Spacewalking astronauts toil outside lab
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - June 5, 2008 Dressed head to toe in white, Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan
Jr. looked like puffy dolls against the 37-foot-long, 14-foot-wide
lab, which is now the biggest room at the international space
station.
It was their second spacewalk in three days at the
shuttle-station complex, orbiting 210 miles above Earth.
"I feel like I'm on a camping trip trying to pack up a wet tent
on a Sunday morning," Fossum said as he wrestled with some of the
lab's insulation. He and Garan removed thermal covers from the
lab's robot arm and added them to a variety of attachment points.
As the spacewalkers toiled outside, their eight colleagues
hauled more experiment racks into the billion-dollar lab, called
Kibo, Japanese for hope, and flight controllers near Tokyo
monitored the power systems.
"Lots of people at work in there," astronaut Kenneth Ham
informed the spacewalkers.
"No, there's not. I don't see anybody," one of the
spacewalkers said.
"They got tired of your banging on the roof," Ham answered.
Even with all the racks moving in, Kibo was still noticeably
bigger than the eight other rooms at the space station. "We have
not seen that much space in space since Skylab," Mission Control
told the astronauts in a written message. Skylab was NASA's first
space station, back in the 1970s.
Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts delivered and installed
Kibo earlier in the week. There are now three labs at the orbiting
complex, supplied by NASA, the European Space Agency and, now, the
Japanese Space Agency.
On Friday, the astronauts will attach a storage shed to Kibo
that was dropped off by another shuttle crew in March. And on
Saturday, they will test drive Kibo's 33-foot robot arm. The two TV
cameras that were set up on the lab's exterior Thursday will be
instrumental in those robot-arm operations.
One last spacewalk is planned for Sunday, to replace an empty
nitrogen-gas tank at the space station. Fossum and Garan got a head
start on that work Thursday.
Some of their chores ended up being downright strenuous. As the
spacewalk hit the five-hour mark, the two joked that they would
skip the workout at the gym and eat whatever they wanted for
dinner.
Just before the seven-hour spacewalk ended, Fossum checked the
solar wing rotating joint on the space station's left side. He
found streaks of white grease but no metal shavings like those that
are clogging an identical joint on the right side.
Flight director Annette Hasbrook said the left joint looked to
be in fine shape and noted that the leaked grease actually may be
preventing a buildup of friction between the moving parts.
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