Honey, Have You Seen My Hammer?

My Dad was quite the handy man and his workshop contained enough tools to supply a Home Depot. Those tools were his. Mom never touched them, nor did she have much interest in them. He had a specific plan for storing his tools and he always knew where each one was.

I have many of those tools myself now, his wish before he died, and I’d like to think those tools and others I acquired myself over the years are mine. I also have a plan for tool storage, but my wife is fairly handy with tools herself and she uses “my” tools all the time. Her plan differs from my plan and I often have to ask for the whereabouts of “my” tools.

So I was quite amused to learn that astronauts lost a bag of tools last week … in space! The bag floated away and is now orbiting the Earth on a path just ahead of the space station the astronauts were working on. In fact, if you look in the right place at the right time, you can see the tool bag’s trek across the night sky.



The contents of the orbiting tool bag? A couple of grease guns, a scraper tool and some large trash bags. The cost? $100,000. For a grease gun and trash bags?! Don’t they know there’s a sale at Home Depot?

By the way, the astronaut who accidentally let go of the bag of tools is somebody’s wife. Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper is the lead space walker on this mission and her job is to clean and lubricate a jammed solar panel on the space station. Her husband is a NASA engineer in charge of the equipment used for her training. That means he is in charge of the tools. I guess their tool storage plans aren’t exactly in sync either.



Click for more:

The bag streaks by in the night sky.

The story on Space.com

Track the bag.