Cooling Loops News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Mastracchio's space suit which had a cooling issue. nasa says he was never in any danger. now saturday's spacewalk lasted more than five hours. it was billed as a success so far. this spacewalk has been going on for more than four hours. the hope is that they will be able to wrap things up and go back inside the international space station very soon and by the way, this is the second time ever there has been a spacewalk on christmas eve, the first one happened 14 years ago. >> thanks so much. certainly will be a christmas eve they don't forget. now we're joined by nick. how crucial is this ope...

Not just in space. yeah. there's psych support stuff on the station. we have a keyboard. we're just people up there, too, t.j. >> who knew. most of our -- i assume most people saw the movie "gravity" in theaters than actually watched this whole spacewalk yesterday. how important is it for people to see these spacewalks. it looked so easy. to really understand just what's at stake and how difficult it is and some of the work that's going on up there. >> yeah. we only go out on spacewalks for absolute necessities. the level of danger is much, much higher, of course, than being inside the spacesh...

Thanks so much for joining us bright and early. >> my pleasure. >> here on terre firma. explain how this led to a problem with the astronaut almost drowning. >> the cooling pump, they have two cooling loops. one of the loops, the pump is not working. they have to replace the whole unit. they tried to do work-arounds but nothing seemed to get them happy with what's going on. the last time we did a space walk a few months ago, an italian astronaut had a problem with his space suit. >> had a problem. >> there was water coming in around his head. there was a leak. we never had this happen before. ...

Systems on the international space station. it malfunctioned this week. the pump on the cooling loop automatically shut down. that system makes sure equipment on iss stays cool and keeps working. nasa officials said yesterday they tried one fix that didn't work, and they may have to do a space walk to replace it. i am joined now by michael nasamino, a nasa astronaut and visiting professor at columbia university engineering school. mike, it's a pleasure and honor to have you on the program. tell me this. >> thanks for having me. >> from the scale of things that can go wrong in a space station, ...

If his lawyer of just a court-appointed lawyer, would he have gotten the same treatment? >> we wouldn't be able to find the key. moving on the this. to nasa now that has engineers pulling an all-nighter. they are trying to figure out how to fix a cooling system on the international space station and it is a race against time. abc's clayton sandell reports a final decision on how to make a repair is likely days away. >> reporter: engineering a tricky repair job, 230 miles above the ground. >> what is actually going wrong? >> reporter: mission control troubleshooting how to fix a faulty critic...