Astronaut Bob Behnken participates in a spacewalk during STS-123. Image courtesy of NASA.
Imagine having your workshop traveling at 17,500 miles per hour more than 200 miles over the Earth as you work through grueling, painstakingly-planned out steps of a project with specialized gadgets like a massive Pistol Grip Tool. STS-130 mission specialists, Bob Behnken and Nicholas Patrick will be doing just that tonight, as they begin the first of three complicated space walks for this mission. And while they've each trained for months, poring over checklists and practicing in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab, it's in their personal experience as tinkerers and builders on Earth where their skills are firmly rooted.
"As a kid, I was always taking things apart," said Behnken, the lead spacewalker on this mission. "I was the boy who would come to your house and take your bicycle apart and then have to get invited back the next day to put it back together again."
Behnken grew up outside of St. Louis, where his father was a construction worker and where he frequented his local Radio Shack as a boy to pick up Heathkits and equipment for making projects around his house.
"I just had that interest in doing things that was from figuring out how to do it and then going out and doing it."
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