Ed Lu speaks at the Expedition 7 crew debriefing.

During his Jan. 12 crew debriefing event at Space Center Houston, Ed Lu shared stories and spectacular images from his stay aboard the International Space Station. Yet he was quick to give credit to his Earth-bound colleagues for the success of Expedition 7.

“Too many words go towards the crew, but really, all the hard work is done on the ground,” Lu said.

However, his colleagues feel that he pulled his weight: Lu, the Expedition 7 Flight Engineer, was awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. The medal is the highest recognition that the Agency can give. Yuri Malenchenko, the mission’s Commander, also received the award but was in Russia the night of the event.

Administrator Sean O'Keefe addresses the crowd.

In attendance was Administrator Sean O’Keefe, who praised Lu’s flexibility -- for example, in reworking the mission when the Expedition crew went from three to two people following the Columbia accident. Lu and Malenchenko became the first two-person crew onboard the Space Station, and O’Keefe said that the success of the mission has “allowed us to rethink what we thought were absolutes.”

Lu has another first to his credit: he was the first American astronaut to both launch and land a mission in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. This scenario made Lu aware of certain traditions in Russia's space culture.

“It’s a tradition in Russia that a crew does not see its ship before launch,” he said, “sort of like our tradition of a groom not seeing the bride before the wedding.”

Once in orbit, Lu and Malenchenko proceeded with their research. Some of this was done on specific scientific experiments, while some was done on what Lu called their “test vehicle,” the Space Station itself.

“The Space Station is the first of its kind -- like a car from the 1920s,” he said. “If you owned one of those back then, you’d spend a lot of time under the hood, fixing it. Today, we have cars that go 100,000 miles and never need a tune-up.”

“When we get to the Moon and Mars, we’ll need to know how these technologies work. We won’t be able to send up a spare part like we can now,” he said. “That’s why we need to spend time on Station, learning ‘how does this break, how do we fix it?’”

Lu’s presentation was given just two days before President George W. Bush announced his vision for the future of NASA, which included missions to the Moon by 2020. Lu compared NASA’s future destinations with nautical missions of the fourteenth century.

“There were so many breakthroughs in that era not because people did science on those ships,” he said, “but because those ships took us places where we saw and did things we’d never dreamed of before.”

Among the stunning images that Lu showed from his mission was a picture of the Moon, taken during August when Mars was the closest it had been to Earth in many years. Mars is visible in the picture as a bright dot next to the Moon.

“I love this picture because it shows what we’re up to,” Lu said.