That Batty Feeling

A pair of spacewalking astronauts added a giant handgrip and cosmic-debris shields to the exterior of the international space station and began working on a new part for the orbiting outpost's robot arm.

The next two spacewalks this week by space shuttle Endeavour astronauts Franklin Chang-Diaz and Philippe Perrin will be devoted entirely to the 58-foot arm. It needs a new wrist joint and a base on which to move around the space station via rail car.

In preparation, Chang-Diaz and Perrin removed thermal blankets Sunday from the mobile robot-arm base that was carried up aboard Endeavour. Then their colleagues inside used the arm to lift the base to within three feet of the rail car, for installation on Monday.

Chang-Diaz, a U.S. astronaut born in Costa Rica, and Perrin, a French astronaut born in Morocco, savored the moment as they emerged from the 240-mile-high complex on the first spacewalk of their careers.

A crewmate wished them good luck in both French and Spanish as they floated out.

Their first job involved attaching a grapple hook for the space station's robot arm on a piece of framework that must be moved during a later assembly flight. "I'm hanging like a bat upside down, looking at the Earth," Perrin said from the side of the station.

Chang-Diaz later experienced the upside-down sensation.

"It's a very strange feeling to fly inverted over the Earth like this," Chang-Diaz said while riding on the end of the space station's arm.

During their seven-hour excursion, the spacewalkers removed a stack of six protective panels from Endeavour and secured them to the space station. The metal shields are needed to strengthen the hull of the Russian-built living quarters.

When the module was launched in 2000, it did not meet NASA safety standards for protection against potentially dangerous space junk. Russian officials promised to fix the problem by adding shields; in all, about 25 panels are to be launched and installed over the next several years.

Chang-Diaz and Perrin put the 109 pounds' worth of shields in a temporary location. The space station's new residents, who arrived Friday aboard the shuttle, will do the installation work in another month or two.

NASA said the initial shielding will result in only a 1 percent decrease in the odds of a micrometeorite or some other debris penetrating the module over the next decade. "This is the first step," stressed Bill Gerstenmaier, deputy space station program manager.

By Marcia Dunn