Posted
on June 3, 2014
One
of the big deals that most astronauts seem to want to do – and that
some of them get to do – is to do a spacewalk.
That
means putting on their bulky, cumbersome pressure suits, going
through the hatch, and being outside of their spaceships.
It
means becoming tiny little satellites in orbit around the Earth,
separated from the gorgeous blue-and-white planet and blazing
sunlight and incredible spangled sky by nothing more than the
gold-plated visors on their helmets!
The
first human to do an EVA (extra-vehicular activity) was a Soviet
cosmonaut named Alexei Leonov, who accomplished his spacewalk on
March 18, 1965. On this date in 1965, astronaut Ed White became the
first American to do an EVA.
White
and his crewmate James McDivitt both had to put on pressure suits,
because their Gemini capsule did not have an airlock. They had to
depressurize the entire spacecraft. Then White tried to open the
hatch, but the latch was stuck.
McDivitt
had seen that this kind of latch had failed to open in a vacuum
chamber test on Earth, so he was able to help White get the latch to
work and the hatch to open. Then White used a hand-held oxygen-jet
gun (also called a zip gun) to maneuver out of the capsule. The first
sight that met his eyes was the state of Hawaii serenely floating in
the Pacific Ocean.
White
was float about 5 meters (15 feet) away from the capsule, where he
began to learnto maneuver. He found it easy to learn how to use the
zip gun to move, but it ran out of O-2 all too soon.
One
of the problems during the spacewalk was that the voice-operated
switch (VOX) on their helmets didn't work, and White couldn't hear
the people at Mission Control with either VOX or the Push-to-Talk
mode. (The guys at Mission Control could hear everything that the
astronauts were saying, though.) The guys on the ground were getting
frustrated – the CAPCOM had tried to reach the astronauts at least
40 times without a reply – and they really wanted to get the
astronauts safely in before the sun disappeared behind the Earth.
Finally McDivitt did the Push-to-Talk thing and found out that
Mission Control really wanted White back in the spaceship. White
asked to take a few more pictures, but McDivitt coaxed him to come
back immediately. Since his zip gun no longer worked, McDivitt pulled
himself back to the hatch using the 8-meter tether.
Here
is the most dangerous part of the EVA – the hatch wouldn't re-latch
again. If they couldn't solve the problem, both men would have died
as the Gemini capsule returned to Earth. Once again, McDivitt had to
fiddle and twiddle, and he was finally able to help White securely
close the hatch.
White had spent about 23 minutes out in space. When he had to come back in, he said, “It's the saddest moment of my life.”
White had spent about 23 minutes out in space. When he had to come back in, he said, “It's the saddest moment of my life.”
Here
is a great National Geographic video about
spacewalks!
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