Spacewalk to anchor European lab to space station

By Irene Klotz

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. space shuttle astronauts, garbed in bulky spacesuits, left the International Space Station on Monday to attach Europe's first permanent space laboratory to the orbital outpost.

Lead spacewalker Rex Walheim and rookie Stanley Love, who substituted for German astronaut Hans Schlegel, floated out of the airlock at around 9:25 a.m. EST (1425 GMT) to begin a planned seven-hour outing to anchor the $1.9 billion, 10-ton Columbus module.

Schlegel was pulled from the spacewalk due to an undisclosed medical condition, though he is expected to participate in a second spacewalk on Wednesday, officials with the European Space Agency said.

NASA delayed the first spacewalk a day to allow more time for Love to prepare. The spacewalkers were all trained to complete each others' tasks.

Walheim, who has made two spacewalks on a previous mission to the station, and Love planned to spend most of their time preparing Columbus to be relocated from the shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay to its permanent home on the station's Harmony connecting node.

The work includes attaching a grapple fixture for the shuttle's robot arm to grasp.

"The grapple fixture is basically a big pin that the robot arm can grab onto and then pull the Columbus module out of the payload bay," Walheim told reporters before the shuttle flight.

"It could be launched with it on there. The only problem is it's a little bit too big to fit into the payload bay with the grapple fixture on."