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November 19, 2008
I left it right there!
Astronaut Jim Reilly STS-117 mission, originally uploaded by Antoon's Foobar.
High above us in Earth orbit, some NASA astronauts are hard at work on the space station. The space station is basically a home in space, and like any home it occasionally needs repairs. One astronaut was doing some work on the station's exterior, when her bag full of tools floated away. Oops:
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper said in an interview with The Associated Press that it was "very disheartening" to lose her bag full of tools. She was trying to clean up grease that had oozed out of a grease gun in the backpack-size bag, when the tote and everything in it floated away Tuesday.
The bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalking astronaut.
For a split second, she thought she might be able to grab it and she tried to judge how far away it was. Just as quickly, "I thought, no, that would probably just make things worse and the best thing to do would be to just let it go."
"There's still the psychological thing of knowing that we made a mistake and having to live through that," she said. "During the spacewalk ... it was easy to put it aside because I knew that we still had five hours of spacewalk work to do and the work needed to get done and you can't dwell on a mistake. It was hardest coming back in and having to face everybody else."
She noted there were three more spacewalks and promised not to let the mistake happen again.
Ah man, I know this feeling exactly. I'll be working on something, and I'll put down whatever it was I was using - a pencil, a hammer, a pair of pliers, and the like. When I go to retrieve it, it's disappeared. Where did it go? Beats me, but it's gone!
The process then goes something like this: I scour the entire room for it, until I give up and start watching Youtube. Then I find the missing item in my couch, two weeks later. I never finish what I was going to do.
If you're an astronaut, at least you have a partial excuse. No wonder I can't find it! There's no gravity! It floated away! Geez I'm stupid! Then they get even more frustrated because they can't figure out how to work the astronaut toilet.
entry no. 1243
Posted at November 19, 2008 05:45 PM