Space shuttle Endeavour docks with ISS

Space shuttle Endeavour docked at the International Space Station on Friday after a round-the-world chase, making for the biggest crowd ever gathered together in orbit - 13 astronauts.

The link-up was established as the two craft soared 220 miles (354 kilometre) above the Australian coast.

Once the hatches popped open, the seven shuttle astronauts floated into the space station, one by one, and embraced their six station colleagues.

Besides being the biggest space gathering ever, it was the most diverse -- seven Americans, two Russians, two Canadians, one Japanese and one Belgian.

Also, 12 men, one woman, four doctors, engineers and pilots are there in the shuttle. The station doubled in size, people-wise at the end of May, and this was the first shuttle visit since then.

Although 13 people have been in orbit before, they were scattered in separate spacecraft.
The old under-the-same-roof crowd record was 10.

But speaking during a mission status briefing, Lead Flight Director Paul Dye said everyone would be busy in their respective modules doing their duties.

"And, you know, we're going to send a couple folks outside, so a lot of the time, they'll be two of those folks outside, so I wouldn't call it chaotic, I would call it extremely busy," said Dye.

Their first team effort comes Saturday, when two of the shuttle astronauts venture out on the first of five planned spacewalks to help hook up a porch for Japan's space station lab.

The porch will be used to hold outdoor experiments.

Endeavour's astronauts had barely settled in when Mission Control informed them that a piece of space junk was threatening to come too close and that the shuttle-station complex would have to move into a slightly higher orbit later in the evening.

Earlier on Friday, as it was closing in for the linkup, Endeavour performed a backflip from 600 feet (183 metres) out so the station crew could photograph its entire surface and uncover any severe launch damage.

Endeavour's fuel tank lost more foam insulation than usual during Wednesday's launch, and some of the smaller pieces struck the shuttle, leaving a series of minor dings.

Space station residents snapped and beamed down a few hundred digital pictures of Endeavour, a routine procedure put in place after the 2003 Columbia accident.

Shuttle programme manager John Shannon later said no significant damage had been found spotted, although the analysis was continuing.

An inspection by the shuttle crew Thursday found the wings and nose, the most vulnerable spots, to be intact.

The bulk of the lost foam peeled away from the central area of Endeavour's fuel tank in 6-inch (15-centimetre) strips, six minutes after liftoff when it was too late to pose any threat.

That part of the tank normally does not shed like that, and NASA has assembled a team to figure out what happened.

Another engineering team is organising tests for the tank that will be used on the next shuttle flight, now delayed.

Discovery had been scheduled to blast off August 18.

Shannon said the launch will occur no earlier than August 21 or 22 because of the extra tank checks and other factors.

As long as the foam is attached properly in the problem area, he said, NASA will proceed with the flight even if it does not know what caused Wednesday's excessive foam loss. Endeavour will remain at the space station until July 28.

Japan's Koichi Wakata, in orbit since March, will be aboard the shuttle when it leaves. American Timothy Kopra, who took his place, was more than a month late because of launch delays.