"No sign of the spatula. I think it's gone, gone,
gone."
Source: Astronaut Piers Sellers, during the
third and final spacewalk Wednesday of the STS-121 shuttle
Discovery mission, on the disappearance of one of the six special
"spatulas" he and crewmember Michael Fossum used to test the
peanut-butter-like repair putty NASA says might one day be used to
repair the shuttle's carbon-carbon heat shield tiles. Sellers
received some good-hearted ribbing from Mission Control over the
loss... as he was asked to reverify his spatual count before
reeentering the orbiter.