Cape Canaveral: With Dextre the robot's power problem solved, astronauts ventured outside the international space station to put together the bulk of the gigantic walking and working machine.

The robot's hands were attached to its 11-foot arms during the first spacewalk of Endeavour's space station trip. This time, astronauts aimed to connect the arms to the shoulders. First, though, the robot was going to sit up on its transport bed, rising like Frankenstein as one astronaut put it.

Yesterday spacewalkers Richard Linnehan and Michael Foreman had to use brute force and a pry bar to get one of the robot's arms off the transport bed, where it had been latched down for launch. Two of the bolts wouldn't budge, even when the astronauts banged on them and yanked with all their might. "We re really having to get medieval on Dextre," Foreman observed.

Finally, the bolts gave way. But by then, the astronauts had fallen an hour behind in their work. The nighttime spacewalk - in the wee hours today - came close to being drastically altered or even delayed. For nearly two days, a cable design flaw prevented NASA from getting power to Dextre, lying in pieces on its transport bed.

It was not until the astronauts gripped Dextre with the space station's mechanical arm on Friday night that the robot got the power it needed to wake up and keep its joints and electronics from freezing. "Dextre is doing much better," said astronaut Garrett Reisman, who performed the first spacewalk with Linnehan on Thursday night.

Source : PTI