Live In Orbit: Station Toilet Fixed During Spacewalk

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A pair of orbital plumbers successfully fixed a faulty toilet on the International Space Station while two Endeavour astronauts set up for some stowage work outside the joined shuttle-station complex.

Station skipper Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Frank De Winne swapped out some parts on one of the two station's toilet, and subsequent tests show that it appears to be back in operation.

Spacewalking astronauts Dave Wolf and Tom Marshburn, meanwhile, are preparing to get into the meat of their days work outside the International Space Station.

Wolf is anchoring himself to a foot restraint on the end of the station's 57-foot-long robotic arm. He'll use it as a platform from which to do his work as Canadian arm operator Julie Payette moves him from work site to work site.

Crewmate Tom Marshburn is attaching a grapple fixture to a ammonia tank assembly so that spacewalkers on a future mission can move it. The grapple will enable the assembly to be moved with more ease that otherwise would be possible.

Still to come: Wolf and Marshburn plan to move large spare parts from an integrated cargo carrier temporarily mounted to the station's Mobile Transporter rail cart to an external stowage platform.

A cooling system pump, a communications antenna and a drive system for the station's Mobile Transporter rail cart are to be mounted on the stowage platform, which is located on the port side of the station's central truss.

You can watch the action unfold here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the NASA TV box on the right side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer, and be sure to refresh this page for periodic updates.

The spacewalk is the 127th to be carried out in the assembly and maintenance of the station since its first two building blocks were joined in late 1998.

Spacewalkers from the U.S., Russian Japan, Canada, Germany, France and Sweden have logged more than 786 hours of spacewalking work building the station since then.