Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Breaking: CU not completely useless, evil

AP:

Two astronauts floated outside the international space station Wednesday to help fold up a solar wing and bring to life a rotating joint that will allow a new pair of solar arrays to track the sun.

Space shuttle Atlantis astronauts Patrick Forrester and Steve Swanson - a University of Colorado graduate - spent the first two hours of their scheduled 6 1/2-hour spacewalk helping to put the 115-foot solar wing away in its storage box.

Now there's the possibility of some sewing to do to repair the shuttle's "loose" thermal bankie, and, tragically, there is no woman aboard.

Rimshot. Actually, it sounds like the "we've got to make this fit into this, using only this" scene from Apollo 13:
The astronauts will secure the blanket using staples found in the shuttle's medical kit and pins that come from the shuttle's tile repair kit. If those methods don't work, NASA flight controllers will have the astronauts sew it into place using a stainless steel wire and an instrument that resembles a small needle.
There's also the possibility of a strike at the Kennedy Space Center. Too bad it wasn't the Houston Space Center, because then I could have done a very obvious joke:

"Houston, we have a problem. Houston? Houston?"

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