Washington - An astronaut aboard the US shuttle Atlantis was over the moon after becoming the father of a baby girl hours after completing a spacewalk on Saturday. Randy Bresnik had waited with bated breath for two days until he was given the news that his wife, Rebecca, had given birth to little Abigail in Houston, Texas.
Bresnik spent six hours working with fellow-astronaut Mike Foreman outside the International Space Station (ISS) without knowing whether the baby had arrived.
On Sunday morning he was able to break the happy news to his 11 colleagues aboard the ISS and the shuttle docked to it.
Doctors had been expected to induce the birth on Friday, but the procedure was delayed for medical reasons, media reports said.
The couple initially thought they could not have a child, but then his wife got pregnant soon after they adopted a son, now 3, from Ukraine.
The event makes Bresnik the second astronaut to become a father in space. The first was Michael Fincke in June 2004.
Fincke was a long-term crewmember of the ISS and had to wait four months before returning to Earth and seeing his new baby for the first time.
Bresnik, a 42-year-old marine is due to return to Earth on Friday after an 11-day mission.
During their spacewalk, Foreman and Bresnik finished not only the assigned tasks but also got head on some other projects.
The two astronauts mounted a new antenna on the ISS, and hardware for later storage of backup parts and supplies. Their tasks also included installing part of a project to monitor ships at sea, and a separate device to measure the electric charge on the space station in its interaction with plasma in orbit.
After the Atlantis mission, only five more shuttle flights to the ISS remain before the programme is retired in 2010.
The final spacewalk of the mission is slated for Monday. Atlantis is to disembark on Tuesday and arrive back on Earth Friday.
Among the equipment it will have delivered are Gyroscopes that help keep the ISS at the proper altitude in space; an extra hand for the station's robotic arm; a gas tank for providing oxygen to the airlock during spacewalks; parts for the station's cooling system.
NASA is at work on developing the next generation spacecraft with an eye on returning humans to the moon or travelling to Mars and beyond. But full support for the plans is still pending in the halls of government.
