NASA Career
Lu flew on space shuttle missions STS-84 in 1997 and STS-106 in 2000, in which he carried out a six-hour spacewalk to perform construction work on the International Space Station. Having been flight engineer on Soyuz TMA-2, Lu spent six months in space in 2003 as part of ISS Expedition 7, with cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. In July 2003, Lu and Malenchenko answered questions from students participating in Japan's NASDA special educational event, where Ed Lu performed Happy Birthday on an electronic piano for a student's birthday in the live broadcast from space. He had demonstrated the difficulty of playing the piano instrument in space during a live in-orbit interview with CBS News and NASA TV video feed. Also on this ISS mission on 15 October 2003, Lu communicated with the crewman of China's first manned mission into space, Yang Liwei, flying aboard Shenzhou 5. Lu congratulated the Chinese for the achievement and said in Putonghua: "Welcome to space. Have a safe journey". Malenchenko added: "I love to have somebody else in space instead of (just) me and Ed".
In his spare time while at NASA, Lu founded the B612 Foundation whose goal is to be able to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015.
Read more about this topic: Ed Lu
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