Japan is about to roll out the Lexus of space station labs, a whopper in size and sophistication.The $1 billion Kibo lab — which means “hope” in Japanese — is poised for a Saturday launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It 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. Making it even bigger will be a closet and porch.
Kibo is so enormous that three shuttle flights are needed to get it all up.
Seven astronauts, one of them Japanese, will deliver the actual lab on the upcoming mission, along with the larger of the two robot arms. A separate storage room loaded with Kibo equipment went up in March. The porch for outdoor science experiments and the smaller robot arm will fly next year.
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