Cross & Crescent

Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, 195 nautical miles above the sparkling blue Earth, seven astronauts gathered on the orbiter’s mid-deck to try to save their mission.

NASA’s Mission Control was not invited to this conversation. Ground controllers had already run out of ideas for capturing a stranded satellite.

Among themselves on this May night in 1992, the astronauts came up with their own plan.

Two spacewalkers had just failed in two attempts, using Mission Control’s specially designed tools, to catch the satellite.

Now, the astronauts devised a risky and bold new plan to grab it using nothing but their gloved hands. To do it, they’d need a third spacewalker.

They chose a quiet former math teacher from Eminence, Missouri, who’d never made a spacewalk.

Spacewalking into History

Astronaut Tom Akers (Missouri-Rolla 1973) had been a park ranger, school principal, and U.S. Air Force pilot before becoming an astronaut in 1987. And at the University of Missouri-Rolla, near his hometown, he had become a Lambda Chi.

Now, Akers and astronauts Rick Hieb and Pierre Thuot floated out into the shuttle’s payload bay to make the world’s first three-man spacewalk.

Commander Dan Brandenstein, standing at the rear control station on the flight deck of Endeavour, had to do some precision flying.

The satellite, named Intelsat VI, was not just floating there in its orbit; it was spinning — slowly rotating as if to do everything it could to make its capture that much more difficult.

Brandenstein maneuvered his space ship, with the three spacesuited astronauts tethered in the payload bay to keep from floating away, within a few feet of the nine-thousand pound mass of metal.

Any collision, even at the slowest of speeds, could wreck a payload bay door or damage a vertical stabilizer, dooming the crew to certain death by making the shuttle unable to survive the trip home.

With vast numbers of Americans watching on live television, the spacewalkers reached out. At the precise capture moment, Hieb was supposed to call out, “Ready, ready, now.” Instead, in his excitement, he blurted, “OK, let’s do it!”

It was good enough. The astronauts captured and repaired the satellite, and Akers had proven himself.

Later in the mission, he and astronaut Kathryn Thornton executed another spacewalk, one for which they had trained for months on the ground.

In it, they assembled a structure using tools and techniques that would pave the way for future astronauts to build a space station in orbit. Astronauts are still doing that today.

Brother Akers went on to become one of NASA’s premier spacewalkers. He told author Anne Lenehan that spacewalking is a lot like dance choreography.

“For it to go smooth and look smooth to anybody else, it took a lot of practice and basically that’s why we use the term choreography,” he said. “You could just go out and get the job done if you had all the time in the world, but when you only have six and a half hours to go and try to get a job done, you don’t want any wasted motion. That’s what we did in the pool (during training) and what they still do down at NASA training is to look for every efficiency.”

The Intelsat capture was one of NASA’s few high-profile, shining moments in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It represented a turnaround from the Challenger accident that had killed seven astronauts in 1986. But now NASA had an even bigger challenge. The billion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope, launched on a shuttle in 1989, was critically flawed.

Its blurry vision was a constant symbol that NASA had lost its Apollo-era touch. It was up to another astronaut crew to change that, a crew led by the legendary Story Musgrave. The handpicked team of four spacewalkers, NASA’s best, also included Tom Akers.

Saving the Hubble Space Telescope

Aboard Endeavour again, the astronauts vaulted into the starry Central Florida sky on December 2, 1993. In the back of the shuttle were 17,000 pounds of replacement parts and repair equipment for Hubble.

It was make or break for NASA’s future.

“Congress told us that if you do not fix the telescope, there is not going to be a space station,” Musgrave recalled. “Why? Because it takes a lot of spacewalks to assemble a space station and you have to demonstrate to us that you can do what you say.”

The silvery space telescope was a thing of beauty, if not a perfect celestial observatory. America watched the spacewalkers in their snow-white suits against the glittering backdrops of Hubble’s gold solar panels, its mirror-bright exterior, and earth’s brilliant surface.

The repairs were not easy. Brother Akers was paired with his old partner from the Intelsat mission, Kathryn Thornton.

The communications in her suit broke down, requiring Akers to relay everything she said to Mission Control. Her suit’s cooling system became plugged, and mission managers had to question whether the spacewalk could continue.

They persevered, and Thornton turned the spacewalk into one of the shuttle era’s signature moments.

She and Akers detached one of Hubble’s malfunctioning solar panels, and Thornton held it aloft in her hands. On Earth, it would have weighed 352 pounds. In space, it weighed nothing at all.

The plan had been to bring home the old panels, but this one refused to fold up. There was nothing to do but throw it away – very carefully. Akers watched as Thornton let it go, making sure the hardware would not later re-contact the shuttle or the valuable space telescope.

As the golden panel floated away, it caught the blast of the shuttle’s thrusters. The burst of exhaust puffed out the flexible solar panel like the wind filling a sail.

“It looks like a bird,” Thornton called out. The moment made for a picture that was carried in every newspaper and seen on every TV newscast the next day.

The mission was a brilliant success. During five spacewalks, Musgrave, Akers, Thornton and Jeff Hoffman installed an array of new equipment, including a set of optics that corrected Hubble’s vision.

To this day, the Hubble Space Telescope is one of America’s scientific crown jewels, filling textbooks and Web sites with stunning, clear images of the universe.

“I heard Story say lots of times when people asked him how he felt about the mission — he would say he was scared to death,” Akers told author Lenehan. “That was early on. By the time we flew, he wasn’t saying that very much because the more training we got, the more comfortable we felt that yeah, we can go do this even though a lot of folks didn’t think you could go do… all this complicated stuff.”

Math Teacher

After the mission, Akers had racked up more spacewalking hours than any astronaut in U.S. history — even more than the astronauts who’d walked on the moon.

The future was wide open for Akers: consulting jobs, aerospace industry vice presidencies, more shuttle flights.

Akers ended up flying a total of four shuttle missions but didn’t pursue glamor or big bucks.

He’s a math teacher. And he’s back home. Akers is back at the University of Missouri-Rolla, doing exactly what he wants to do, and attracting as little attention as possible.

And if you look into the sky at the right time, you can still see his accomplishments. Both the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station are visible to the naked eye. If you know when and where to look, you can see them moving across the sky like bright, fast-moving stars.

Lambda Chi Alpha’s vision is to encourage college men to contribute to the world in which they live. Tom Akers’ contributions go beyond this world.

All quotes are used with permission from Anne Lenehan’s book, “Story: the Way of Water,” copyright 2004.