Space walking: Extra-vehicular adventures

Flight Journal, Oct 2002 by Oberg, James

At some point during the last 20 years, we lost our wonder at the concept of a man floating in outer space. At one time, it was the stuff of science fiction; now, it is barely newsworthy. We take it for granted. Still, when watching a televised view of space-suited astronauts "walking" in space, you have to wonder whether they worry. Having only a thin layer of rubber and foil between an astronaut and the vacuum, radiation and micrometeorites of deep space seems to have become routine.

The Russians pioneered space walking in 1965, two months before American astronauts managed to exit their Gemini capsule. But the space-walking records for the longest time spent and the farthest distance from earth belong to the U.S.

The following stories cover these records plus some close calls by Russian cosmonauts.

I've got it ... no, you have it ... no ...

In May 1992, American astronauts set a space-walk-duration record, which was the result of a space-- walking emergency. The astronauts' lives weren't in danger, but the fate of a $100 million satellite was.

STS-49 was the first space mission for Endeavour, the shuttle built to replace Challenger, which was lost in January 1986. Mainly intended as a shakedown cruise, the mission turned out to be an ideal rescue mission for an Intelsat communications satellite that had been stranded in low orbit since March 1990. Space planners expected to grab the satellite during a space walk, attach a new rocket stage to it and send it on its way. Once it was in its planned 24-hour orbit, it was to beam the 1992 Summer Olympic Games from Barcelona to the world.

But the hand-held snare device built to grab the Intelsat failed to function as hoped. For two days, astronauts Rick Hieb and Pierre Thuot tried several times to shove the device into the base of the fourand-a-half-ton, beer-can shaped satellite. But it just wouldn't work.

Their last chance was to set the mechanism aside and just rely on muscle power; but the astronauts couldn't grab the satellite by themselves, so, in an overnight practice session in a water tank in Houston, fellow astronauts worked out a process whereby a third astronaut would squeeze into the air lock and go outside to help. Three people had never been outside in space together-ever.

Tom Akers was that third man, and he used the spacesuit he had brought up for his own experiments, which were scheduled to be conducted after the recovery. His motto in space was: "Never be in a hurry. It can be tedious; just go slowly." This was another chance to put that philosophy into practice.

Using the last of the shuttle's maneuvering fuel, the two pilots approached the rogue satellite for a third time. Later, Akers was asked whether he had worried about failure. "That's like being on the eighteenth green and thinking you'll miss a shot," he rebuked the journalist. "Keep your mind on what you're doing."

And they did. With Akers and Hieb at opposite sides of the shuttle's payload bay and Thuot on a platform at the end of the robot arm, they waited for the approaching, slowly spinning Intelsat. Hieb gave coordinating commands, and six hands simultaneously gripped the Intelsat's lower rim. Within seconds, they had stabilized it.

The rest was routine. Thuot plugged in the booster rocket, and after the connections had been checked out, the shuttle backed away to allow the rocket to fire. The space walk had lasted eight and a half hours-a record that has yet to be broken.

And speaking of feeling small ...

On three occasions, pairs of American astronauts went outside their space vehicles and were the only humans outdoors 100,000 miles above the earth. During the last few Apollo moon landings, while national television showed the two bounce around on the surface near their lunar module, the third astronaut (inside the command module) was circling the moon 60 miles away. He busied himself operating a mapping camera that had been originally designed for a spy satellite but now was recording views of the lunar surface in images that were detailed enough to actually show the landing module.

On the way back to Earth, the exposed film-in a breadbox-size canister-had to be retrieved from the camera package before the section containing it was jettisoned. It was easiest to just have somebody go outside and get it. As a consolation prize for not walking on the moon, the command-- module pilot was given the job. The lunar-module pilot was to watch from the open hatch and assist if needed.

On the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972, Charlie Duke's job was to sightsee while he stood in the hatch, and his crewmate, Ken Mattingly, busied himself with retrieving the film pack. He had plenty of time to look around. "It was a really different impression than doing a walk on the moon in gravity," he told me recently. "I floated out of that hatch, and it was a wonder; it was almost euphoria."

While Mattingly faced the camera module and concentrated on bolts and plugs, Duke turned to look directly out onto deep space. "I could look off to the right--down in the lower right position at the four-o'clock position on a clock-- and there was the Earth. It was a new earth; it was just a thin sliver of a crescent of blue and white. And I rolled around to the left, and at about the ten or eleven o'clock, there was the moon-gigantic in size. Earth was 180,000 miles away; the moon, 60,000. This enormous almost full moon towered over us, and everywhere else was the blackness of space." Because the sun was so bright, he couldn't see any stars.