Cape Canaveral, Fla. — In what's being billed as NASA's longest spacewalk, two astronauts rearranged the outside of the international space station on Sunday to make room for an Italian cargo carrier.
The excursion by shuttle-soon-to-be-station crew members Jim Voss and Susan Helms was just four minutes shy of nine hours. It entailed slow, deliberate work with cables and connectors "a jungle of wires" as Voss called it.
Astronaut James Voss works outside the Destiny module, right, during a spacewalk Sunday. Voss helped clear a space for a cargo carrier in a 9-hour spacewalk.
"We knew this one was going to be tough," NASA's lead flight director, John Shannon, said when it was all over. The spacewalkers were "right on the edge" of what they could handle, he said, but performed admirably despite some initial butterfingers that put them an hour behind.
A plastic bag containing a hydrazine-detection kit floated out space shuttle Discovery's hatch as the spacewalk got under way. "Uh, oh," Helms uttered. Voss managed to catch the bag.
Minutes later, Voss accidentally let go of a viselike device needed for a work platform. The 10- to 15-pound chunk of metal, about the size of a thick dictionary, drifted away and joined the thousands of pieces of junk orbiting Earth.
Because the part is considered critical, NASA had a spare on board.
The main event was the relocation of a docking port on space station Alpha. The bulky cone had to be moved from one side of a module to another so the shuttle crew could plug the Italian-made cargo carrier into the vacated spot late Sunday night.
The reusable $150 million module, named Leonardo for Italy's Signor da Vinci, was packed with 5 tons of gear and ferried to the space station aboard Discovery. It will be emptied and returned to the shuttle for the March 17 undocking.
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