Live in orbit The third and final spacewalk of shuttle Discovery's mission is in the books. Inside the International Space Station's Quest airlock, Danny Olivas and Fuglesang have plugged back into station power and communications lines, officially ending a spacewalk that lasted one minute past seven hours. That brings the mission's total space-walking time to 20 hours and 15 minutes. All three space-walks achieved their major goals, though today's ended with a bit of frustration. During the first spacewalk, on Tuesday, Olivas and station flight director Nicole Stott removed an old ammonia coolant tank and recovered two sets of experiments from the Columbus lab. Two days later, Olivas and Fuglesang paired up for the first time to install a new ammonia tank and return the old one to Discovery's payload bay. Today, Olivas and Fuglesang deployed an attachment mechanism for a spare parts carrier, replaced a circuit breaker and a box holding gyroscope sensors, installed two Global Positioning Systems antennas and routed a pair of 60-foot avionics cables for a future module. The spacewalk was running well ahead of schedule until one of the cables couldn't be plugged in to its connecting port on the station's truss. Then Fuglesang's helmet camera came loose, forcing him to head back inside. “You guys did an awesome job, thank you so much for your help,” Olivas radioed to ground controllers from the airlock. “It was a super effort by everybody,” someone replied from NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. It was the 133rd spacewalk supporting station assembly and maintenance, and the fifth for Olivas and Fuglesang. Here is the total space-walking time each has accumulated: • Olivas: 34 hours, 28 minutes. • Fuglesang: 31 hours, 54 minutes. • Discovery's STS-128 mission: 20 hours, 15 minutes. • Space station assembly/maintenance: 830 hours, 51 minutes. – www.floridatoday.com/content/blogs/space/index.shtml ‘Appalling' Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has denounced “in the strongest possible terms” an Associated Press photograph of a 21-year-old soldier with a badly injured leg. In a four-paragraph letter to the AP, Gates delivered stinging criticism. “Why your organization would purposefully defy the family's wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me,” he wrote. He further called the release of the photo “appalling” and a breach of “common decency.” The pictured soldier, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, later died and his family requested several times that the photo not be released. “We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is,” Santiago Lyon, the AP's director of photography, responded. The news agency's statement added that the image “conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.” The organization noted that it waited until after Bernard's burial to distribute the photo, and called the picture and its accompanying story “a respectful treatment and recognition of sacrifice.”
