The wrong stuff: junk in space station

Such is life in space, post-Columbia.

With no garbage pickup by shuttles for nearly two years, the International Space Station is more and more resembling a cluttered attic.

''Room limited" is how astronaut Mike Fincke describes it.

Shuttle deliveries and pickups will not resume until spring at the earliest. A barrage of hurricanes and their devastating blow to National Aeronautics and Space Administration's launch site have delayed the next shuttle flight, by Discovery, for at least a couple of months.

So trash will keep piling up.

''It's at the point where we have to figure out a way to handle it. You can't just wish it away. The garbage man isn't coming tomorrow to take everything away for you," said astronaut Kenneth Bowersox, who was the space station's skipper during the Columbia shuttle disaster.

Astronaut Michael Foale, another former space station commander, said that even more important than what Discovery brings on that first flight will be what it takes away.

''It's essential that when that first shuttle comes up, before they do anything, they start to clear out the items that we need to deliver back to Earth on the shuttle," Foale said.

The crowding slowed him down, Foale said, and began to affect his work during his six-month stay, which ended in April.

''It's limiting our efficiency maybe by a percent or two, as we have to move some items out of the way when we get to a panel behind it," he said. ''But we are nowhere near as critical as I thought we were on space station Mir."

NASA takes little comfort in the fact that the six-year-old space station isn't as dingy or messy as Russia's Mir, which tumbled from the sky in 2001 after 15 years of operation. The point, from the beginning, was to avoid a pigpen in orbit.

''We're in a constrained situation," said Suzan Voss, manager of the NASA cargo integration office. ''But it's still a safe situation."

Columbia's catastrophic plunge from the sky Feb. 1, 2003, grounded the shuttle fleet and halted all space station construction.

The Russian Space Agency has been sending capsules and supply ships to the station. The cargo carriers have provided backup stores of precious oxygen that have come in handy during the repeated breakdowns of the station's main oxygen generator. But the Russian spacecraft can hold, at most, only a third of what the shuttle can carry.