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Pat Duggins
Pat Duggins
Senior News Analyst
pduggins@wmfe.org


 

SPACEWALK #1—A talk with Astronaut Hans Schlegel

 

February 11, 2008— European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel went to space to help deliver ESA’s Columbus Science lab. Now he’s the story. An undefined health issue forced mission managers to pull Schlegl from the first spacewalk, and to postpone that venture outside of the Shuttle and Station until Monday. Astronaut Stanley Love will step in for Schlegel to help veteran spacewalker Rex Walheim to outfit Columbus for installation. One loss is the symbolism of having a European astronaut help outfit and attach Europe’s biggest contribution to the orbiting outpost.

 

Hans Schlegel’s presence on the mission is also a blast from the past for me. How long have been I been covering the “space beat”? Well, look at it this way, I covered Schlegel’s first shuttle mission, aboard Columbia in 1993. It was the second flight of the German Spacelab program, called D-2. He and fellow German Ulrich Walter joined Shuttle crewmembers like Jerry Ross, who would set the record for the number of Shuttle missions, Charlie Precourt, who would later make three trips to the Russian Space Station Mir, and Bernard Harris who would go onto to become the first African American to perform a spacewalk.  Their crew mission patch is pictured here. You have to squint hard, but the design includes stars for each of the astronaut’s children.

 

Since Atlantis’ current mission to the International Space Station is only Schlegel’s second spaceflight, I asked what he did with fifteen years of “down time”?  Schlegl says he trained to fly a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and learned the Russian language in the process. “I learned a lot about myself, and my preconceptions of Russia,” he says. He’ll perform two spacewalks on the Atlantis flight to help hook up power and data cables on the new ten ton Columbus laboratory. His Shuttle crewmate, Leopold Eyharts of France, will remain on the space station to operate the new lab during a six week abbreviated mission in orbit.

 

Many thanks to everyone who tuned in for the three re-airings of my talk about “Final Countdown” on C-SPAN’s BookTV. If you’d like to get a copy, they’re available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, or Scientific American’s book club has an introductory offer for new members. The link for that is at…

 

http://www.sciambookclub.com/doc/full_site_enrollment/detail/fse_product_detail.jhtml?repositoryId=903808B450

 

 

More to come…

 

 

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