Astronaut regrets losing bag

2008-11-20 13:18

Marcia Dunn

Cape Canaveral - The astronaut who lost her tool bag on a spacewalk admitted that she made a mistake by not checking to see if the sack was tied down, and said she's still smarting over the whole thing.

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper said in an interview on Wednesday with The Associated Press that it was "very disheartening" to lose her bag full of tools. She was trying to clean up grease that had oozed out of a grease gun in the backpack-size bag, when the tote and everything in it floated away on Tuesday.

The bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalking astronaut. Nasa put the price tag of the tool bag at $100 000.

For a split second, she thought she might be able to grab it and she tried to judge how far away it was. Just as quickly, "I thought, no, that would probably just make things worse and the best thing to do would be to just let it go".

Mistake

"There's still the psychological thing of knowing that we made a mistake and having to live through that," she said. "During the spacewalk ... it was easy to put it aside because I knew that we still had five hours of spacewalk work to do and the work needed to get done and you can't dwell on a mistake. It was hardest coming back in and having to face everybody else."

She noted there were three more spacewalks and promised not to let the mistake happen again.

"You're not going to see us lose another bag. We're going to double- and triple-check everything from here on out," she said.

The next spacewalk is Thursday; Stefanyshyn-Piper will venture back out of the International Space Station for more work on a jammed joint at the space station that controls some of the solar wings.

Partner also takes blame

Her spacewalking partner on Tuesday, Stephen Bowen, also took the blame for the mishap.

"I didn't go back and triple-check everything. So I'm just as guilty at this as Heide is," Bowen told the AP. In the packing and repacking of all the tools and sacks, it's possible that bag became untethered, Stefanyshyn-Piper said.

Flight director Ginger Kerrick was withholding judgement.

"We don't know that this incident occurred because they forgot to tether something. We don't know if perhaps the hook just came loose inside the bag," Kerrick stressed at a news conference. "You've got to remember, we are working with humans here and we are prone to human error. We do the best we can, and we learn from our mistakes."

Meanwhile, the bag that got away was still in the neighborhood of the shuttle-station complex but was expected to fall out of orbit fairly soon.

- AP