Associated Press
Japan is about to roll out the "Lexus" of space station labs—the $1 billion Kibo lab, or Japanese Experiment Module.
The bulk of Kibo—which means "hope" in Japanese—is slated for a Saturday launch aboard space shuttle Discovery.
Kibo will be the biggest and, by far, the most elaborate room at the International Space Station—a 37-foot-long (11-meter-long) scientific workshop as large as a school bus, with its own hatch to the outside for experiments and a pair of robot arms.
Seven astronauts, one of them Japanese, will deliver the actual lab on the upcoming mission, along with the larger of the two robot arms.
But Kibo is so enormous that a total of three shuttle flights will be needed to get it all up. A separate storage room loaded with Kibo equipment went up in March. And a porch for outdoor science experiments and the smaller robot arm will fly next year.
Two decades in the making, the 16-ton Kibo dwarfs the two labs already in orbit—NASA's Destiny and the European Space Agency's Columbus.
Kibo is 9 feet (3 meters) longer than Destiny, which was launched in 2001, and more than 14 feet (4.3 meters) longer than Columbus, which flew to the space station in February.
"It's usually the other way around, isn't it? Japanese products should be smaller, but this time it's the other way around," Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide said with a chuckle.
Shuttle commander Mark Kelly called it "the Lexus of the space station modules."
"It's big and it's capable. I mean, it's got its own dedicated robotic arm. It's got its own air lock. Eventually, it's going to have an external platform for experiments. It's got a lot of capable science racks that are going in. So yeah, I think it's pretty impressive."
Tricky Installation
Kelly and his crew will install Kibo during the 14-day shuttle flight, then attach the Japanese storage compartment that was left in a temporary parking position in March.
