Live: Space Spider Weaves Wacky Web

The Endeavour astronauts outfitted the International Space Station with new crew quarters today as preparations for the second of four spacewalks continue aboard the orbiting outpost.

At the same time, a space spider was weaving a tangled, disorganized web in a student experment that unfolded on the joined shuttle-station complex. The orbital arachnid seemed to have lost its sense of symmetry.

You can watch all the action live here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer and round-the-clock coverage of the STS-126 mission. A few of the astronauts will be chatting with reporters in a space-to-ground interview coming up at 3:50 p.m., and lead station flight director Holly Ridings will update the media during a Mission Status Briefing to be held at 4:30 p.m. EST.

Circling Earth at an altitude of 213 statute miles, the 10 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard Endeavour and the station are busy setting the stage for a planned doubling of the size of resident crews on the outpost. Crew size will increase to six from three in April.

The Endeavour astronauts are installing two crew quarters in the U.S. Harmony module -- sleep stations that are about the size of a large kitchen refrigerator.

The astronauts also are installing a water treatment that will save NASA and its partners an estimated $62 million a year -- money that otherwise would be spent hauling water to the outpost.

The system collects urine, condensation from the cabin atmosphere and both crew perspiration and respiration. Then, through a a series of chemical treatments and filters, it produces water clean enough to drink.

Astronauts and cosmonauts on the station are allotted about one gallon of water per day -- 3.5 liters, or 0.9 gallons.

The onboard water supply comes from two sources:

First is what NASA calls "deliverables." That is, water hauled up to the station aboard Russian Progress space freighters or European Jules Verne cargo carriers.

Also included in this category: water produced as a byproduct when liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are combined in shuttle fuel cells to generate electricity to operate all spaceship systems. Rather than dumping the water overboard, NASA bags it and transfers it to the station from visiting shuttles.

The second source comes from a Russian reclaimation system that produces potatable water by recycling condensation in the cabin atmosphere -- as well as crew perspiration and respiration.

The new U.S. Water Recovery System will generate enough water to reduce deliverables by 65 percent, Humphries said.

That's a reduction of about 2,850 liters -- or 743 gallons -- per year. And that's a big cost savings.

Water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon, and the average cost of launching a pound of payload to low Earth orbit is about $10,000.

The Water Recovery System will reduce the amount of water that must be delivered to the station each year by 6,196 pounds.

Or almost $62 million.

And even in the aerospace world, that's not chump change.