Somebody Will Make a Video of It!

Last week one of the astronauts working on the International Space Station lost track of her toolbag. Apparently her grease gun exploded — something it wasn’t supposed to do.  It got grease all over her helmet camera and gloves.

So, she did what any worker would do, she started to clean the stuff off of her gloves. In the process, the bag came came loose and floated away beyond retrieval. She wasn’t very happy about this, since an exploding grease gun wasn’t in the mission plan.

A lot of folks have made fun of her for this problem, but it’s pretty obvious she was taken by surprise and tried to deal with what could have been a dangerous situation in a calm manner.  (And, I’d like to see all those who are making stupid (and some pretty sexist) jokes about it tell the rest of us about how well they would handle such a mishap in space. )

So, everybody figured that would be the last of the bag.  Well, maybe not so much. Turns out that in space, everyone can hear you mutter when a piece of equipment goes haywire and, if you lose track of a bag (or a camera or anything else that can be tracked by ground-based observers), people will be able to find it. And take movies of it. According to Spaceweather.com, satellite observer Kevin Fetter managed to get a video of the backpack-sized bag on orbit. You can watch it here.  (Note:  the servers at the site are getting slammed… if you can’t get through, give it a few hours until the “storm” passes.)

Working in space poses all kinds of issues that ground-based workers never have to face:  low-gravity, vacuum, the need to wear specialized gear to keep from dying in vacuum, learning to work with extremely specialized tools that need to be made especially for the space environment, and doing all your work with cameras fully trained on you at all times. Every motion you make  needs to be done deliberately and carefully; and every mistake you make is on camera for all time. And now, it appears that if you drop a tool bag, people with really good telescopes and cameras in their backyards will be able to track your loss for quite a while!