"It would be neat," McArthur added in his distinct North Carolina drawl. "Yes it would be -- living in space."

Taking place amid NASAs most ambitious station assembly mission to date, the daylong excursion was the third of four spacewalks planned for the agencys 100th shuttle flight.

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Coming up Wednesday: Daring test-flights of jet backpacks that outpost construction workers would use to zoom back to the station if their safety tethers snapped, casting them adrift in the deadly vacuum of space.

Astronaut Leroy Chiao works on the Z-1 truss at the space station.

Astronauts Jeff Wisoff and Michael Lopez-Alegria also will "clear the deck" of the stations new rooftop truss, which was mounted atop the 13-story outpost last Saturday.

Shaped like a giant cube, the $273 million truss will serve as a temporary mounting platform for a pair of power-producing solar arrays to be launched aboard shuttle Endeavour on November 30.

The spacewalking work carried out by McArthur and Chiao largely was aimed at prepping for the arrival of the huge solar panels, which will have a wingspan of 240 feet (73 meters) once unfurled in orbit.

The boxy power converters they installed will route electricity to the station from the arrays. Like large transformers on Earth, the converters will reduce and regulate the amount of voltage being fed into the outpost.

To do the installation job, the astronauts first unbolted the 129-pound (58-kilogram) converters -- which are about the size of a large footlocker -- from the sidewalls of the shuttles cargo bay.

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Anchored to the end of Discoverys 50-foot (15-meter) robot arm, Chiao lugged the converters up to the truss with an assist from Lopez-Alegria, who was operating the Canadian-built crane from inside the shuttle.

Astronaut Bill McArthur works in Discovery's cargo bay before heading up to the International Space Station.

"Take your time, Mike, Im enjoying the ride," Chiao said as Lopez-Alegria lifted the spacewalker up to his orbital work site.

"Its like riding a wave," said McArthur.

"Easy as falling in love," Chiao replied.

Scaling up the station with a cordless screwdriver in hand, McArthur then helped Chiao fasten the transformers to the 9-ton truss. The lofty vantage point gave the two spacewalkers a panoramic view of the blue planet below.

"Hey Bill, what coast is that were flying over?" Lopez-Alegria asked.

"Is that Gibraltar?" Chiao guessed.

"Yes it is," McArthur said.

"Beautiful!" Chiao shouted. "Wow!"

"Woo-hoo!" McArthur exclaimed.

"Ill take geography for $200, please, Alex," Lopez-Alegria joked -- a reference to the crews favorite TV game show -- Jeopardy -- and its host, Alex Trevek.

And so it went as the crew kept up a near-constant banter during the rest of their spacewalking work, which mainly involved running electrical cables to the truss and a new shuttle docking port mounted to the outpost Monday.

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Other mop-up work included stowing a toolbox outside the station and removing a keel pin that had been used to hold the new truss in the shuttles cargo bay during Discoverys launch last week. McArthur and Chiao repositioned the pin up inside the truss to make way for the soon-to-be-delivered solar arrays.

Mission Discovery

Look here for the latest news from NASA's STS-92.

The six-hour, 48-minute spacewalk afforded the astronauts some unrivaled views of eight orbital sunrises and sunsets, and both McArthur and Chiao clearly enjoyed watching curtains of color spread out across the horizon.

"Ah, a beautiful sunset," an awed Chiao said at one point.

"Thats one of my favorite things to look at in space -- the sunrises and sunsets," veteran spacewalker Dan Barry said from NASAs Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.

"We go around the Earth so fast that the sunrise and sunset happen 16 times faster than you see them on Earth. So the Sun really explodes out of the horizon," he said.

"You can actually see the motion of the Sun and the Moon across the sky. When you go from horizon to horizon in 45 minutes, the motion is fast enough to perceive, so it is a spectacular part of spaceflight."

Yet another coveted part of spaceflight: Bellying up to the dinner table, so to say, after an arduous spacewalk. Clad in cumbersome spacesuits for hours at a time, spacewalkers can drink a limited amount of water -- but they cant snack -- while working in open space.

And by the end of the day, McArthur and Chiao were more than ready to eat.

"You having steak, tonight?" Lopez-Alegria asked as the duo wrapped up their work and headed back to their mothership.

"Yes, sir!" McArthur bellowed.

"Maybe I can scrounge one out of the pantry," Lopez-Alegria replied.

Said Barry: "I know theyll be ready for the steak dinner when they get inside."

Discoverys crew -- which includes six American astronauts and a Japanese mission specialist -- plans to depart the station Friday, heading off on a two-day trip back to Earth.

Landing at Kennedy Space Center is scheduled at 2:10 p.m. EDT (18:10 GMT) Sunday.