Senate Committee as
Paul Cleary had had to do to the Western. He wanted an out just as bad
as Paul did.

There were a good many conferences before a sufficient number of
people decided the cheapest way out was to send a man to fix the
Telstars that had broken down. The question was whether it was
possible.

We went at it from two directions. They got a team assigned to
figuring out if the Dyna-Soar rocket could be modified to make the
three contacts around the orbit, carry two men and enough air and fuel
for the job, and at COMCORP we appointed a crew to figure out what it
meant to make the repair in orbit.

Cleary put me in charge of our crew. They gave me a full-size Telstar
satellite for my lab, and I went to work.

Fancy electronic equipment consists of millions of parts, and Telstar
is no exception. One of the bonuses America got from its poor rocket
booster performance, as compared with the Russians, was a forced-draft
course in miniaturization. Our engineers have learned how to make
almost anything about one-tenth the size you'd think it ought to be,
and still work. To get all these tiny parts into a total system, they
are assembled in racks. In the Telstar each of these long skinny
sticks of perforated magnesium alloy is hinged to the main framework
so that it can be swung out for testing or for replacement of parts,
which is why the engineers call each component a "gate."

I spent several weeks learning how to take each suspected component
out of the gate. Most of the time I needed a screwdriver. Sometimes I
had to drill out a soft aluminium rivet. The hard part was that some
of the components were so deep inside, even with a couple gates swung
out the way, that I needed all kinds of extension tools.

Of course, I had to visualize what it would be like doing all this out
in space. I'd be in a spacesuit, wearing thick gloves, and when I
removed a screw that would have looked good in a Swiss watch, there'd
be no work bench on which to place it while I took out the next one.
Worse yet, I would have to put it back in.

The longer I worked with the parts, the harder it looked. There
wouldn't be a prayer of just turning the parts loose in space. In
theory they'd follow along in orbit. In practice you can't bring your
hand to a halt and release a tiny part without imparting a small
proper motion to it. And even worse, you couldn't handle the little
wretches when you tried to put them back in. With a solid flo