It had a good run, but space station’s first treadmill jettisoned

NASA

The International Space Station's first treadmill, referred to as the Treadmill Vibration Isolation System, or TVIS, floats inside the orbiting outpost in May as it was being prepared for Tuesday's disposal.

Robert Z. Pearlman Space.com A space apparatus that for more than a dozen years enabled both astronauts and cosmonauts to literally run around the Earth bid farewell to its home on orbit Tuesday. The International Space Station's original treadmill is now on its way to its fiery destruction aboard a spent Russian cargo freighter.

The now-discarded exercise device, called the "Treadmill Vibration Isolation System," or TVIS (pronounced "tee-viss"), was used by the orbiting outpost's first 34 resident crews from November 2000 until March of this year, when it was replaced by a new Russian-built unit. The 12-year-old running machine (and sometimes marathon track) was previously succeeded by a more advanced U.S. treadmill that was famously renamed after the television comedian Stephen Colbert.

"There has been a history of treadmills, trying to get them to work pretty well in space, and it is no easy feat," said NASA astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams, who ran on the TVIS, and later the C.O.L.B.E.R.T. (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill), to stay in shape during her two long-duration missions onboard the space station in 2006 and 2012. [ Photos: Comedian Stephen Colbert Visits NASA ]

Astronauts and cosmonauts use treadmills and other types of exercise devices as a countermeasure to the debilitating effects that extended exposure to microgravity has on the human body, including the loss of muscle mass and bone density.

Williams made history on the TVIS by becoming the first person to run a full marathon in space. On April 16, 2007, as thousands on the ground ran in the Boston Marathon, Williams completed the same distance on the stationary-but-still-circling-the-Earth treadmill.

"It made it through the (marathon's) 26.2 miles without a fault," Williams recalled in an interview with collectSpace about the TVIS's legacy.

Last month, Russian cosmonauts who had been using the TVIS since it was replaced in the U.S. segment of the space station by the COLBERT (or "T2") uninstalled the treadmill and packed it inside the Progress M-19M (51P) unmanned resupply craft to discard with other no-longer-needed hardware and trash. The cosmonauts now use the BD-2 treadmill, Russia's first new space exercise machine since the space station Mir.

NASA TV

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It had a good run, but space station's first treadmill jettisoned