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Astronauts Repair Space Station

Posted on: Thursday, 1 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

Astronauts repair space station

By MARCIA DUNN Associated Press

Thursday, July 1, 2004

Cape Canaveral, Fla. -- Determined to do better than last week, the International Space Station's two astronauts ventured back outside Wednesday on an unusually risky spacewalk and successfully replaced a bad circuit board.

American Mike Fincke and Russian Gennady Padalka safely crossed nearly 100 feet to get to the repair location -- a grueling distance for spacewalkers over potentially dangerous terrain. Then, they pried off the tray protecting a row of circuit breakers; it was stiff and incredibly hard to move.

"I got it," Padalka said, breathing heavily.

Mission Control warned the men to take their time.

"We understand," Fincke replied. "We're not out of the woods yet. We're just getting started."

They quickly removed the fried circuit breaker and pushed in the spare. Then they rested while flight controllers conducted electrical tests to see if the swap was good.

The spacewalk got off to a fast start. Fincke and Padalka were so eager to get the repair work done -- after last week's aborted attempt -- that they popped open the hatch almost a half-hour early.

The crew members cranked open an extendible boom to traverse the station and made it to the work site without incident 90 minutes later.

Last Thursday, their first attempt at the job was aborted just 14 minutes after they opened the hatch. An oxygen-flow switch on Fincke's suit did not lock into the proper position, and oxygen gushed out of his tank, prompting flight controllers to order the spacewalkers back inside.

This time, Fincke and Padalka verified that the switches on both of their suits were in the right setting. NASA was anxious to get the circuit board replaced to restore power to one of the gyroscopes that keep the 225-mile-high outpost steady and pointed in the right direction. The circuit board conked out in April, leaving the space station with just two good gyroscopes, the minimum.

The space station is down to two crew members, instead of three, because of the grounding of the shuttle fleet since the Columbia disaster.

As a result, no one was left inside to watch over the station during the spacewalk -- a situation NASA never tolerated until this year.

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