CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronaut Bill Shepherd was stunned--and frustrated--when he moved into the international space station last fall and discovered the kitchen table would not be arriving any time soon.
Shepherd did what any self-respecting home mechanic would do. He built his own table out of space station scraps.
The home improvement project, however, turned into as stealth an operation as Shepherd had ever tackled as a Navy SEAL.
"We didn't want too much help from the ground," Shepherd explained recently from his NASA office. "So we figured if we got the thing going and it looked like it would be useful and a reasonable addition to the real estate up there, the ground would not object."
The ground was Russian Mission Control.
"We sometimes were in the situation of having to do things that people didn't think could be done," said Shepherd, space station Alpha's inaugural commander. "People on the ground would have assessed that it was not possible to make something like this up there."
Given Russian Mission Control's combativeness, the table became "a stealth project," according to Shepherd, a 51-year-old Navy captain.
Shepherd and his two Russian crew mates scavenged the orbiting outpost for building material once they learned that the promised Russian-built table would not be launched because of weight concerns. The table was simply too massive, and other equipment was deemed more important by the Russians for delivery.
One month into their 4 1/2-month mission, Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev began building the table out of aluminum frames that had held solid-fuel oxygen generators, as well as struts and pieces of angled aluminum. The men drilled holes, bolted the pieces together, covered the top with duct tape and, after weeks of working on it a bit at a time, finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work.
"Once we got it put together and finished, it was kind of the social center of the station," Shepherd said. "That's important too."
Shepherd unveiled the table gradually. He and his crew beamed down pictures of the Russian living quarters with the table in the background. Flight controllers eventually noticed, and "we kind of let the cat out of the bag."
NASA space station flight director John Curry was impressed.
"They've got a fully functional table now because he built the thing," Curry said. "He's a Home Depot kind of guy."
