Today's first EVA took us close to Waypoint 324, about 5 minutes away by ATV, which is probably the most lifeless area really close to the Hab. The purpose of this pre-mission EVA was to get used to the flight hardware, especially our new medical monitoring equipment and have the four of us (CDR Frischauf, XO Soucek, FE Hutsteiner and yours truly HSO Groemer) give the media teams a good few shots, especially when it came down to simulate a medical situation with an injured CDR, so we could also practise drag-techniques with the team.

It was getting fairly hot, making the helmet sometimes feel like being in a microwave, but this time we had a new gadget on our side: between the flight overalls and EVA-suits, we all were wearing the brand new cooling vests, graciously donated from Draeger system. These cooling vests are using phase shift materials, which is a fairly new technique which is comprised of crystals which melt above 36° Celsius and in doing so lower the body core temperature by a few degrees, thus reducing the heat load significantly. The only minor downside is an extra weight of a few kilogramms and a limited duty cycle of about 2-3 hours, but still it is worth while using it.

In addition, we are using new gloves similar to dry-suit diving gloves which have a better joint between the EVA-overall and the gloves themselves which simulate real spacesuit-gloves currently being used in the Russian spacesuits superbly.

Given the beautiful pictures and four happy faces after our first out-of-sim preparatory test-EVA, it was a wonderful 3hour-EVA around noon. (No detailed timing information is provided, as this was still out-of-sim).