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[i]Mike and Ron it was a pleasure working with you guys today. It was the 43rd anniversary of the first U.S. EVA conducted by Ed White on Gemini 4, so I think it was appropriate that we had two Air Force guys out the door today, in honor of Ed White... And I've got [public affairs] checking to see if Ed White's capcom was a Navy guy...[/i]
[i]I was in mission control for the first shuttle EVA back in the day, and I was involved in the space station redesign. As we went through that process, it became obvious [where] the design choices were going. Instead of automated hookups and things, we were going onto human manual EVA hookups with bolts and connectors and all those things. As we started to put this entire picture together, what it was going to take to build this station, we got what we saw, this wall of EVA, EVA hours and content and all. And you looked at our piddling little experiments, I mean, Apollo had some great stuff, but you had some gravity helping you there, and on shuttle a lot of the EVAs were experiments to figure out how to build and work and operate with the plates and tools in zero-g. When you get to station assembly, this is a construction site. It is hard work and there is a lot of it. And so I think we're almost at the top of that wall that was so daunting 15 years ago. Amazing. And not just for me, one of the lucky people who gets to go do this, but for the entire community that has gone and figured it out how to get this stuff done. And we figured out how to build the tools, figured out how to train people and figured out how to work around the problems that have occurred and to get it done. To me that is very gratifying to be here at this time, to get one of these challenging assembly missions and go out there.[/i]
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