Endeavour flew a crew-rotation and resupply mission to the International Space Station in December 2001, exchanging the third resident expedition for the fourth and delivering a load of supplies in an Italian cargo module. The mission came just months after the September 11 attacks, and the crew carried mementos honouring the victims.
A spacewalk worked on the station's exterior, including efforts to clear debris snagging a solar array's rotating joint. The nearly twelve-day flight continued the dependable cadence of ferrying crews and cargo that sustained the outpost through its construction years. Missions like this rarely made headlines, but their reliability was what allowed the station to remain permanently staffed while the more dramatic assembly flights added its ever-growing structure.
Endeavour launched in December 2001, the first American crewed flight after the September attacks, and the mission carried a great deal of freight that was not cargo. Among the items aboard were flags recovered from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Port Authority patch, and several thousand small flags flown for the families of the dead.
The practical work was a crew rotation and a resupply run: Expedition 4 up, Expedition 3 home after four months, and a Leonardo module carrying three tonnes of supplies berthed and unloaded. A spacewalk fixed insulation on the Russian segment's solar array drive mechanisms.
Space stations are, among other things, statements about continuity — a Russian and American crew living together above a world where little else was going smoothly. The flight is barely remembered for its engineering and probably should not be; what it did was arrive on schedule, three months after the worst day in recent American memory, and carry on.
