U.S. Astronaut a Blend of Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Fixit

Astronaut Bill Shepherd was stunned--and frustrated--when he moved into the international space station last fall and discovered the kitchen table would not be arriving any time soon.

Shepherd did what any self-respecting home mechanic would do. He built his own table out of space station scraps.

The home improvement project, however, turned into as stealth an operation as Shepherd had ever tackled as a Navy SEAL.

“We didn’t want too much help from the ground,” Shepherd explained recently from his NASA office. “So we figured if we got the thing going and it looked like it would be useful and a reasonable addition to the real estate up there, the ground would not object.”

The ground was Russian Mission Control.

“We sometimes were in the situation of having to do things that people didn’t think could be done,” said Shepherd, space station Alpha’s inaugural commander. “People on the ground would have assessed that it was not possible to make something like this up there.”

Given Russian Mission Control’s combativeness, the table became “a stealth project,” according to Shepherd, a 51-year-old Navy captain.

Shepherd and his two Russian crew mates scavenged the orbiting outpost for building material once they learned that the promised Russian-built table would not be launched because of weight concerns. The table was simply too massive, and other equipment was deemed more important by the Russians for delivery.

One month into their 4 1/2-month mission, Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev began building the table out of aluminum frames that had held solid-fuel oxygen generators, as well as struts and pieces of angled aluminum. The men drilled holes, bolted the pieces together, covered the top with duct tape and, after weeks of working on it a bit at a time, finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work.

“Once we got it put together and finished, it was kind of the social center of the station,” Shepherd said. “That’s important too.”

Shepherd unveiled the table gradually. He and his crew beamed down pictures of the Russian living quarters with the table in the background. Flight controllers eventually noticed, and “we kind of let the cat out of the bag.”

NASA space station flight director John Curry was impressed.

“They’ve got a fully functional table now because he built the thing,” Curry said. “He’s a Home Depot kind of guy.”

Because of his fix-it skills and stamina, Shepherd set the standard for space station occupants, Curry and other NASA officials say. He moved into the space station on Nov. 2 and moved out on March 18, turning over a clean ship to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev, his successor.

“Shep paved the way as the first commander,” Bill Readdy, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for spaceflight, said at a May space symposium.

More than once, Shepherd--Mr. Garage Mechanic to his NASA colleagues--sent flight controllers into the garage of his Houston home to dig for tools he needed in orbit.

Shepherd wanted a big pair of pliers to use as a clamp, pliers like the ones in his garage. His own pliers were too greasy to fly, but someone had a new pair tucked away as a Christmas gift.

“Instead of the guy giving the pliers for Christmas, they went to space,” Shepherd said with a chuckle.

Shepherd said his mission pointed out the importance of shop class and electronic repair courses for space station residents, especially during the ongoing construction phase.

“We’re moving some of our training here in Houston toward that direction,” he noted. “We have more hands-on, how-to-fix-stuff classes now than we have had before.”

The European Space Agency already is heeding Shepherd’s call for down-to-Earth know-how. Four European astronauts are training for future space station stints, and all four are operational types--engineers and pilots who are good at fixing things, said Ernst Messerschmid, head of the European astronaut center.

The space station’s current handyman is NASA astronaut Jim Voss, a 52-year-old retired Army colonel. An air conditioner was causing so much racket that Voss fashioned a muffler out of foam scraps to quiet it.

“I spend most of my day with a tool in my hand, so I think it really does help to have people who are mechanically inclined and who are used to working on machinery, electrical things and stuff like that,” Voss said recently from the space station.

“Computers as well,” he added after being reminded by the crew’s computer specialist, NASA astronaut Susan Helms.

As it turns out, computers have required an extraordinary amount of repair work in orbit. All three command-and-control computers in NASA’s Destiny laboratory shut down during space shuttle Endeavour’s visit in late April, temporarily crippling the space station. It took hundreds of flight controllers working round the clock to bring the computers back up to a minimum level.

Such craftsmanship and cunning--on Earth and in space--are reminiscent of the scene from the 1995 movie “Apollo 13” in which Mission Control engineers throw a box full of parts and a spacesuit on a table to devise an air purifier for saving the three astronauts. “I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole,” Ed Harris’ character tells his controllers in the film.

“You do that a lot,” Curry observed.

For Shepherd, building a table was therapeutic when the days were long and wearying. It also allowed him to work shoulder to shoulder with his men.

Russian Mission Control had the bad habit, Shepherd says, of divvying up chores according to nationality. As the lone American, he was ordered to work on the U.S. hardware, while Gidzenko and Krikalev handled the Russian equipment.

“We just didn’t think that was smart from a lot of angles,” Shepherd said. “But things like this table, some of the other repair work that we got into, they were opportunities for all of us to work on something together . . . and this was very good.”