Toothbrush 'engineering' saves the day for Astronaut Sunita Williams Hoshide

A $100-billion space station was saved by a simple $3 toothbrush thanks to an improvisation by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and her Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency colleague Akihido Hoshide and NASA engineers on the ground: a tool to clean a bolt that had given them much trouble during a marathon 8-hour spacewalk last week.

They were trying to replace an electrical switching unit, which they could not bolt to the outside of the station.

With no hardware store in the neighborhood and the next supply ship months away they decided to build it themselves, attaching a simple toothbrush to a metal pole and that was it.

They cleaned out the bolt's socket yesterday and finished the job. Decades ago Apollo 13 mission engineers did something similar when they threw parts on a table and brainstormed a solution which saved the crew.

A spacewalk is no cakewalk and Williams gives some details of what it involves in her blog.

"You don't just 'go outside,'" she said. "Usually that is the fun and easy part of the entire thing -- suit sizing, tool gathering and preparation, equipment gathering and preparations, studying new procedures, reviewing and talking through how to get us suited and how to get the airlock depressed, reviewing the tasks we will do with each other and with the robotic arm, talking about cleaning up, and then talking thru a plan to get back into the airlock, and any emergencies that can come up -- loss of communications, suit issues, etc.