Astronaut Jerry Linenger describes his first spaceflight, including coordinating an untethered spacewalk where astronauts used thrusters like a "ballet," deploying a free-flying satellite, and firing a laser beam at Earth to study weather systems in ways conventional satellites couldn't.
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You've been to space twice. I know not all astronauts do that. What. What was your first mission like? So it's a bit of a. You know, the first one's overwhelming, I guess. We went up and. Main thing we did, we had a untethered spacewalk. I was the inside guy helping coordinate the ballet out there. Guys firing thrusters, kind of like a Buck Rogers jetpack thing. It was an awesome advancement in our spacewalking abilities. Ability to get you back to the space station if you get detached. And then the other big thing, we had a satellite. We actually set it out into space, left it alone. It did observations, and then at the end of the mission, we went, grabbed it, put it back in the payload bay, and brought it back to Earth. And the final thing was a big laser. We beamed at the Earth. And when you think of weather systems, you know, we only see half of it. You see the lighted side of the Earth, you see the satellite photos of these, you know, typhoons swirling.