 FACT: In the first space walk, Hawk is in free fall (i.e.,  "floating" in space) when he grabs a large lever and pulls it to  open the hatch of the Soviet satellite. Unless he was attached to  something massive when he did that, he would have rotated opposite  the direction of the levers rotation. Instead the lever moves but  he doesnt. U.S. astronauts are equipped with special tools designed  to account for the free fall environment. (The term "floating" is  not strictly correct because it is not a fluids buoyancy that  permits astronauts to move freely in orbit. It is because they and  the objects near them are constantly falling towards earth but their  tangential speed is high enough to keep them in orbit.)