Zero gravity can be heavy burden
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Wednesday, Atlantis astronauts Rex Walheim and Hans Schlegel contended with tools that wanted to drift away as the men made a six-hour, 45-minute spacewalk to upgrade the cooling system on the International Space Station.

It was the first spacewalk for Schlegel, who sat out an assigned spacewalk Monday because of an undisclosed illness. Astronaut Stanley Love took his place.

"You guys did an outstanding job today," spacewalk coordinator Alan Poindexter said from inside the shuttle as the spacewalk ended.

Zero gravity can complicate exotic activities such as a spacewalk, but doing even mundane chores "is a challenge," Atlantis commander Stephen Frick said before the flight. "It's really something we have to work with a lot."

During Frick's first flight, crewmate Walheim kept finding things Frick had lost, "so it's a good thing that I'm flying with Rex again, so he can fulfill that task," Frick joked.

Eating in zero gravity is so inconvenient — food easily drifts out of containers and splatters — that astronauts in orbit often skimp on food. Astronaut Charlie Hobaugh said after his 13-day shuttle flight in 2007 that's one reason he lost 8 pounds in orbit.

Other tasks that are easy on Earth and tricky in space:

Tying your shoes. The astronauts on the International Space Station wear sneakers during their runs on the station's treadmill. At first, putting them on without floating away is a puzzle.

"You have to figure out how to hold yourself down while you use both hands and one foot to tie that shoe," astronaut Clay Anderson said after spending five months on the station in 2007.

Moving from one place to another. Novices tend to shove off walls to get somewhere, then grab something to stop themselves. Often their bodies stop, but their feet keep going.

"I felt like the first two days in space, all I kept saying was, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to kick you in the head,' " said astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper after her first shuttle mission in 2006.

Handling electrical cables or other items that tend to coil. On Earth, if you run a power cord between an outlet and a piece of equipment, it lies flat.

In orbit, the cord "will float up and assume whatever coil shape it was in before and take up a whole bunch of (space) that you wanted to get into," astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria said after his 2006-2007 stint on the station.

Using the bathroom. Astronauts don't go into detail, but they make it clear that the hoses and vacuums on space toilets leave something to be desired.

"You never really appreciate gravity till you think about going to the bathroom without it," station crewmember Dan Tani said in December. "Trust me, there are times when I really could use some gravity." He'll get it soon: he'll return to Earth on Atlantis, which is scheduled to return next Wednesday.

Astronauts train exhaustively, often for years, for their missions in space, but NASA can't train them to live in zero gravity. The best it can do is send rookies up in a jet that flies a series of upside-down-U-shaped curves. At the peak, passengers experience 25 to 30 seconds of weightlessness.

After that experience, "you think you know it all," Schlegel said before his flight. "Then you come into space and you realize, wow, (weightlessness) doesn't go away. It stays. … To some people, (adjusting) comes easy; to some people, it comes with more difficulties."

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Astronaut Rex Walheim installs a fixture on the Columbus laboratory inside shuttle Atlantis' payload bay Monday.