I am such a space geek

I just spent half an hour watching Steve Robinson on STS-114 get maneuvered into place under the Discovery space shuttle orbiting 300 km above the Earth at 8 miles per second, and successfully remove 2 pieces of filler material that threatened to allow the shuttle to overheat during re-entry.

This was on Nasa TV, by the way, with live video and complete audio feed of all the conversation between the crew on the ISS, those on Discovery, the Capcom in Houston and of course, Steve the EVA-er.

It surprised everyone that it was so easy - it looked (and probably felt) like pulling out a name card from between 2 rubber bricks using his fingers. Here's a screenshot (I cheated a bit though). It shows Steve holding the second of the pieces of filler in his right hand during his 4 hr 41 minute spacewalk.


This set of EVAs was unique in the sense that Steve was held in place by the robotic arm on the ISS, rather than maneuvring himself using a Manned Maneuvering Unit. This made his moving into place a little more tiresome and slow, but was probably safer for all.

When I was a kid, I first read of EVA in a book called 'The Hamlyn book of "What do you know?"', an excellent and fat book, which made me the geek I am today. And what really fascinated me about EVA was how the spacewalker would move in space. They didn't have MMUs in those days; all they had was a longish rod with tiny thrusters at each end. Since there's no (or little) inertia in space, they'd fire short bursts on the rockets to change their momentum and thereby move themselves around.

Naturally, this was dangerous; a misfire would mean the astronaut (or cosmonaut!) could get pushed out of control until the end of his tether, and possibly severing his tether and his oxygen feed.

Leaving him quite dead quite soon, and orbiting the Earth as a permanent souvenir of this planet's thirst for adventure and exploration.