HOUSTON, May 27 (UPI) -- Astronauts aboard the International Space Station spent most of early Wednesday morning relocating a module from one port to another. The move is part of an ongoing reconfiguration that will make way for the arrival of future U.S. commercial crew spacecraft.
Astronauts began prepping for the eventual arrival of the so-called space taxis earlier this year, but there is more yet to do. Wednesday's effort was one of several manipulations that will happen as part of the reorganization process between now and the end of the year.
February's maneuvering featured a spacewalk and significant manual labor, but Wednesday's module move was mostly handled by the space station's robotic arm. The arm was directed by engineers back at Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Astronauts aboard ISS simply had to stand by and monitor.
While NASA expects to have a main port and a backup port ready for the commercial crew craft by the end of 2015, the U.S. space agency isn't expecting the taxis -- currently being designed and built by SpaceX and Boeing -- to be deployed until 2017.
The module that was moved is used mostly as extra closet space, and has served as a suitcase of sorts, shuttling materials back and forth between ISS and Earth aboard SpaceX's Dragon capsule.
Since the Space Shuttle retired, NASA has had to rely on Russia and its space agency to ferry its astronauts back and forth to the space station. For the services, NASA pays roughly $70.7 million a head to Roscosmos.
