When two astronauts on the International Space Station were able to lock down a bolt that had jammed during a previous spacewalk, astronaut Jack Fisher at Mission Control in Houston got cinematic. "It's been like living on the set of Apollo 13 the past few days. NASA does impossible pretty darn well, so congratulations to the whole team," he told the spacewalking astronauts.
I found that quote in the story by Space.com's Denise Chow, who reported that "mission managers, engineers and veteran spacewalkers worked around the clock at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to devise ways to fix the stuck bolt." It was a nice bit of drama, and it made the story come alive.
The AP story by Marcia Dunn had the same quote, and the same drama; it's not easy to come up with original stuff when everybody gets the same NASA feed.
Irene Klotz of Reuters didn't have the quote in this version of the story, and she seemed to differ slightly from the other reports. She writes that astronauts "cleaned, greased, and finally coaxed a jammed bolt into position" to make the repair, which was necessary to restore full power to the station. The other stories seemed to say that the astronauts had lubricated a spare bolt, not the primary bolt that was used to make the repair.
Amy Hubbard at The Los Angeles Times missed the Apollo 13 quote, but I forgive her, because she linked to a blog post by Sunita Williams, a NASA astronaut who was one of the two spacewalkers who made the repair.
"You don't just go outside," Williams said at the beginning of her post. The days leading up the space walk, she wrote,
are the intense days with battery charging, METOX (CO2 removal cartridge) regenerations, suit sizing, tool gathering and preparation, equipment gathering and preparations, studying new procedures, reviewing and talking through how to get us suited and how to get the airlock depressed, reviewing the tasks we will do with each other and with the robotic arm, talking about cleaning up, and then talking thru a plan to get back into the airlock, and any emergencies that can come up – loss of communications, suit issues, etc.
That's a perspective you won't find in any of the other copy. Mark this one down as recommended reading for the weekend. Better yet, stop and read it right now.
-Paul Raeburn
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