A special cement is then injected into the space, repairing the crack.
Yet even as women quickly proved themselves capable of spacewalks, space repairs, space press conferences, not until July 1999 -- the 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's giant leap for "mankind" -- would a woman, Eileen Collins, at last serve as commander of a shuttle flight.
The same video sensors are already used to track schools of jellyfish in Monterey Bay; one day they might be used to help NASA perform outer-space repair jobs, or to remotely clean up nuclear waste.
I have been using them for my Space Station repair work and figured the boys would like to have something that daddy used to repair Space Station.
But it can work, Mr. Knutson said, if fishermen are allowed to sell their catch off the boat and if they are given enough space to repair their nets, to clean their engines, to get back and forth without delay.
Far from being the weakest element in a Mars mission, humans would be the strongest, as was demonstrated during Hubble Space Telescope repair missions, the assembly of the International Space Station, and countless other space flights.
The only previous spacewalk on 24 December was in 1999 during a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission.
Self-healing could be useful when sensors have to be placed in extreme conditions such as in space, where repair is sometimes difficult or impossible.
Eastwood played one of a group of veteran ex-test pilots sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite.
The ship, which persevered through numerous adversities on the way to the OpSail 2000 celebration in the summer, is in New London awaiting dry-dock space for repairs.
"It's awful, really bad," said Roberto Romeo, who runs a rehearsal space and repairs musical instruments across the street from the Muse, a mid-rise boutique hotel.
