station?
Well, you pretty much nailed it. A lot of it is we just can carry more equipment and we can carry bigger equipment up to orbit. For instance, the Human Research Facility-2 Rack I talked about can’t go aboard a Progress. Until the Shuttle gets back flying we can’t take any other large scientific payloads up to orbit, and ours has some and the flights after ours have a bunch more coming up. You can’t bring new modules — you can’t build the Space Station without the Space Shuttle. The solar arrays that have to go up; the rest of the truss segments that go up, the European lab module, the Japanese lab module, all of those things can’t go up without the Shuttle. So, all of the big pieces you can think of can’t go up until, until we, go up. And the other critical part is the, the Soyuz only has, I think it’s around 150 pounds of return mass capability, so every time a Soyuz comes back there were huge raging arguments about what pieces of gear needed to come home. We’ve got so much that need
