Veteran NASA astronaut Ed Lu, who calls Honolulu his hometown along with Webster, N.Y., will be one of the two new caretakers of the International Space Station, the space agency has announced. UH’s Lu joins
Russian space missionBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.comHe will join Russian Air Force Col. Yuri Malenchenko for the flight to the space station April 26 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, NASA announced yesterday. They worked together on an earlier mission and will live at the 240-mile-high station for six months.
A research physicist, Lu, 39, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy in 1995 when he was accepted as a NASA mission specialist. He was at the university from 1992 to 1995.
Lu will be the first U.S. astronaut to go on a space flight since the shuttle Columbia exploded Feb. 1, killing the seven astronauts. U.S. space flights were grounded and construction of the space station halted after the disaster.
Lu flew on the space shuttle Atlantis in 1997 for a nine-day mission to rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir. In September 2000, he was mission specialist and payload commander on a 12-day mission to construct the space station.
He and Malenchenko performed a six-hour-14-minute space walk to connect power, data and communications cables to the station to prepare for the permanent crew.
He will be flight engineer for Expedition Seven to the space station and Malenchenko will be commander.
Lu discussed his space adventures in a Star-Bulletin interview two years ago when he was here to speak to students at the State Science and Engineering Fair.
"The neat thing about space is you can look down and see where you lived," he said. "If you miss it, in 1 1/2 hours you can see it again."
Anticipating a return to the space station, he said, "I got a chance to build my home and now I get to live there."
He said astronauts could ask for anything they want to eat and he once asked for something "like Chinese sticky rice and chicken." He also had macadamia nuts and Kona coffee at almost every meal and could get any other food he wanted by trading Kona coffee, he said.
Lu coaches wrestling, surfs, skis, plays tennis and piano and does acrobatic flying. He calls Webster, N.Y., his second hometown because he went to high school there.
NASA