Discovery Astronaut Easily Makes First In-Flight Shuttle Fix

Even though Wednesday's spacewalk turned out to be relatively simple, Hill told reporters that Mission Control and the astronauts originally opposed it as a perhaps unnecessary task that risked damaging the shuttle's heat shielding, the orbiter's most vulnerable and, during reentry, most important component.

Robinson and fellow astronaut Soichi Noguchi left the shuttle airlock at 4:48 a.m. Eastern time to begin the third spacewalk of Discovery's eight-day sojourn at the international space station. Their agenda included a large and varied menu of tasks, with gap-filler repair shoehorned in about halfway through the schedule.

First, however, the spacewalkers wrestled a three-ton stowage platform out of the shuttle payload bay and into position, a job delayed by problems with the fasteners. Once that was finished, Mission Control deferred all the other large tasks, setting the stage for Robinson's journey.

Assisted by Noguchi outside and astronaut signal-caller Andrew Thomas inside, Robinson needed 50 minutes to prepare, shedding unnecessary tools and other paraphernalia, mounting a foot restraint on the station crane, stowing tethers and verbally running through checklists.

The key to the exercise, as NASA experts had pointed out, was never to touch the heat shielding, and to that end, all of Robinson's gear needed to be tied down, tucked away or left behind. He carried three tools, to be used only if he could not extract the gap fillers with his fingers: a pair of forceps, a modified hacksaw and a pair of astronaut scissors.

At 8:19 a.m., Robinson signaled, "Vegas, we are ready to fly."

"As always," astronaut crane operator James "Vegas" Kelly replied, "call stop three times if you see anything you don't like." And the crane lifted out of the shuttle payload bay.

The biggest uncertainty for the spacewalk was the possibility that Robinson, the first astronaut to be dangled below the shuttle, would lose communications.

"We wanted him to keep talking," spacewalk supervisor Cindy Begley said later at a Johnson Space Center news conference. "If Vegas stopped hearing him, he would stop the arm [crane]. If he stopped talking for more than a minute, Vegas would pull him out."

So Robinson talked. He soared out over the side of the shuttle in a preprogammed five-minute maneuver, then dove beneath the orbiter during a nine-minute second step, all the while expounding an informative but bizarre sotto voce tutorial.

"My plan is to do a gentle pull with the . . . fingers," he said. "If that doesn't work, I'll go to a slightly longer pull with the forceps."

The second maneuver left him stopped about seven feet in front of the first of the two gap fillers.