2 Astronauts Test Building Skills During Spacewalk

Two spacewalking astronauts manhandled a 250-pound beam, laid cable and read warning labels in the dark Monday, breezing through a set of lessons for building the international space station.

The men, working 200 miles above Earth, even wrapped up their work early. They then climbed back into space shuttle Endeavour.

Rookie spacewalker Leroy Chiao had no problem reading the warning labels, with letters the size of large newspaper headlines.

The fake labels, cautioning “Electrical Hazard” and “Corrosive Hazard,” created a furor before flight. Technicians preparing Endeavour for launch thought the labels on a toolbox were genuine and balked at putting the box on board.

“We had to calm them down,” said Daryl Schuck, lead flight controller for Monday’s spacewalk and another one scheduled Wednesday. “They felt better after we assured them there were no demons inside this box.”

Chiao and Dr. Daniel Barry encountered only a few minor equipment snags during their six-hour spacewalk. In addition, a shuttle cooling system failed because of ice buildup but did not hamper the astronauts’ work outside.

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“The lessons we’re learning here are going to be folded directly into the station design, so that we can make sure the station is a workable, maintainable facility,” Schuck said.

Chiao and Barry erected a 17 1/2-foot, hinged aluminum beam in the open cargo bay with ease and strung cable along it, just as they might do in helping assemble the space station from 1997 through 2002.

As Endeavour circled Earth at 17,500 mph, the men took turns connecting and disconnecting various lines to a box, and swiveled atop a work platform on the end of the 50-foot shuttle robot arm.

The pair also evaluated heated gloves and other new thermal wear. They remained comfortably warm for the most part, despite an average temperature of 75 degrees below zero.

Up next for the six shuttle astronauts: Today’s retrieval of a NASA science satellite that they dropped off Sunday.

Engineers discovered the cooling system had iced up during the spacewalk. NASA said it would maneuver the shuttle to catch heat from the sun and Earth to try to melt the ice, but mission managers said the malfunction could force Endeavour to cut its mission short by a day.

NASA’s schedule calls for the shuttle to land at the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday.