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What advice can you give a tool maker preparing tools for work in microgravity? Were there any tools,
restraints, or accessories that you wish were available to you during the Hubble Space Telescope Repair?
That is really the base of work we do out there during spacewalks. You start with mechanics, the
experiences I had as a child working with farm machinery from the age of five on up, and the
experiences that I had as an airplane mechanic with the Marine Corps during the Korean War.
These experiences turned out to be very important in my abilities to work on the Hubble Space
Telescope
The characteristics of tools need to accomodate that you are working in a very bulky spacesuit
with very bulky gloves. You do not have the nice feel and tactility that you have with the human
hand. And although your suit does not weigh anything, it has a very high mass up to 500 pounds.
So the high mass and bulky suit are important considerations but also, as you know, everything
moves around. Working out there is like working at a desk where a fan is blowing all your papers.
You are always trying to maintain control and hold things down
So the tools out there, to work in space, they should accommodate the fact that you are working
with very bulky gloves, a bulky spacesuit, and the fact that everything needs to be restrained
But lots more research needs to be done on the development of tools that we call "friendly tools"
to the spacewalker
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