By Ed Stoddard HOUSTON, June 6 (Reuters) - Astronauts aboard the International Space Station used its robotic arm on Friday to grapple and then hoist a storage room onto Japan's new orbital research laboratory. The massive lab complex dubbed "Kibo" -- "Hope" in Japanese -- was delivered to the space station by the U.S. shuttle Discovery, which blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday on a two-week mission. The $100 billion station, which orbits over 200 miles above Earth, is like a gigantic construction site at the moment. The U.S. space shuttles act as delivery vehicles bringing building materials and additions. Kibo, the latest segment, also needs its own components, such as the storage facility, which is like a tool shed where spare parts, tools and experiments will be stored. Astronauts Karen Nyberg and Greg Chamitoff used the station's 58-foot (18 meter) Canadian-built robotic arm to grab the storage facility and move it to its permanent home atop of the Kibo complex. The shed had been brought up on a previous shuttle flight and moored to the station until its "mother lab" arrived. Spacewalking astronauts on Thursday had prepared Kibo's docking port for the storage room. "It is now connected to the Kibo laboratory," said NASA TV commentator Brandi Dean after the facility was put in place. Like the larger Kibo module -- which is 37 feet (11 meters) long -- the storage facility is shaped like a cylinder. Kibo, which will conduct scientific and even artistic experiments, is the centerpiece of this mission and of Japan's space program. NASA is nearing completion of the space station, which is permanently manned with a rotating three-person crew. NASA has seven construction missions and two resupply flights remaining before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. The U.S. space agency also plans a final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in October before turning its attention to developing a fleet of new spaceships that in addition to reaching the space station can travel to the moon. (Additional reporting by Irene Klotz in Houston; Editing by Tom Brown and Eric Beech)
A protester holds a picture of Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Russia during a demonstration in Moscow May 31, 2008, marking the third anniversary of the date when Khodorkovsky was sentenced. The former ...
