Aug 31 1985
From The Space Library
During Space Shuttle mission 51-I astronauts James Van Hoften and William Fisher spent seven hours and eight minutes, a new record for a spacewalk, in the first stage of repair of the Leasat 3 satellite, the Washington Post reported. During the walk, they retrieved the 15,000-Ib. satellite, fastened Discovery's mechanical arm onto it, disarmed its Minuteman rocket motor, and exposed its electronic connections. Later Fisher said he could see no evidence of what caused the satellite to go dead after astronauts deployed it in April. “There is no evidence of debris on anything that would cause a problem. It's clean as a whistle,” He said.
Van Hoften and Fisher were outside the Space Shuttle from about 8:00 a.m. to shortly after 3:00 p.m. EDT, breaking by one minute the spacewalk record set April 1984 by van Hoften and George Nelson when they repaired the scientific satellite Solar Max.
Although the astronauts accomplished more than half of what was needed in the salvage mission, they were planning a four-hour spacewalk on September 1 to finish the job. They would put a “space blanket” over the engine bell that served as the Minuteman motor's rocket nozzle to trap more of the sun's heat to warm it, because Leasat-3 had been in the cold of space so long that its rocket motor was too cold to fire correctly. Then the astronauts would install a vertical bar along the 20-foot length of the satellite to serve as a handle for van Hoften to spin the satellite and push it away from Discovery into space.
It would then be seven days before the satellite acquired enough power to thaw its liquid-fuel tanks and almost two months before the solid-fuel rocket motor was warm enough for ground controllers to command it to ignite. (W Post, Sept 1/85, A5)
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