Space Center, Houston – With a gentle tug of his gloved right hand, Discovery astronaut Stephen Robinson removed two worrisome pieces of filler material from the shuttle’s belly Wednesday in an unprecedented space repair job that drew a big sigh of relief from NASA.
But he may have to go out again to fix yet another trouble spot.
Robinson was barely back inside the shuttle and out of his space suit when Mission Control informed the crew there was a chance that another spacewalk may be needed Friday to deal with a torn thermal blanket below a cockpit window.
The concern is that a 2-foot section of the blanket could rip away during re-entry, whip backward and slam into the shuttle, perhaps causing grave damage. Engineers expect to know by this afternoon whether the danger is real and whether any blanket trimming is required.
Discovery and its crew of seven are to return to Earth on Monday.
It took Robinson just seconds to pull out each short dangling strip of ceramic-fiber cloth, which engineers had feared might cause the shuttle to overheat during its descent through the atmosphere and lead to another Columbia-type disaster.
Robinson never had to pull out his forceps or his makeshift hacksaw, which he took along just in case the material was stuck between the thermal tiles and he needed to employ more force.
It was a delicate operation: Robinson had to be careful not to bump into the shuttle’s fragile thermal tiles, which would make things worse.
Standing on the end of the international space station’s 58- foot mechanical arm, he tugged out the first piece as the two linked spacecraft passed over Massachusetts. By the time he had pulled out the next fabric strip 10 minutes later, he had crossed the Atlantic and was zooming over the French coast.
“That was the ride of the century!” Robinson exclaimed.
Robinson, a 49-year-old mechanical engineer and musician who took his childhood space-cadet lunchbox into orbit with him, became the first person to venture beneath an orbiting shuttle and the first person to repair a shuttle’s fragile thermal skin in space.
His crewmates inside the shuttle kept an eye on him via the arm’s camera. His spacewalking partner, Soichi Noguchi, watched from 75 feet away, although he lost sight of him at one point. But Robinson described what he was seeing and doing the entire time, so his colleagues would know he was safe.
“I’m pulling. It’s coming out very easily,” Robinson said. “The offending gap filler has been removed.”
The spacewalk ended after six hours. Robinson and Noguchi also installed a massive toolbox filled with spare parts on the space station.
With the gap-filler problem behind them, teams of engineers and thermodynamic experts turned their attention to the torn, crumpled blanket beneath the commander’s side window. Blanket samples were rushed from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to California for wind-tunnel testing.
The blanket is covered with a quiltlike fabric and stuffed like a pillow, which serves as insulation. The insulation would blow harmlessly away if the blanket came apart; the concern is where the top layer of fabric might go and how much damage it might do at high descending speeds, despite its less than 1-ounce weight, said deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale.
The blanket was apparently ripped by debris during the July 26 liftoff.
Hale said he believes the likelihood of a repair is low, but noted: “We’re just pounding this flat.”
