Word: labs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...months the battered Mir space station has been as much a ghost ship as a spaceship. Even as its crews have continued to live and work in four of its aging modules, its fifth--the once glittering Spektr lab--has remained dark and cold, ruptured by a collision with a cargo ship in June...
Last Friday Spektr flickered back to life. In a superbly executed internal space walk, Mir's new commander, Anatoli Solovyev, and his flight engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, floated into the airless lab and installed a new cable system that will provide electricity to Spektr and the rest of the power-thirsty station. "This is a super day," exulted NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who waited out the space walk inside Mir's Soyuz re-entry vehicle, the crew's lifeboat in case they had to abandon ship. "Well done, everybody...
...immediate goal of Friday's fix-it call was to install a new hatch on Spektr--one equipped with a cable assembly that would let the crew tap electrical power from the lab's solar panels while keeping the module sealed off from the rest of the station. Before the walk got started, NASA's Greg Harbaugh, who helped plan the exercise, played down its difficulty, brushing off news reports calling it the most dangerous EVA ever. "I don't think they get much easier," he said...
...exactly. Shortly after Solovyev and Vinogradov donned their spacesuits and depressurized an airlock adjacent to Spektr in preparation for opening the airless lab's hatch, Vinogradov's left glove began leaking air. At first the cosmonauts were unconcerned, and a ground controller even joked as Vinogradov struggled to adjust his suit. "Pull it with all your proletarian force," he instructed...
Sometimes Hollywood does get it right, or almost right. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and this summer's Contact reawakened the human craving to reach out and touch those things we do not know. While the jolly Jet Propulsion Lab fellows liked to drown out the Martian silence with Twist and Shout, these movies are about the wisdom of being quiet enough to hear the otherworldly message--the simple sequence of chords that announces the aliens' arrival in Close Encounters, the pounding radio signal from Vega that Jodie Foster's character picks up in Contact...