Astronaut to Attempt Spacewalk Record

MattSparkes writes "Two residents of the International Space Station will take a spacewalk tomorrow to try to jam a stuck antenna on a docked cargo ship back into place. The spacewalk will set a US record of over 65 hours spacewalk experience. During the spacewalk, the astronauts will "use a hammer and a chisel to try to pound the antenna into place". Precision engineering at its very best I'm sure you'll agree."

A Hammer?

They're going to use a Hammer and a Chisel... I thought these pieces of equipment were highly delicate...

Apparantly they're more like IBM computers...

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well, at least it is not a hammer and a sickle, now that the MIR has gone the way of the dodo...

besides, it would be unamerican.

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Well they cant be that delicate being in space where objects could hit them at hundreds of miles per hour. A persision hammer strike is probably nothing to it. (perhaps just enough to put the chizle in place.)

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They're going to use a Hammer and a Chisel... I thought these pieces of equipment were highly delicate...

From what I understood of TFA, they're simply trying to get the antenna back into place before they can destroy the whole cargo ship by letting it b

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From what I understood of TFA, they're simply trying to get the antenna back into place before they can destroy the whole cargo ship by letting it burn in the atmosphere.

does anyone else think it odd that an antenna must be put back in place so it can burn up in the atmosphere? Reminds me about the guy on death row in California that got a heart transplant. Except at least I can see the astronauts wanting to get the "mo

Houston...

...we need a bigger hammer!

Please...

It's not a hammer.
It's a highly specialized kinetic-energy inertial impartion implement.

After all, it cost far more than a mere hammer...

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Of course it costs more! It has to be radiation hardened! *groan*

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Of course it costs more! It has to be radiation hardened! *groan*


Not to mention the Inertialess Tethering Point and Coupling (ie a hole drilled in the handle and a bit of string, to tie it to the suit) and the Point Acceleration Minim

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Can you really use a standard hammer in outer space? Won't our poor astronauts be flung back, courtesy of Newton Airlines?
the hammer is a much smaller mas than the astronout but yes hitting something will push them away and they will need to have some way

Re:Please...

I know you are joking, but try to use a dead blow hammer sometime. its kind of creepy to have the hammer just sort of die on impact. It wouldn't surprise me if they were using dead blows for this job to minimize the bounceback.

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After all, it cost far more than a mere hammer...

Of course it did - it's ambidextrous! Can't be sending left-handed hammers into space with right-handed astronauts...

It better have cost more!

When you're paying about $20,000 to lift that hammer into orbit, I sure as hell hope that they'll splurge, instead of going for the $5 Walmart model. Ditto for their food. When each meal costs that much to lift to orbit, they may as well eat caviar, lobs

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This just reinforces an old mechanical engineering maxim:

      "If you have a large enough hammer, anything can be made to fit."

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exactly.

That's how I got the CB antenna onto my 4X4! The inner fender had a funky little jog that prevented me from closing the hood if I just used a right angle mounting bracket.

All these comments about using a hammer on a space station makes me wonder h

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me wonder how many people here (obviously not everyone) have ever worked on a car or anything

Been there, done that. The hammer is the easy bit. Especially if you have the right variety and size. Now, filling it, sanding it, painting it and polishing it a

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...we need a porta-potty. oh...wait...

Bah!

64 hours should be enough for anyone.

Get back to me when he does 65 hours in a week...

THAT's an amount of work worth mentioning.

It's the Chisel part...

I can understand the practical applications of, and use for, packing a hammer aboard a space cargo flight, but i can't for the life of me imagine what they would do with a chisel?.. maybe they hid it inside of a cake?

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Dang it! We need to switch delivery companies! First they sent chainsaws to Mars, now chisels to the ISS.

Just A Hammer and Chisel?

Did they forget about the BB gun, pepper spray, 6" knife and rubber tubing? Oh... Wrong astronaut...

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I knew that would be brought up eventually!

What was that saying?

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Imagine spending 65 hours playing whack-a-mole.

Re:What was that saying?

The hammer in my house is helpfully labelled "Emergency Repair Procedure #1" in sharpie on the handle.

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Not just whack-a-mole, but whack-a-mole in microgravity.

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haha, if I hadn't posted in here already this would've got a +1 funny. I get this picture of an eager astronaut waiting for the mole to appear, hitting it and flying away into orbit shouting "damn you Newton!"

Replace Alpha Echo 35 unit prior to failure

Stuck Antenna? It's not the AE-35 unit that's failed, by any chance?

Spacewalk record? I'm unimpressed.

Now if he was breaking the moonwalking record, that'd be more newsworthy.

Stop.

Hammer Time.

A US record? Yawn

Oh, a record for US astronaut spacewalks? Yawn. That Russian has 80+, you know? US triumphs are not so special as to be noteworthy compared to the superior exploits of other nations. This mind-set isn't new - I recall learning about the space race in grade school and god help you if you remembered who Yuri Gagarin was but forgot that first American guy in space, whoever he was.

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This mind-set isn't new - I recall learning about the space race in grade school and god help you if you remembered who Yuri Gagarin was but forgot that first American guy in space, whoever he was.

Of course. Because he went on to other things. His name was

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US triumphs are not so special as to be noteworthy compared to the superior exploits of other nations.

Oh yeah? Well at least we knew to bring a chisel instead of a sickle!

Re:A US record? Yawn

Yes, because PR has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the continuance of manned spaceflight.

You're right, the mind-set isn't new, sports records are also kept by country. In my high school, we even had state and local records! But God forbid that anyone else than America be chastised for it. I'm sure that my principal should have looked up the times of that Kenyan fellow who was faster than any of our track team.

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Of course the Russians had more space walk experience. They had to keep in shape because there was always a pretty good chance they were going to have to walk home from the Mir.

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The next person to pull that one out is going to be taking a space-walk of their own.

Sans the suit.

Life immitating Art. ( Armageddon (1998))

When the Russian cosmonaught takes a hammer to the fuel systems saying "this is how we fix things in Russia". Or something to that effect.

I know that hammer part SOUNDS funny..

But you need to read up on the reality of fixing things to, from and on orbit and beyond - and the engineering that goes into a lot of it. Chariots for Apollo comes to mind, most of what happened on certain Gemini flights, lots of Skylab, and the ups and

Hammer Time

If it doesn't work, hit it with a Hammer.
If you break it, it didn't work anyway.
(usually as applied to delicate electronic equipment)

Alan Bean, Is that you?

Sounds like the technique used to try repairing the TV camera on Apollo 12.

Unfortunately, "percussive maintenance" was no match for a vidicon tube that got aimed into the sun...

Hammer and chisel...

We call that "percussive maintenance" (i.e. hit computer to fix).

well...

if anyone actually RTFA, you'd know that the ship with the faulty antenna is a trash barge that's going to burn up in the atmosphere as soon as they can hammer the antenna out of the way, or cut it off. i'm sure they wouldn't try to fix the ISS's communications antennae with a hammer and chisel.

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Bravo. I'm glad someone finally said something sensible in this discussion. I'm tired of all of the backseat-astronauts who don't know anything about the mission but go on and on about the million dollar space hammer or how the mission would have been bett

Not what it sounds like

It's not a continuous spacewalk record. And it's also not an accumulative spacewalk record. From the article:

Lopez-Alegria has already spent more than 61 hours spacewalking during his astronaut career. This spacewalk, his 10th, should add about six more hours to his total - making him the US astronaut with the most spacewalks performed and the most total time spent walking in space. Only Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyov has spent more time outside the hatch, racking up 82 hours of spacewalking time.

Like the old saying goes

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Or some such.

Related metalworking question-

I'm not a metalworker, so I'll ask a stupid question here...

If you're chiselling a piece of metal, aren't pieces of the metal going to flake off? I'm just thinking of the orbiting debris issue - would the specks be too small to worry about?

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That depends on how you use the chisel.

If you use it to flake bits of metal off, then yes, there will be flakes. But chances are, they're just going to use the chisel as an impromtu guillotine to cut through the antenna legs. Chiselling away at them would

Over kill

The chisel is over kill. You only need to tools in aerospace. A hammer and a roll of duct tape. If it moves and it isn't supposed to use the duct tape, if it doesn't move and is supposed to use the hammer.

It's a trap!

Whoa there, Dave, hold on a minute!

I once read about an American astronaut going outside his spacecraft to fix an antenna alignment problem, something happened and he didn't come back in again. I seem to recall some other stuff happened, too. I think they

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We all know that [t]hey wear diapers.

How do they dispose of the diapers afterwards? Do they send them out the airlock?