Space Walk
Thanks to a link from Mal, I managed to watch the tail end of last night’s space walk by cosmonauts Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri streamed live on NASA-TV. It was a mission made riskier by the fact that the space walk left the ISS crewless; usually there’s someone in the station to oversee the space walk to make sure everything’s going OK (think Bowman and Poole in 2001 
. This served to give the experience of watching the event live a bit of an edge; a feeling compounded when the cooling system on Kaleri’s suit malfunctioned and he started to overheat, forcing the mission to be cut short.
While the crew weren’t in any real danger, watching the mission live made palpable the inherent risk of space travel and this is something you don’t experience when you read about such missions after the event.
3:19 pm on 27 February 2004 :::
Mal Says:Damn – wish I\’d watched it all now. I left it at a point where the station went out of range of the relay station (or something like that) and the video had to just cut back to mission control. Still, I loved the fact I could watch something like that totally unedited.
3:21 pm on 27 February 2004 :::
Mal Says:One other thing – don\’t you find it bizarre that space suits have a *cooling* system? As if it\’s not cold enough out there already!
3:36 pm on 27 February 2004 :::
Matt Says:Yeah, bit of a weird one that, so I looked up a bit more about it: \”Is Space Hot or Cold?\”:http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad5.html