Really High Steel

The damn thing wobbled. The satellite floated like some giant oil barrel kicked overboard at sea, only it was 18 feet tall and 12 feet wide and the sea shone 300 miles below.

Astronauts Pierre Thuot and Richard Hieb had trained for years to nab this floating barrel—a stranded multimillion-dollar communications relay known as Intelsat VI (F-3)—and direct it into the open bay doors of the space shuttle Endeavour. They had practiced every move they would make in this daring space walk, rehearsing almost daily for months in the vast pools and virtual-reality simulators of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. But no matter how hard you plan and how much you think about working weightless, nothing fully prepares you for the experience. Up here, the rules of physics are not the familiar ones that are hardwired into your body and brain, not the rules that governed the growth of the illustrious human body inside this bulky space suit from single cell to astronaut, but the clean abstractions of textbooks, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes surprisingly equal, and immediately opposite.

The idea was for Thuot to stand on the end of the great arm extending from the shuttle's cargo bay, his feet secured with restraints and heel and toe clips, and then hang his ass out over the edge in a far more literal way than ever imagined by the old test pilots who popularized the expression. With the whole of the Atlantic Ocean and the west coast of Africa rolling brilliantly from toe to heel, he would ride the arm out to the slowly rotating black cylinder and attach a 15-foot-long capture bar to its bottom. There was a steering wheel built into the capture bar that would enable Thuot to gently brake the cylinder's slow rotation. Thus stabilized, the errant satellite could then be drawn gently into the cargo bay for repair. The steps in this procedure had been thought through and practiced so often that one could hardly conceive of anything surprising happening.

Except the damn thing wobbled. As massive as a small house, weighing four and a half tons on earth, the giant black barrel behaved exactly like a spinning top. Whenever Thuot touched it with the capture bar and began to apply the brakes to its spin, the cylinder didn't just slow, it started to wobble, drunken-ly, as a top does when it loses its momentum. Thuot pulled back quickly and ground controllers fired the lurching satellite's tiny stabilizing rockets, nudging it back into a stable spin. If the wobble disintegrated into a tumble, not only would it be impossible to snare the satellite, but it would pose a threat to him, the shuttle floating alongside and the six other members of his crew.

It was May 10, 1992. NASA was on the verge of a spectacular failure. If there were a defining moment for the current generation of NASA astronauts, this was it. The single-combat knights of the Sixties' rocket-jock corps have evolved into magnificently over-qualified construction workers—hard hats in space hefting huge components like giant soap bubbles, specialists in what astronaut Bill McArthur calls "really high steel." Six years hence they would embark on the first major construction project in orbit, the International Space Station, the central truss of which was delivered and installed last year. But when Thuot and Hieb encountered this giant wobbling barrel in orbit nine years ago, the Space Station was still on the drawing boards, and the idea of building something huge up there was untested. There was no new tincture of Right Stuff to define the hard hat generation of astronauts—that is, until one man stepped up on that mission to pluck the giant black barrel out of orbit, a man now considered the prototype of the modern astronaut, the Chuck Yeager of the new ziggurat. His name is Tom Akers.

Intelsat VI, the giant black cylinder, was the latest in a series of high-flying communications satellites designed to keep the growing global cell-phone culture connected; it could handle 120,000 phone conversations simultaneously. But this link in the global Intelsat system had been floating uselessly in space ever since the second stage of its Titan booster rocket had failed to separate two years earlier. Instead of reaching its assigned slot in the heavens some 22,000 miles up, where it would fly in geosynchronous orbit— that is, hold its position by orbiting at the same speed as the planet's rotation—it was stranded here at a relatively pedestrian 300-mile altitude. Rescuing this garage-size satellite worth the gross national product of a small nation was the practical raison d'etre of this 47th Space Shuttle flight. It would provide the best illustration yet of the shuttle's usefulness. To fail would be more than a humiliation for NASA and the astronauts aboard Endeavour; it would not only suggest the futility of trying to capture and repair satellites, a promising role for future shuttle missions, but also call into question the entire issue of man working in space and hence the Space Station and all further manned space exploration. The future of man in space would not have ground to a halt if the crew failed to snare Intelsat VI, but the error would have presented a setback when NASA had planned on a triumph.

So after the first space walk failed— four tries took three hours and 43 minutes—Thuot and Hieb retreated into the air lock, desuited, huddled electronically with the geeks in Houston and the rest of the shuttle crew, including Akers, and planned a different strategy. The next day they gave it another shot. This time they tried five times, maintaining the space walk for five hours and 30 minutes, and every damn time they touched it, the big black cylinder began to wobble.

Akers watched this frustrating exercise from inside the shuttle. He was a wiry man with a slow Missouri drawl who was, at 40, a few years older than most astronauts. An Air Force colonel and former test pilot, he had a master's degree in applied mathematics, but he had also worked as a park ranger and spent four years as a high school principal in his hometown of Eminence, Missouri. He still loved to teach and planned to return to it when he finished space traveling. But he had another qualification that prior to this mission wasn't seen as anything special. He was a tinkerer, an unreformed grease monkey. Akers' idea of a relaxing weekend was lying under an old car with a wrench in his hand. He had never lost his childhood passion for fixing things, be they cars, TV sets or toaster ovens. Akers had been an astronaut for five years at that point and had already flown on one shuttle flight. Watching the fiasco out the window, he began doing what he did best—sketching out notions, trying to work out a practical solution with the tools at hand.

"It wasn't just me," Akers says, who has retired and gone back to teaching in Missouri. "It was a group effort that included not just the crew members but also the folks on the ground. Bruce Melnick [another mission specialist] is the one who came up with the idea of sending three people out."

If the cylinder could be grabbed simultaneously at three points, it might stop the wobble cold. But this was easier said than done. The mission called for only one astronaut to ride out on the arm to the satellite and connect the control bar. How were three astronauts to do it? Remember, every action in space is choreographed more diligently than at the Bolshoi ballet. It takes a committee to determine the most efficient technique for blowing your nose. Getting NASA to forget years of planning and practice to try something on the spur of the moment was hard enough, but authorizing an impromptu three-man extravehicular activity and figuring out how to deliver out to the Intelsat not just one more astronaut but two was like asking a 500-pound tortoise to do a back flip.

"When we posed the possibility, they didn't like the idea," recalls Akers. "The system was not set up for a three-man EVA."

There were not enough umbilical lines to handle the three astronauts at once. The radio system in the EVA space suits had only two frequencies, complicating communications. Most important, the third astronaut would need a place to stand. It is said that one needs a place to stand in order to move the world; in space, one needs a place to stand to do anything. Only Thuot (continued on page 143)Really High Steel(continued from page 72) and Hieb had been provided with places to restrain their feet. Akers and fellow mission specialist Kathy Thornton had the parts for a truss they planned to assemble on a space walk the following day, so it was proposed that they use that to jerry-build a third platform. If the pilot, Kevin Chilton, could maneuver them close enough to Intelsat, there was a chance.

Houston tried it out overnight in their giant pool—the Weightless Environment Training Facility—then took a deep breath and gave the astronauts the go-ahead. Akers is the one who went out into the cargo buy, sharing an umbilical with Thuot. It took the three about an hour to assemble the new platform and attach foot restraints.

"We had to position ourselves equidistant," Akers recalls. Then the shuttle pilot and commander flew us up to the satellite. Thuot, Hieb and I took up positions around it. And then we just reached up and grabbed hold of it. It was hard to coordinate. The communications system in the EVA space suits was designed for just two people—there are only two frequencies. With three people, two had to be on the same frequency. So we decided we would all transmit on the same frequency. If you tried talking at the same time you would just get a loud squeal. So the way we did it was, Ricky Hieb was the quarterback. He said, 'OK, is everybody ready?' We answered in turn. Then we coordinated the timing on his cue. He said, ' OK, OK, grab!' And it worked."

The Intelsat was repaired and released, and it boosted itself up into orbit. Akers went on to fly two more shuttle missions and to become the second most experienced spacewalker with a total of 29 hours and 40 minutes, a milestone he dismisses with typical self-deprecation: "All that demonstrates is that I'm a slower worker than everyone else." But his colleagues in Houston see it different.

"The Intelsat rescue was the big one," says McArthur, one of the new breed of spacewalkers. "It took place right there on TV with the whole world watching. What Tom brought to that exercise was an inherent cleverness with tools and practical problem-solving. He won't admit it, but that was an Akers save. Ever since, if you ask NASA what they're looking for today, they'll tell you that they're looking for Tom Akers clones."

•

The original seven astronauts possessed what Tom Wolfe had dubbed the Right Stuff, the essence of pure manhood that led them right up the ladder of fighter-jock stardom to the vanguard of the New Frontier. The original seven gave way to an overtrained, cross-disciplined astronaut corps that spent most of its time waiting for a mission, laid out under glass in Houston during the Seventies and Eighties like an exhibit of exotic lepidoptera. These were NASA's superachievers, a second generation of would-be space explorers who had been compiling credentials for astronaut selection for a lifetime, folks with multiple degrees in things like astrophysics, aeronautical engineering and microbiology who were also, as it happen, jet pilots or emergency room physicians (or both!) in their off-hours. In relatively anonymous groups of six and seven, still basking in the afterglow of supreme astronaut status—the days of ticker tape parades and White House ceremonies—these superscouts gradually got their one or two chances to ride the shuttle rockets into orbit, adding to their impressive collections the rarest, most prestigious merit badge of all. Yet when they went shopping, nobody knew who they were.

Today's astronauts are still more obscure. The job no longer carries the luster it had in the past. Three hundred and ninety-seven people have flown in space, from 29 nations. NASA's astronaut corps now numbers 194, and the space agency hires them by the dozens. To the rest of the world they have become interchangeable, the units who make up crews of carefully balanced color, gender and nationality who tinker with obscure experiments in microgravity aboard the space shuttle, which, except for that mishap back in 1986 when NASA blasted that poor New Hampshire schoolteacher to smithereens, has come to appear about as threatening as the redeye from Tokyo to LA. Oddly, as space travel has become safer and more routine, cultural attitudes have evolved in the opposite direction. Thirty years ago it was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that defined our dreams of space exploration, technology pushing man to a higher plane of existence. Today's controlling myth seems to Alien Ridley Scott's vision of space as a menace, or, more recently, Armageddon. The more we learn about space, the more hostile it seems. A growing number of scientists believe, after 40 years of experimentation, that space is far too hostile an environment for human beings, that maintaining safe habitats in zero gravity and interplanetary space is ridiculously expensive and of questionable value, and that it is far less expensive and risky, and far more scientifically worthwhile, to send robotic explorers to distant planets, moons and asteroids.

Resisting this train of thought has become part of corporation culture of NASA. Its newest generation of anonymous astronauts inhabit the sunbaked grounds of the sprawling Johnson Space Center south of Houston like adherents of some futuristic cult. NASA enters the new century as an established if under-funded bureaucracy. Like all bureaucracies, it would be damn hard to kill. It is an industry that employs many thousands all over the country. And just as the rampant sprawl of Houston has absorbed the once-distant Space Center so that it is now just another suburban neighborhood. the space agency has sunk deep roots into American mythology. It is a temple for true believers in technology, for those who see space exploration not just as a giant as a giant science project but as the inevitable unfolding of human destiny. Our ultimate survival requires no just human direction at consoles on the ground, but also human presence in space. Either mankind is destined to perish with the sun in some final supernova a gigabillion years in the future, or we will spread out in the universe, first to the solar system and then beyond, designing, building and maintaining our own habitats. Viewed this way, there is no more important work going on in the 21st century than the exploration of space.

The past 40 years have been primarily an exercise in demonstrating that we can safely slip the bounds of earth and return. Now begins the task of learning how to live and work in space. This new generation hopes to leave as its legacy the International Space Station, a permanent orbiting space campus that looks like a tangled squadron of box kites.

Building the Space Station has elevated the job of mission specialist to the top of the pile. Until now, the primo astronaut job had always been pilot, heir to the macho luster of the fighter pilot. The Space Station has ushered in the EVA era of astronauting, one where the most coveted job in the system is not just riding the rocket but dancing in the void, hanging 10 over the whole wide world.

In October, Brian Duffy, who has logged 978 hours in space, commanded a mission that delivered something called the Z-1 Truss to the seed of the Space Station in orbit. Previously, two modules, the Russian-built Zarya and an American one called Unity, had been shot into orbit, awaiting the all-important crew module, which had been delayed for two years by a lack of money and problems with Russia's Proton booster. That module was delivered last June.

Although the Z-1 Truss was unexciting in itself (it looked like a well-packed trunk), it was first major connector for the Space Station. The truss houses four control moment gyros that will give the final station the mobility and stability necessary for permanent human occupation, which began with the arrival of a Russian and American crew in November.

Five years and billions of dollars and rubles from now, after more than 40 assembly missions have flown and all 100 components are attached, it will be hard to even find the Z-1 Truss embedded in the middle of the complex assembly. But it is the linchpin. The astronauts who spacewalked from the shuttle Discovery to set it in place—Leroy Chiao, Peter Wisoff, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Bill McArthur—are the first of the real hard hats in space.

Spacewalking remains the province of very few. There have been only 93 EVAs by American astronauts. Among the growing club of astronauts, the spacewalkers form a kind of elite. It's the first thing most candidates say when asked what kind of mission they would like to perform in orbit, and only a select few get the assignment. "Everyone who becomes an astronaut candidate is asked to note the kind of things they would eventually like to do, and just about everybody puts down EVA," says McArthur. "When I went for my first evaluation, they saw that I'd written that down and said, 'An EVA? You and everybody else.' " It's one thing to ride a rocket into orbit and watch the earth the earth roll by beneath you from the window of Endeavour, Soyuz or Mir. It's another to EVA, to open the door and step out into the eternal blackness of space to become a self-contained, free-falling human satellite, a celestial body of one.

First, there's the view. Not just mind-blowing, say the astronauts who have seen it, but life-altering, as if expanding the borders of your vision from horizon to horizon nudges consciousness out into regions of gray matter heretofore unused. "It's one thing if you're driving in a car and see a spectacular view, but if you stop and get out and stand there to really experience the view, it's 100 times better," says Chiao. "You experience a visceral response. You're experience a visceral response. You're completely on your own. The whole world is floating by. I remember watching down between my boots as my feet passed over continents."

But enjoying the view and getting any work done are two different things. Even though you are weightless, the bulky space suit has considerable mass, which means you must cope with substantial inertia. It's hard to get moving, and, once moving, hard to stop. The inside of the suit it pressuring like a balloon, so it takes effort to move, even to open and close your hands. At first you don't notice it, but after 15 minutes or so it is painfully wearying. The inside of the suit is not soft—it has bearings, joints, seams and a lot of internal stiffness. The upper torso is a fiberglass shell. After you have battled around inside for a few hours, it is not unusual to accumulate bumps and bruises. Above all, working in space requires breaking down and relearning just about every small action once taken without thought on earth.

"The first thing that I learned about working in space was to conserve hand strength," says Chiao, who has a doctorate in chemical engineering but whose thick neck, torso and arms reveal an equal devotion to the weight room. "You don't use your legs much in a weightless environment, and since you move by pulling yourself around, you are constantly grabbing on to things. Your tendency at first is to grab things tightly, because you hold on tight on earth to support your body weight. But in space you learn to just lightly grasp things, maybe using only one or two fingers. When you use a wrench, you have to hold it tightly for the initial turn, then you can loosen your grip for the remainder of the turns. If you're using a power tool, you learn right away that if the drill end is turning clockwise, then the tool wants to turn counterclockwise. So you learn to make sure that it isn't pushing on the weak side of your hand—your fingers—but into the meaty side of your hand. If you don't do those things, about one hour into the space walk you will find yourself exhausted."

Some astronauts find the experience of climbing out into space so vertiginous that they must fight nausea and terror. There is a corporate code at NASA that discourages discussing the unpleasant aspects of space flight, but more than half of all astronauts vomit upon encountering weightlessness, severe back pain is common as the spine stretches, and bathrooms are "like being in a really bad hotel with facilities you don't want to go near," says astronaut Kenneth Cockrell. Most astronauts are ecstatic about the joys of spacewalking, but former astronaut Jerry Linenger, who spent months aboard Mir in 1997 and who has been more candid than most about his experiences, described feeling an over-whelming sense of falling when he took his first space walk. He felt himself plummeting at 18,000 mph, a sensation nothing like what he felt working for all those months in the weightlessness training pools. "It wasn't just me falling, but everything was falling, which gave an even more unsettling feeling. So it was like you have to overcome 40 years or whatever of like experiences that tell you to let go when everything falls. It was a very strong, almost overwhelming sensation that you just had to control. And I was able to control it, and I was glad I was able to control it. But I could see where it could have put me over the edge."

"Some people aren't very good at coping with a situation where they don't have a lot of control," says Cockrell. "Working in space involves being in an unusual and frightening situation over which you cannot exercise complete control. So many of the things you have to do are counterintuitive, like hanging on when the thing you are grabbing feels like it's falling, or trying to turn a latch and finding yourself spinning in the opposite direction. Things happen in slow motion. You can make a wrong move that sets in motion a huge calamity, and you realize it a moment too late to correct it, so you become an audience, watching yourself fail inexorably in slow motion. You can make a wrong move that sets in motion a huge calamity, and you realize it a moment too late to correct it, so you become an audience, watching yourself fail inexorably in slow motion. You don't hear astronauts complaining about it, but what you do see are people who come back lying about how great the experience was and then quietly leave the program."

NASA is still trying to develop better ways to prepare their hard hats. They use virtual reality to acquaint them with some of the sensations of spacewalking. I tried it out at the Johnson Space Center, donning helmet and gloves and then opening the simulated shuttle hatch to step out into space. Although it still seemed too much like a cartoon version of the real world to feel overpowering, it was dizzying at first. You view the scene through a helmet visor and when you lift your hands or reach you see gloved cyber hands making the same motions in the simulation. As you move along the outside maze of the station, the earth rolls lazily past below. I attempted climbing—or crawling—around the surface of the station by reaching out for one hand-hold after another, quickly got lost and managed to send myself drifting away from the station into the nether regions of cyberspace. The astronauts who train with the device float around the simulation like industrious moths.

Closer to the real thing is the work done in the pool, where the wannabes are separated from those who will be selected from those who will be selected for space walks. Working in this simulated environment is actually somewhat harder physically than working in space, and it takes ingenuity. Many of those eliminated in the pool fall victim to frustration.

"You have to be the kind of person who responds to a difficult small problem not with frustration but with delight," says McArthur. "It just defines a certain kind of personality, and the pool makes it clear pretty fast who qualifies and who doesn't."

True EVAers learn to love the pool. They spend 10 hours training for every one hour they will spend walking in space.

"Inside the space suit you feel a lot like the Michelin Man," says Cockrell. "They put weights on you underwater so you neither float nor descend, and you just run through every task you will have to do in space. And that's where they really evaluate you as a spacewalker."

"When you're upside down in the pool, the blood flows to your head, and then when you're upright, you have the weight of the suit hanging on your shoulders," says astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who worked with Chiao to attach the Z-1 Truss. Lopez-Alegria had flown in space but had never done an EVA.

"Some of the tools we have for doing the work in space are very heavy here on earth, even in the pool," he says. "So in that sense it's not realistic training. When you've been in the pool for four or five hours, it can be exhausting. I've been working with a strength coach two hours a day, three times a week, but I think I need the workouts more for the training sessions in the pool than I will for working in space. I'm going to reserve judgment about whether all the gym work is necessary."

NASA has designed special tools for the construction work. All the bolts on the Space Station are the same, with seven-sixteenths of an inch heads that make it easier for a floating astronaut to grip with the Pistol Grip Tool, which resembles an overgrown cordless drill on steroids. The PGT's specialty is that it can count the number of turns needed to secure or loosen a bolt, which prevents overtightening and saves labor. The spacewalkers carried swiveling socket extensions for the PGT, a manual ratchet wrench capable of 100 foot-pounds of torque, other adjustable wrenches, a crowbar, vise grips, scissors and a dead-blow hammer with a pocket of shot in the head to absorb recoil. Because normal steel turns brittle in the –200°F to –250°F cold of space, the tools are all made of beryllium copper.

"You have to be pretty vigilant with the tools," says McArthur. "A lot of instinctive good habits you develop working on earth don't serve you well in space. For instance, you tend to focus you concentration on the work site. You use a tool and then you set it down next to you without taking you eyes from the work site. If you do that in space, when you reach back down for that too, it's gone. It can easily drift away from you. So not only have you contributed to the problem of space debris, you might also have just lost a tool essential for finishing the job—and you can't run to the hardware store for a replacement. Some of the tools are on retractable tethers, so you have to learn tether discipline. When you are moving you are constantly attaching and releasing tethers, so you have to learn tether discipline. When you are moving you are constantly attaching and releasing tethers. And the most important thing to tether is, of course, yourself"

So far, neither the Russian nor American space program has lost a spacewalker. In December 1977, cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko nearly became a permanent satellite when he lost his balance at the hatch of Salyut 6 and floated helplessly off, flailing his arms in a futile effort to swim back. His tether was loose and trailing behind him, but fortunately his fellow cosmonaut was able to grab it and reel him back in. All it takes is for a bolt to break, or for a spacewalker to lose focus and make a series of bad moves. The Space Station will have a small rescue vehicle in that event, but the prospect of drifting away alone with enough oxygen in your suit to allow for extended contemplation of your fate is enough to haunt the dreams of astronauts and would-be spacewalkers everywhere. At least the view would be spectacular.

"You begin preparing for a space walk the night before," says Peter Wisoff, who did a space walk in 1993 that lasted nearly six hours, and who went out again to help attach the Z-1 Truss. "You get as far ahead as you can, getting you suit and tools ready. You wake up, grab some food quickly, put your electrodes on, strap on your diaper and then the liquid cooling undergarment, and then start to pull on the main suit. At this point it's like a circus on the flight deck with everyone floating around, helping you get ready. Once you have the lower portion of the suit on you go into the air lock, a small cylindrical closet, where a hatch closes behind you. You shimmy into the upper half of the suit. Then you wait for about an hour, breathing pure oxygen to get all of the nitrogen out of your blood. You go through suit checks and tether checks and then open the air lock. Then, when you step out, the first sensations are quite fun. You take a second to absorb the view. On my first space walk it was nighttime when I stepped out, and I could see light from cities below. It's amazing how quickly your brain just decides on direction is up and the other is down, even though it makes absolutely no difference. You start off by moving real slow. You don't weigh anything but you still have inertia, so you don't want to get moving to fast. When you go past the shuttle windows you see everybody watching you from inside. You hear the airflow in your helmet, fan noises blowing air into your suit, and you hear your own breathing. And the first thing you notice are the differences between space and being in the pool. Water has viscosity, so it tends to stabilize you. Space doesn't. In space you are always slowly drifting somewhere."

No matter how absorbing the work, "you never stop being amazed by where you are," says Wisoff. "On my space walk I remember looking out as we passed over the Western U.S I could see all the way from southern California to Salt Lake City. I remember looking down and noting landmarks like the Amazon, Hawaii, the Galápagos Islands and Australia, and being affected by the historical impact. Looking down on the Strait of Gibraltar, where ancient ships took their first hesitant voyages out of the Mediterranean, and thinking, From up here, it's no bigger than my thumb."

Perhaps most important, when you're out there alone in the whirl of the universe, walking the really high steel, you are conducting a command performance. Not since the earliest days of the space program has the success and failure of an entire mission rested so squarely on one or two people—or three in the case of Akers, Thuot and Hieb and the Intelsat rescue. The EVAers are an elite within the elite, a special corps, and when the moment arrives, it's like the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl or NBA championships, bottom of the ninth in the World Series. It's money time. Your fellow crew members will have their noses to the shuttle windows, knowing your performance on the space walk will likely define the success or failure of their mission. Back on the ground maybe the rest of the world doesn't care that much anymore, but the whole hierarchy of NASA will be glued to their giant TV screens, the folks who selected you for this mission, who trained you for it and who will be making selections in the future.

"You do feel pressure while you're out there," says Bill McArthur. "You feel like the whole world is watching you. You know that everybody at mission control is watching you. When an EVA starts, just about everything else stops and focuses on you. For those hours when you're out there the mission is on your shoulders, and you don't want to mess up. Your peers, colleagues and fellow professionals are all watching you. You are under a microscope. The pressure is to be professional."

To demonstrate the Right Stuff.

Like all bureaucracies, NASA would be damn hard to kill. A temple for true believers in technology, it has sunk deep roots into American mythology."

First, there's the view. Not just mind-blowing, say the astronauts who have done it, but life-altering.