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.