Hello. I'm astronaut Steve Robinson. Welcome to NASA Direct.
Music.
Six. Five. Three engines up and burning. Three. Two. One, and liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery,
beginning America's new journey to the moon, Mars and beyond. And the vehicle has cleared the tower.
I've flown on three space shuttle missions and, coincidentally, they've all been on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
The most recent Discovery flight was NASA's return-to-flight mission to the International Space Station in July of 2005.
During that mission, I completed three spacewalks along with my partner, Soichi Noguchi from Japan,
and on one of those spacewalks, we performed an unplanned repair to the shuttle Discovery's heat shield.
OK. I'm grasping it and I'm pulling. It's coming out very easily.
Soichi was out on the space station truss, kind of being my safety eyes.
He was watching me and making sure that...he's the only person that could actually see me. Everybody else was just with cameras.
But it was, it was exciting because nobody had done this before and we hadn't trained to do it either.
So we really had our thinking caps on and we were trying to, trying to do absolutely everything right and very, very carefully.
And it wasn't just us. It was Wendy and Jim Kelly were operating the robot arm,
and Andy was helping us out. A great big team of engineers on the ground were helping us out.
So it felt like a kind of like in a baseball team where everybody's trying to go for the, go for the score,
and it was, it went well and we were happy to do it and we felt very lucky.
Well, in training, when you first get, are getting used to being inside a spacesuit,
you find out that things sort of maybe itch or are uncomfortable and you can't get to them for six hours.
And you learn to deal with that. And after that, it's just hard work. You know, it's like going to the gym all day
long and doing a test term and at the same time a whole day. But you know, like anything that way, it's like playing sports.
The things that are difficult and tiring are the biggest challenge and the most satisfying when you're done.
Well, we train mostly underwater, and underwater you can be neutrally buoyant,
which means you don't either sink or float...at least, your suit can, but not you.
And if you go upside down when you're under water, you definitely feel like you're upside down.
And in space, of course, there is no upside down, because you're in the zero-gravity environment.
So, it's, it's different how you move, and it's very different once you see.
And, and you're almost glad of that; you don't want to be, the real thing to be just like training because
you're very used to training and you want it to be very new and exciting. And it sure was.
Whenever you're in space and you're orbiting, say, the Earth, you're in a freefall all the time,
but you don't hit the ground because you're going forward so much.
But you don't really feel that because there's no real forces on your body. And you hear the fan noise inside your suit,
there's a little air circulation fan, but what you see is the big thing. You can see, you know, you feel like you can see the whole universe,
the horizon of the Earth, the space shuttle, the space station...it's a fantastic sight to take in.
I would say at the very end of my last spacewalk, we flew right over my hometown and I was outside in the payload bay of the shuttle.
And I looked up and there goes California, and I could see Sacramento, California.
I could see actually where I was born. It was a very, very striking and emotional moment.
Well, anybody who's an astronaut knows that they're very, very fortunate to, to have that job.
And if you get to fly into space at all, you're really lucky. You're a lucky human being. And if you get to go outside,
you feel like one of the most fortunate human beings that's ever been born. You really do.
It's a fabulous experience and we're all feel lucky to have it.