Two spacewalks are scheduled this month to service scientific experiments located outside the International Space Station (ISS), marking the first time NASA astronauts will venture outside the orbiting laboratory since a series of water leak incidents halted off-ship activities.
After a long hiatus, NASA plans to resume spacewalks, and four astronauts are preparing for two separate missions outside the ISS on January 16 and 23, the space agency said in a blog post this week. The NASA astronauts will leave the space station for the first time in nearly seven months after faulty spacesuits previously put crew members in danger. The Russian crews were not injured as a pair of astronauts worked outside the station last December.
NASA has suspended spacewalks after a horrific spacesuit leak forced the space agency to halt all off-ship activities. In June 2024, two NASA astronauts were preparing to exit the ISS for a spacewalk when it was suddenly canceled due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “There’s water everywhere,” Dyson said during a live broadcast from the ISS.
A few months later, NASA announced that it had solved the problem by replacing the seal and umbilical connecting the suit to the ISS and resealing the leaking suit.
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Nick Hague will be the first two astronauts to leave the ISS on January 16 at 7 a.m. EST to replace the gyroscope unit and service the NICER X-ray telescope, an X-ray observatory that studies neutron stars, black holes and other phenomena while attached to the outside of the ISS. The pair will also prepare the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a module for particle physics experiments installed on the ISS, for future upgrades.
Another pair of astronauts, Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore, will make their second spacewalk on January 23. Williams and Wilmore launched to the ISS aboard Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft in June 2024 and have been stuck in low Earth orbit waiting to return home. The astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth in March aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
NASA’s spacesuits are in desperate need of an upgrade. The spacesuits worn by astronauts outside the ISS are more than 40 years old and are nearing the end of their useful life. NASA’s Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) were first developed in the 1970s for the space shuttle program. Over the past few years, the spacesuits have not proven themselves in the best way. In May 2022, NASA suspended spacewalks outside the ISS after a series of potentially life-threatening incidents involving water leaks in astronauts’ helmets during spacewalks. In early 2013, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano noticed a water leak inside his helmet, forcing him to suddenly stop spacewalking.
NASA has turned to its commercial partners to develop new spacesuits, signing contracts with Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in June 2022 for a total of $3.5 billion. It is hoped that the suits will help withstand future spacewalks while NASA prepares a new line of suits.
