Lombard native takes walk in space
Lombard native and current astronaut Dan Tani egged on conspiracy theorists Sunday morning when he strolled out of the international space station.
Never the one to miss out on the chance for humor, Tani said the "model" station looked great.
It was a jovial nod to those naysayers who say the first moon walk never really happened and was actually set up on a sound stage.
Tani and the other astronauts went up in the space shuttle Discovery to delivery a bus-sized module named Harmony, which was attached to the station on Friday.
As Tani and his partner on Sunday's spacewalk, Scott Parazynski, floated out of the airlock just before 5 a.m. Sunday, Parazynski asked Tani - who came out feet first - what he thought.
"Is it good to be back, dude?"
"Man, it's good to be back in space," Tani said. "I tell ya, they did a good job on this space station model."
"Well, the real thing's going to look just like this," Parazynski countered.
The men then headed off on a six hour and 33 minute mission to help relocate a solar panel and attach external hardware to the Harmony model. Tani, a 1979 Glenbard East High School graduate, will not return to Earth with the space shuttle Discovery crew but will remain on the space station until mid-December.