Astronaut Steve MacLean has changed history, becoming only the second Canadian to walk in space.
MacLean and fellow Atlantis crew member Dan Burbank started their six-hour spacewalk at the international space station at 5:05 a.m. ET to work on the newly installed truss.
"You know guys, it feels like home out here," MacLean said.
The pair is focusing their attention and tools on a ferris-wheel-like rotary joint that will allow two solar arrays, once unfurled, to always face the sun as the space station circles Earth.
The solar arrays will supply a quarter of the space lab's power when it is completed by 2010.
The work is tedious and repetitive. Burbank and MacLean need to release and remove 16 locks and six restraints that kept the rotary joint in place during Saturday's launch from the Kennedy Space Center.
The astronauts were to remove more than a dozen insulation covers and scores of bolts wearing bulky spacesuit gloves.
To pump them up for the hard work ahead, Mission Control played "Taking Care of Business'' for their wake-up song.
"We'll be taking care of business getting the solar arrays prepared,'' MacLean said in response.
The spacewalk was the second of three to install the new 14-metre, $372 US million addition to the space station during Atlantis' 11-day mission.
Astronaut Joe Tanner crewmate Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper made their spacewalk Tuesday morning, conducting the first work on the space station in 3 1/2 years.
Stefanyshyn-Piper became the eighth woman to go on a spacewalk. Of 159 U.S. walks in space, only six women have left the airlock. Only one participated out of 118 Russian walks.
The reason is logistical: spacesuits and their gloves are bulky and don't come in small sizes, so an ill-fitting suit makes it difficult to manoeuvre and manipulate machinery. Stefanyshyn-Piper is 5-foot-10.
During MacLean and Burbank's morning work, the astronauts lost a bolt similar to one that popped off during Tuesday's spacewalk.
It is believed to have floated away, the same assumption NASA officials made Tuesday. NASA said the lost bolt posed no major problem.
MacLean ran into another small problem a short time later when an extension on his pistol-grip power tool broke while he was trying to remove a restraint on the rotary joint.
"Son of a gun," he muttered, then gathered the pieces in a trash bag so they wouldn't float away and went to a toolbox to retrieve another.
A stuck bolt also slowed down MacLean and Burbank, who struggled together to finally get it loose. Astronaut Joe Tanner, inside the space station, helped out.
We sure appreciate you answering that age-old question from Mission Control -- how many astronauts does it take to unscrew a bolt?'' said astronaut Pam Melroy in Mission Control in Houston.
"Apparently, it takes three. Two outside and one inside.''Despite the hiccups, Atlantis' mission is going better than expected.
"It's been a great success, they are ahead of schedule once again," Ed Tabarah, of the Canadian Space Agency, told CTV Newsnet from Montreal.
MacLean, 51, was selected as one of the first six Canadian astronauts in 1983. He first entered space while part of the Columbia mission in 1992.
The laser physicist known to the crew as "the professor" is an Ottawa native. He is the second Canadian to walk in space, following in the footsteps of Chris Hadfield, who completed the feat in 2001.
"Steve feels weird right now because it's a mixture of emotions," Hadfield told CTV Newsnet from Houston shortly after MacLean began his spacewalk.
"He is extremely excited to be doing this thing that he's been practicing for for so much of his life. He's so focused because he has this long, absolutely vital list of activities that he needs to get done to help build the space station.
"But at the same time, Steve, and I know the feeling well, is overpowered by the beauty of the place that he is in."
Hadfield said MacLean's work requires a tremendous amount of concentration and focus.
"One little mistake, you're floating off into space, or one of your tools is gone, or you've hooked and damaged something on the outside of the space station," he said.
"So it takes a tremendous ability on Steve's part today to somehow ignore the overpowering beauty of the world beside him."
Hadfield said the view from space is enough to make an astronaut cry inside their helmet.
"It absolutely shocked me the effect that it had on me," he said.
"Every 90 minutes, Steve goes around the whole planet once, so he will see every beautiful, peaceful, tranquil part of the world, and every war-torn, ripped up, hateful part of the world all. It really puts things into perspective," he said.
You see all those things so rapidly, it brings your emotions right up to the surface. I found the whole time you're in space, you're always on the verge of laughing or crying."
Hadfield said he is "extremely proud" to see another Canadian in space, and hoped to see more Canadians there in the future.
MacLean was chief science adviser for the space station from 1993 until 1994, when he was appointed director of the Canadian astronaut program for two years.
His wife Nadine Wielgopolski, and three children, Jean-Phillippe, 16, Catherine 14, and Michele, 13, are watching the spacewalk from Montreal.
In an interview taped Tuesday, Wielgopolski told Canada AM she and MacLean keep in touch through email, and he tells her he is having a great time.
"He's been waiting 14 years again to fly back in space. It's a dream come true," she said.</p>
*CTV.ca News Staff, With files from The Canadian Press
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