Word: walks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...space walk was a welcome grace note in a week of too familiar problems for the pratfall-prone station. Four days before, the onboard computer failed--again. Shortly after, there was a touch-and-go moment as a cargo ship approached the station--again. Amid all this, the inevitable finger-pointing began. Russian President Boris Yeltsin suggested that recently returned crewmen Vasili Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin were largely responsible for the station's woes; at his postflight press conference, an indignant Tsibliyev denied the charge...
...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...
Just how successful the space walk was remains to be seen. It will take several days before the power system is configured and the station's hardware fired back up. Mir generates 15 kW of electricity--about enough to run a small house--and the repairs could help it produce up to 11 more. The additional juice would allow 80% to 90% of the station's planned experiments to be resumed...
...such squabbling will probably be put aside. With Mir stabilized, the crew is looking ahead to its next space walk--this one outside the ship to find and patch the elusive holes in Spektr's skin. NASA has agreed to allow Foale to train for that orbital excursion, though just when it will take place and whether he'll actually participate is still undecided. NASA officials firmly state, however, that as long as Mir stays sound, they will proceed with plans to send astronaut David Wolf up to relieve Foale in late September. Ghost ship or not, Mir will apparently...