Ed Lu '84 to spend six months on space station

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Edward Lu '84, NASA mission science officer and flight engineer, has a leak check performed on his Russian Sokol suit, April 10. NASA/Bill Ingalls

Some 240 miles above the Earth, Russia's Expedition 7 Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station (ISS) early in the morning of April 28 and deposited NASA astronaut and Cornell alumnus Edward Lu '84 and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. The space station will be their home for the next six months.

Lu, 39, and Malenchenko, 41, the first men in space since the shuttle Columbia disaster Feb. 1, were launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 26. The launch replaced that of the grounded space shuttle Atlantis.

The two astronauts replaced the three men who have been on the ISS since November, and who will return to the Earth on Expedition 7.

Before this mission Lu, who earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell, had flown into space twice before, both times on the shuttle Atlantis. He was a mission specialist in 1997 and a mission specialist and payload commander in 2000. In all, he logged about 8.5 million miles, 504 hours, including a walk in space for six hours and 14 minutes.

Malenchenko, one of Russia's most experienced astronauts, also flew aboard the 2000 mission, which was crucial in preparing the ISS for the arrival of the first permanent crew. Lu and his colleagues delivered more than three tons of supplies and installed batteries, power converters, life support and exercise equipment on the space station.

On that mission Lu and Malenchenko conducted a space walk to connect power, data and communications cables to the Zvezda service module.

Lu graduated from R.L. Thomas High School in Webster, N.Y., in 1980. He was a Cornell Merrill Presidential Scholar and a member of the Big Red wrestling team, for which he competed in the 134-pound weight class. He earned a doctoral degree in applied physics from Stanford University in 1989.

After Stanford Lu became a visiting scientist at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colo., and in 1992 held an appointment with the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado.

From 1992 until he joined the space program, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu. Lu has published articles on a wide range of topics, including solar flares, cosmology, solar oscillations, statistical mechanics and plasma physics.