You will need Real Player to view the video clips. We've got a lot of excited people up here,'' replied space station astronaut Susan Helms. With one hand holding on, the hand at the other end of the arm released a temporary handle on the space station and eventually plugged itself into a socket 24 feet away. The arm's first workout got under way as soon as all the hatches were opened between space shuttle Endeavour and space station Alpha, allowing the two crews to meet face to face for the first time since Endeavour arrived Saturday.
Somebody's upside down.
I think it's us. Voss and Helms were in charge of the robot arm. Watching over their shoulders like an expectant father was Hadfield, who hooked up his country's billion-dollar arm to its temporary mount on Sunday. It was the first time the entire arm had ever moved on its own, joint by joint. We've done so much testing on the ground, software and electronics and wiring and so on, we were very confident that everything would behave,'' said Savi Sachdev, acting director general of space systems for the Canadian Space Agency.