Spacewalker Expected Work Would Have Him "Freaking Out"

Anchored to the end of a 57.5-foot Canadian robot arm, spacewalker Garrett Reisman is hauling a six-foot-wide dish toward a stowage spot high above the core of the International Space Station and visiting shuttle Atlantis.

Reisman and spacewalking partner Stephen Bowen will bolt the dish down on top of an antenna boom that already has been put in place on the Z1 truss, which juts up perpendicularly from the U.S. Unity module. The spot affords a panoramic view of the station and the Earth below, and Reisman has been looking forward to the otherworldly work place.

"The dish is six feet in diameter, so it’s an enormous dish. And my job is actually to go out on the tip of the robot arm, out during the spacewalk, grab the boom first and then while I hold onto the boom they fly me up to the top of the space station," Reisman said in a preflight interview.

"Then Steve and I will plant that thing like a flag in the very, very top and then I go back and get the dish and we put the dish on top of the boom. And that’s going to be crazy because I’m going to be flying back and forth. At one point, the robot arm comes straight up on the top of the space station," he said.

"I’m going to be sticking way up there on the tip. I’ve seen pictures of that thing. It looks kind of scary but also looks really amazing. I’m bringing a camera so I want to take some good shots so I can come back and show you what that was like. I’m going to be freaking out again I’m pretty sure."

Reisman and Bowen remain pretty much on schedule despite computer crash that stalled work outside the station earlier in the spacewalk. They got off to an early start at 7:54 a.m., about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. That's about the same amount of time it took to recover from the computer crash.