COLBERT update: How to assemble a space treadmill

Hey gang! As Stephen told us this past Wednesday (and I blogged on Monday), the crew aboard the International Space Station began putting together the C.O.L.B.E.R.T. this week. Today DB pointed me toward this article in the St. Petersburg Times explaining exactly what it will take to get the treadmill up and running for the astronauts to work off all that Tang and astronaut ice cream. It’s a pretty complicated operation.

Challenge of putting together COLBERT treadmill reaches new heights in space
by Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, October 4, 2009

Many of us have labored through 30 pages of instructions to put together a wardrobe from Ikea or a desk from Office Depot. Pieces are sometimes missing or broken. It’s time-consuming. Fights break out over which piece goes where and there’s the inevitable “I told you so.”

But what’s it like to put together a $5 million treadmill in space?

Last week, astronauts aboard the International Space Station unpacked the COLBERT, named after Comedy Central comedian Stephen Colbert, and began the 20-hour process of putting it together.

The COLBERT — Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill — comes with 52 pieces and 62 pages of instructions.

. . .

Astronaut Nicole Stott of Clearwater will lead the effort during the next few weeks to assemble the 2,200-plus pound treadmill. Before Stott left for space, she spent four hours going over the assembly procedures with lighter mock pieces.

As with Ikea instructions, there are pictures to help Stott and other astronauts combine the parts. But NASA engineers added hundreds of step-by-step instructions: Align pins (one per side) on back side of Upper Isolator Bracket with spring end of Right Upper Isolators (two).

. . .

Read the full article here

If you think furniture assembly is tough, add in the variable of weightlessness and you’ve got a level of complexity that Ikea can only aspire to attain. But knowing the care and detail that NASA teams put into their preparations for any space activities, I feel pretty confident that the ISS crew will wind up with a fully functional treadmill, and no leftover parts.

And now, in checking the On-Orbit Status Reports over at NASA.gov, it looks like they’re finished with the actual assembly:

T2/COLBERT Treadmill: Yesterday, the crew completed all planned T2 installation steps in Node-2. The remainder of the work was originally scheduled after the docked period, but the crew elected to use their free time to complete the job today. Everything has been going smoothly. ACO (Activation & Checkout) is planned after the 18S departure.

If I’m translating this correctly, the COLBERT is fully assembled and will be activated once the current Soyuz mission to the ISS is complete and the Soyuz ship and its crew undock from the station to return to Earth. Undocking is scheduled to happen on October 10th, so sometime shortly after that, we will hopefully have the first reports on the COLBERT’s use. (Now do we get another OMG! SPACE! interview?!?)

For more updates, you can follow NASA on Twitter (@NASA), and now you can also follow astronaut Nicole Stott (@Astro_Nicole), currently the only member of the ISS crew who is tweeting from space.