British Astronaut Breaks Space Walk Record

Astronaut Piers Sellers became a record breaker in a narrow field 213 miles above Earth last night when he logged the most hours for a Briton performing spacewalks.

Sellers, who was born in Crowborough, East Sussex, captured the record from veteran astronaut Michael Foale three hours and three minutes into a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. At its conclusion, he had recorded more than 26 hours of 'extra-vehicular activity' from four walks on two space shuttle missions.

'The large planet is below me, which is good,' Sellers said as he and fellow astronaut Michael Fossum emerged from a hatch on the space station to begin testing the load-bearing capabilities of the robotic arm aboard the shuttle Discovery, to which it was docked on Thursday.

The pair enjoyed what Sellers described as 'a real rich view' of a sunset behind Earth before starting the tasks of the spacewalk, which included preliminary repairs to power cables positioned outside the space station.

Fossum, an American, broke off from the repairs to alert his colleague that they were approaching the British Isles. 'Piers, we're coming up on the UK and Ireland,' he said.

'Oh my goodness, wow...' Sellers replied. 'It looks beautiful today.'

The two are due to replace a failed cable during a second spacewalk tomorrow.

Sellers, 51, a scientist who graduated from the universities of Leeds and Edinburgh, is a key figure in Discovery's 13-day mission to the space station to conduct repairs and test safety modifications that were introduced after the 2003 Columbia disaster, in which seven astronauts were killed.

Nasa officials are continuing to study images taken during a close-up inspection of the shuttle's heat-resisting tile shield - the source of the Columbia disaster - from a camera on the 100ft boom, but say there is no indication that Discovery suffered any significant damage during its Independence Day launch.

The five million-mile mission is only the space agency's second since Columbia burnt up as it plunged to Earth and the first since the shuttle fleet was grounded for a further year last summer when foam insulation fell from the external fuel tank at the start of Discovery's original return to flight.