Amidst of the controversy with the delay and aborting Discovery's launch, NASA had to compromise their restrictions to make way for their return to space flight and they paid the price with having Discovery's orbiter damaged during the lift off.

After all the fact finding and logical engineering, Astronauts Stephen Robinson and Soichi Noguchi wrapped up the first spacewalk today, testing heat-shield repair techniques, hot wiring one of the space station's gyroscopes and mounting an attachment device that later will hold a large external tool kit and spare parts box. Mission Control didn't fail to acknowledge "You did a great job today!"

This one was the 59th spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance, pushing the cumulative total to 355 hours and five minutes by 40 NASA astronauts, 10 Russian cosmonauts, one Canadian, one Frenchman and now, one Japanese.

The Discovery crew will continue their space walks until a final decision is made on the repair. It may all sounds like the fun stuff in Jetsons, but they could only wish it was that simple!