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Walking In The Void
Houston TX (SPX) Aug 20, 2004 Venturing into the vacuum of space, with its extreme temperatures and the challenges of weightlessness in what amounts to a personal spacecraft, can never become routine. Yet humans have made more than 250 spacewalks, 142 of them by NASA astronauts. Perhaps the most famous of all spacewalks were the 15 made on the moon, including the first step onto another planetary body by Neil Armstrong. Spacewalks have given us unforgettable images - from the very first U.S. spacewalk by Ed White outside Gemini 4 in June 1965 to the most recent spacewalk by International Space Station crewmembers on Aug. 3. Among the best of those images:
The satellite was recovered by Discovery in November 1984 after it had been stranded in a useless orbit by a malfunctioning booster. It was later refurbished and relaunched on an expendable rocket.
The first spacewalk at the ISS was one of three during the December 1998 flight of Endeavour that brought the second ISS element, the Unity Node, into space. The next Station spacewalk is scheduled for early September. All in all, there have been 55 spacewalks at the ISS - 25 from Space Shuttles and 30 based from the Station itself. Total time of ISS spacewalks is 332 hours and 56 minutes. That's about 14 days. The history of US spacewalks parallels the history of the nation's space program. Nine were done from Gemini capsules, five from outside Apollo command modules and 15 on the surface of the moon. Skylab was the base for 10 spacewalks. Three Americans did spacewalks from the Russian Mir space station. In addition to ISS-based spacewalks, a total of 74 have been done from Space Shuttles. Each was done with the utmost emphasis on safety, and each was done with the support of thousands of people in the United States and elsewhere. The supporting cast begins in Mission Control. It includes trainers, engineers, equipment designers, manufacturers and a host of others. The Russians have done 111 spacewalks, including the first. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov stepped out of the Voshkod 2 spacecraft in March 1965. He traveled about 3,500 miles during his 12-minute outing. Two Russians did spacewalks from Space Shuttles and 75 Russian spacewalks were outside Mir.
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NASA Had No Choice But To Buy Soyuz Flights
Washington DC (SPX) Jan 09, 2006NASA's announcement last week that it will pay Roskosmos $43.6 million for a round-trip ride to the International Space Station this spring, and an equivalent figure for an as-yet-undetermined number of future flights to the station until 2012, represents the agency's acknowledgment that it had no alternative. |
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