Late Night with Garrett Reisman

May 09, 2008

Space station flight engineer Garrett Reisman kibitzes with Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert during a video linkup on Thursday.

The million-dollar cufflinks

November 02, 2007

It’s a plot more suited to “This Old House” than “Star Trek,” but the drama unfolding in low-Earth orbit this week is indeed what space exploration is all about in the early 21st century.

For the past three days, astronauts on the space shuttle and aboard the space station have been fashioning homemade braces to fix a tear on a solar wing panel. NASA has been calling the aluminum, tape and wire harnesses these highly educated engineers and scientists have been making “cuff links” since they’re intended to be threaded through holes in the ripped array like cuff links passing through buttonholes.

Designing the spacewalk to reach the damaged wing has been a monstrous undertaking, consuming the time of dozens of NASA engineers and contractors who have been working around-the-clock since Tuesday to figure out a way to safely send a spacewalker to the outer reaches of the station’s farthest wing panel.

The wing is electrically charged as well, with no way to turn off the juice since its automatically generating power whenever the sun shines. The monumental effort is now the total focus of the ongoing shuttle mission and a critical step for its continued expansion.

Never mind that no one really knows what the value of the space station will be, research-wise. The best rationale NASA comes up with is that it’s good to work on tough problems and spaceflight presents a never-ending number of challenges.

Still, there’s something very staid about watching astronauts sitting (or what passes for sitting in weightlessness) cross-legged aboard their spaceship, with a pair of scisors tethered nearby, cutting strips of aluminum and taping them together like kindergarteners in arts-and-crafts class.

Wonder if Scotty ever had to do stuff like this off-camera.