Risky Spacewalk Left No One in Station

The International Space Station’s two astronauts hustled through an unusually risky spacewalk and successfully replaced a bad circuit breaker Wednesday -- a sweet victory following last week’s attempt.

Shouts of “hurray!” and “great!” emanated from space after American Mike Fincke and Russian Gennady Padalka learned their effort had paid off.

The spacewalk was considered riskier than most. The station is down to two crew members, instead of three, because of the grounding of the shuttles since the Columbia disaster. As a result, no one was inside to watch over everything during the spacewalk.

The men also used Russian suits not intended for this type of hand-intensive, U.S. repair work.

It was a long and potentially dangerous haul to the work site -- and back to the hatch after the repairs were made.

Fincke and Padalka had to cross nearly 100 feet to get to the fried circuit breaker -- a grueling distance for spacewalkers over difficult terrain. Then they managed to pry off the cover for the row of circuit breakers; it was stiff and hard to move.

The two were ahead of schedule the entire time. Less than six hours after venturing out, they were safely back inside. Last Thursday, they barely made it out the hatch when their spacewalk was aborted after 14 minutes because of an oxygen glitch.

NASA was anxious to replace the circuit breaker to restore power to one of the gyroscopes that keep the 225-mile-high outpost steady and pointed in the right direction.