Word: bays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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McCandless started cautiously on the epic walk, slowly moving beyond the edge of the cargo bay at a sluggish .2 m.p.h.* But as he ventured deeper into the forbidding abyss of space, whatever apprehension he may have felt-NASA no longer talks publicly about astronaut heartbeats-seemed to vanish. "Hey, this is neat!" McCandless shouted, and then followed with a verbal bow to Neil Armstrong's famous comment when that astronaut first set foot on the moon: "That may have been one small step for Neil, but it's a heck of a big leap...
Safely back in the cargo bay, McCandless turned over his Buck Rogers contraption to Lieut. Colonel Robert Stewart, 41, the first Army man to journey into space. (Of the two MMUs aboard Challenger, one was always kept in readiness as a spare.) Urged McCandless: "Enjoy it. Have a ball." The hot-rodding Stewart, a former helicopter pilot, took that advice. When he throttled up to a radar-timed speed of .7 m.p.h., Brand warned him to slow down...
...test pilots, the astronauts gave their flying chair a thorough checkout; McCandless reported that his only real surprise was that the MMU shook and rattled when he turned on the forward-motion jets. The space walkers also retrieved a faulty camera from the aft end of the cargo bay, engaged in a brief and successful tryout of the shuttle's sinewy, 50-ft.-long arm, readjusted a scientific instrument on the big West German-made movable platform called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) and tested some of the tools created for April's satellite retrieval...
...earlier in the flight struck once more. The astronauts discovered that the shuttle's trusty triple-jointed arm had mysteriously developed a machine's equivalent of arthritis. It could not adequately move its "wrist." The problem effectively scuttled the plan to lift SPAS out of the cargo bay and rotate it slowly in space at the end of the arm. While SPAS simulated Solar Max's spin, McCandless was supposed to attach himself to it with a specially designed pin. Unable to cure the arm's ailment, however, the astronauts could do no more than practice...
...other foul-ups ended more satisfactorily. Left untethered in the cargo bay, a foot restraint was accidentally jogged and began floating away in space. "We can go get it," McCandless volunteered. But Commander Brand, exercising caution, immediately replied: "No, no, no, no." Instead, he maneuvered the shuttle toward the fleeing bit of hardware until McCandless could reach out and snare it. The balletic catch brought applause from the Houston controllers. McCandless was pleased too. Improvising on a slogan of an earlier shuttle crew, he joked, "We deliver, but we pick up also...