Pair of Shuttle Astronauts Get Ready for Experimental Spacewalk

Two astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, raring to go on the ultimate Sunday stroll, checked out their spacesuits Saturday for a five-hour spacewalk intended as a drill for space-station construction.

It will be the first spacewalk by Americans in nearly a year.

“We’re really excited about it,” said astronaut Gregory Harbaugh.

The mood at Mission Control also was upbeat.

“Any time we get ready to go do an EVA, I think the excitement level comes up a little bit,” said mission operations director Lee Briscoe. EVA stands for extra-vehicular activity.

Harbaugh and Mario Runco Jr. plan to move about the shuttle payload bay and practice working with varying loads. One exercise calls for them to take turns carrying one another from one end of the 60-foot-long bay to the other.

NASA wants to see how difficult it is to move large objects in space before astronauts start building a space station in 1996. The exercise will also show what it would be like for a spacewalker to carry an incapacitated partner.

Each crewman weighs more than 400 pounds in his spacesuit, at least on the ground. In the weightlessness of space, it’s the bulkiness that complicates matters.

Officials added the spacewalk to the six-day mission just two months ago to give astronauts more spacewalking experience.

With today’s spacewalk, “we are trying to help identify outer boundaries of the human performance envelope, if you will, in doing spacewalks,” Harbaugh said.