![]() ![]() My tool was moving, but the screw was not. There was one screw on the bottom right, and that came out easily. There were two screws on the top, and they came out easily. The first thing I had to do was to remove from the telescope a handrail that was blocking the access panel. ![]() I took my time, and I got through the treacherous path to the telescope. I knew they would get me back I just wasn’t sure what they would get back on the end of the tether when they reeled me in. I knew I had a safety tether that would probably hold, but I also had a heart that I wasn’t so sure about. And when there’s no gravity, you could go spinning off into space. If you look over the edge of the shuttle, it’s like looking over a cliff, with 560 kilometres to go down to the planet. The thing I was most worried about when leaving the air lock that day was my path to get to the telescope, because it was along the side of the space shuttle. Now was the day to go out and do this task. They built us our own practice instrument and gave us our own set of tools so we could practice in our office, in our free time, during lunch, after work, on the weekends. Inside was Drew Feustel, one of my best friends. I was gonna be the guy actually doing the repair. And my buddy Mike Good (whom we call Bueno) – he and I were gonna do this space walk. We designed over 100 new space tools to be used – at great taxpayers’ expense, millions of dollars thousands of people worked on this. And for five years, we designed a space walk. This access panel had 117 small screws with washers, and just to play it safe, they had put glue on the screw threads so they would never come apart.īut we really wanted the Hubble’s capability back, so we started working. There was no way really to replace this unit or to repair the instrument, because when they launched this thing, it was sealed up with an access panel that blocked the power supply that had failed. The power supply on this instrument had failed, so it could no longer be used. Planets in other solar systems could be analysed using this spectrograph to see if we might find one that was Earth-like or could support life. Scientists used this instrument to detect the atmospheres of far-off planets. And our task that day was to repair an instrument called a spectrograph that had failed. Thirteen years after that, I’m on the space shuttle Atlantis, about to do a space walk on the Hubble Space Telescope. You’re gonna have to tell me.”Īnd Leestma said, “Well, I think you’re gonna be pretty good after this phone call ’cause we wanna make you an astronaut.” And on April 22, 1996, I picked up the phone, and it was Dave Leestma, the head of flight-crew operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. So I applied a third time, and this time I got an interview, so they got to know who I was. They sent me back pretty much the same letter. So I waited a couple of years, and I sent in another application. I filled out my application, and I received a letter that said they weren’t quite interested. While I was at MIT, I applied to NASA to become an astronaut. So I was lucky enough to get accepted to MIT. I wanted to be part of an organisation like that.Īnd it rekindled a boyhood dream that had become dormant over the years. And secondly, the camaraderie among the original seven astronauts depicted in that movie – how they were good friends, how they stuck up for one another, how they would never let one another down. The first was the view out the window of John Glenn’s spaceship – the view of Earth, how beautiful it was on the big screen. And a couple of things really struck me in that movie. ![]() Ray Lewis emerged from tiny Lakeland, Florida to become one of the National Football League’s (NFL) mos… C S Lewis, Lewis, C.S.In 1984, I went to see the movie The Right Stuff. Infuriating and erratic, but brilliantly creative, the Canadian-born British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an always… Ray Lewis, Lewis, Ray 1975– The English novelist and playwright Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), known as Monk Lewis, a popular wri… Wyndham Lewis, Lewis, Wyndham arabesque, burlesque, Dantesque, desk, grotesque, humore… Matthew Gregory Lewis, Matthew Gregory Lewis.ask, bask, cask, flask, Krasnoyarsk, mask, masque, task.Language, Linguistics, and Literary Terms, dark often used figuratively to mean unenlightened or ominous.ĭark Ages the period in western Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the hi… Dusk, dusk ![]()
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