Endeavour crew mixes experience, excitement

Spacewalking chief
A veterinarian by training, Endeavour's lead spacewalker Rick Linnehan joined NASA's astronaut ranks in 1992 and performed life sciences experiments on his first two spaceflights before making three spacewalks to service the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002.

Growing up in Lowell, Mass., Linnehan was raised by his parental grandparents Henry and Mae Linnehan, whom he credited with setting him on a path to space.

"They instilled in me a really good work ethic. They were really old-fashioned," said Linnehan, 50, who will participate in three STS-123 spacewalks. "Probably if it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't be where I am today."

As a child, he hoped to be a pilot, astronaut or veterinarian, but it was while attending veterinary school that he applied to NASA's spaceflying ranks.

"I started looking and they had doctors and they had geologists and physicists so I'm like, 'Well, you know, they need a veterinarian because, you know, why not?'" Linnehan said.

Despite his surgical work to service Hubble, Linnehan finds the tricky assembly of Canada's large Dextre robot as a more daunting task.

"We're building this giant robot ... it looks like some kind of old 1950s or '60s sci-fi movie," said Linnehan, who likened Dextre to the cartoon "Gigantor," the space age robot, from his youth. "It's pretty wild."

Japan’s orbital deliveryman
Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, 53, is a mission specialist representing the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency aboard Endeavour and will help deliver his country's first habitable module to the space station. He is making his second spaceflight.

"I'm very proud to be part of this team and part of this mission," Doi said.

Doi hails from Minamitama in Tokyo, Japan, and is married. He first flew aboard NASA's Columbia orbiter during the STS-87 mission in 1997.

An amateur astronomer, Doi earned a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Tokyo and later joined Japan's astronaut corps in 1985. On STS-87 — also a long, 16-day mission — he became the first Japanese astronaut ever to perform a spacewalk.

"I was watching stars when I was a kid and I still like watching stars right now," Doi said in a NASA interview, adding that watching Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong walk on the moon when he was 11 put him on the path to space. "I was hooked."

[Click here for a full profile of Doi and JAXA's Kibo storage module.]

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