NASA Adds One Day To Shuttle's Mission

HOUSTON, July 30 -- Two Discovery astronauts stepped into space Saturday, floating, crawling, drifting and dangling from gantries, handholds and tethers all over the space shuttle and the international space station.

At Mission Control, Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle project manager, announced that NASA planners added an extra day to Discovery's mission to transfer equipment, water and other consumables to the space station, anticipating that a long time could elapse before the grounded shuttle fleet flies again.

The six-hour, 50-minute spacewalk was the first of three for Soichi Noguchi, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut, and Stephen Robinson, a guitar-playing engineer from California, and the first by any space shuttle crew in the 2 1/2 years since shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry.

The pair used the time to test new repair techniques, install part of a storage platform, and replace and fix broken equipment that had crippled the space station for months. They accomplished all of their tasks in the allotted time and even added a couple of extras at the end.

"They did it like they could do it in their sleep," said a beaming Cindy Begley, Mission Control's spacewalk chief and the pair's chief mentor for more than three years. "I'm more than happy at the way everything went."

So was Mark Ferring, the space station flight director in Houston, who finished the day with a new gyroscope to hold the station in place and a new Global Positioning System antenna. "It's really nice to have the backup," Ferring said.

The crew of the space station, which depends on the shuttle for heavy equipment and large-scale resupply, had been watching the machinery wear out and its resources dwindle ever since the Columbia disaster.

Discovery's mission, in the first shuttle flight since 2003, was to inaugurate a new era in shuttle travel, but the orbiter's external fuel tank lost a 0.9-pound piece of foam insulation during launch, prompting NASA to halt all shuttle flights until the problem is fixed, a decision that put September's scheduled mission in doubt. A similar but larger chunk of debris doomed Columbia.

Despite the cloud hanging over the shuttle program, Discovery's mission has proceeded virtually without flaw since liftoff Tuesday. The orbiter appeared to have emerged unscathed from the launch, and a new suite of cameras and other imaging devices provided engineers with unprecedented images of the shuttle's heat shielding.

Shuttle astronauts used a new 50-foot boom sensor to conduct laser imaging of several "areas of interest" where scarring might have occurred on the "reinforced carbon-carbon" leading edge of Discovery's wings.

Mission operations representative Philip L. Engelauf said at a Johnson Space Center news conference that the latest survey appeared to have found nothing significant, but he suggested that analysts may "develop another shopping list of targets."

Noguchi cracked open Discovery's airlock hatch and stepped into the void at 5:46 a.m. Eastern time, in time for sunset over Southeast Asia. "What a view!" he exclaimed.