Spacewalk cosmonauts remove 'explosive bolt'

Two space station cosmonauts took a daring spacewalk to cut into the insulation of their descent capsule and remove an explosive bolt.

If mishandled, the bolt could have exploded with enough force to blow off their hands.

Flight controllers in Moscow assured Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, both Russians, that the bolt would not detonate and that the unprecedented job would help ensure their safe return to Earth in the Soyuz capsule this autumn.

Nasa said its own engineers were convinced the two spacemen would be in no danger, and that it would be all right for them to put the explosive bolt in a blast-proof container and take it into the space station for eventual return to Earth.

The past two Soyuz descents have been steep, off-course and bone-jarring, and the Russian Space Agency wants to avoid the problem when Mr Volkov and Mr Kononenko fly home in October.

Mission Control urged the cosmonauts, both on their first-time space mission, to use caution working on the Soyuz capsule that carried them to the international space station in April. The men took out a serrated knife to cut into the insulation surrounding the bolt – a tool normally shunned by spacewalkers because of the possibility of piercing their pressurised suits or gloves.

They used a spanner to remove the 3ins pyrotechnic bolt, one of 10 used to separate two parts of the module during re-entry.

During Soyuz descents this past April and in October last year, the two module sections did not separate properly, leading to so-called ballistic entries that submitted the crews to far higher gravity forces than normal.

Russian engineers suspect some of the explosive bolts did not fire. By disabling the bolts in this suspect location, there should be no mechanical problems during the October descent, officials said.

The lone American on board, Gregory Chamitoff, was inside the Soyuz for the entire six-hour spacewalk in case an emergency required the two Russians to join him in the capsule.

Each pyrotechnic bolt has the force of a large M-80 firecracker, Nasa officials said.

A high-ranking flight director at Russian Mission Control outside Moscow told the crew that the bolt could withstand shocks of up to 100 times the force of gravity and would not fire, even if they hit it with a big hammer.

Once the space shuttles are retired in 2010, the Soyuz will be the sole means of human space transportation until 2015, when America’s new rocketship starts carrying crews.