Jeff Williams conducts an experiment aboard the station.

STARDATE: What other kinds of research are you pursuing aboard the station now, and what kind of a laboratory is it with only a two-person crew aboard?

JEFF WILLIAMS: Well, it’s very effective as a laboratory. Obviously, our limitation right now is crew time. It takes most of our time just to run, operate the station, repair things when they go wrong, get ready for the shuttle coming up, unloading supplies, loading up the Progress to get rid of trash -- that takes most of our time.

But in terms of the facility, it’s a great facility to conduct research, and we are, in fact, conducting many experiments on board that have to do with a wide variety of things....Right now, I’m conducting an experiment, as we speak, that is a material science experiment, looking at crystal growth in a weightless environment, because you can grow more precise, more exact crystals than you can on the ground in the force of gravity.

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing a fluid dynamics experiment, studying how we can better transfer and manage fluids in a weightless environment. Next week, I’ll be doing an experiment on a new type of robot that will fly itself around inside the space station -- we’re just gonna begin that, and we’re very excited about that. So there’s still a lot that we can do onboard. Of course, when we get Thomas Reiter aboard later this summer, that’ll add a whole lot of time for doing research.