Word: spacewalkers
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...With China planning to conduct its first ever spacewalk this week and India making noise about its own space program, it almost seems as if there?s a new space race heating up. And this comes at a time when the U.S. is retiring its shuttle program and NASA's scrambling for funding; is the U.S. in danger of falling behind? There's no question that other countries are really pushing forward, fairly significantly in some cases, right at the time when the U.S. is having what I would describe as a hiccup in its continuity...
...Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei completed 14 orbits of the earth in Shenzhou V, making China the third nation after the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. to put a human into space independently. Two years later Shenzhou VI carried two Chinese astronauts into space. This week's Shenzhou VII spacewalk is part of preparations for constructing a Chinese space lab. Subsequent flights would carry up the lab components, though Johnson-Freese notes that if China want to launch a larger vehicle, like a space station, or send a manned flight to the moon, it needs to develop a heavy lift launch rocket...
...first. Now the country will show it can also be very happy with bronze. Later this week, 43 years after cosmonaut Alexei Leonov spent 12 minutes outside an orbiting spacecraft, China plans to become the third nation after the Soviet Union and the U.S. to conduct its own spacewalk...
...astronauts are scheduled to don the spacesuits, and one will make the historic spacewalk. A small monitoring satellite will be released from the ship during the mission. The crew is People's Liberation Army Air Force fighter pilots Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng. "Shenzhou VII is another breakthrough in China's development of manned spaceflght, and we are entrusted with an honorable mission with historical significance," Zhai told a pre-launch press conference on Sept. 24. "As an astronaut, it is the greatest honor to launch into space on behalf of our motherland...
...repair the damage - something they could do by attaching a protective plate, dabbing on insulating paint, or squeezing on a layer of epoxy-like insulation. None of the fixes is perfect, though all of them do help - and all of them entail the added danger of an unscheduled spacewalk. (Two astronauts went out on a scheduled spacewalk this morning to replace equipment on the international space station, and two more walks are scheduled for Wednesday and Friday...