Two NASA astronauts’ spacewalk on the International Space Station ended almost as soon as it began Monday morning when water began leaking from one of the spacesuits in the airlock.
“There’s water everywhere,” Tracy Dyson, one of the astronauts, reported to mission control.
That was minutes after she and Mike Barratt, the other astronaut on the spacewalk, switched their spacesuits to battery power, marking the start of the spacewalk at 8:46 a.m. ET.
“I got arctic blast all over my visor,” reported Ms. Dyson.
She brushed away a layer of ice, allowing her to see that ice crystals were coming from an umbilical service and cooling unit connected to her space suit. The connections provide power, oxygen and water while the astronauts are in the airlock. The leak started when Mrs. Dyson turned off the appliance.
“I could see the ice crystals flowing in there,” Ms Dyson said. “Just like a snow cone machine, ice was forming in that harbor.”
Then controllers at the space station in Houston canceled the spacewalk. NASA said the astronauts were never in danger.
The shortened spacewalk was the latest in a series of problems NASA has faced this month. Other problems include an earlier postponed spacewalk and delays in the return to Earth of a pair of astronauts aboard a Boeing space capsule known as the Starliner, which is on its first trip to the space station with astronauts aboard.
On Monday the leakage stopped when Mrs Dyson reconnected the umbilical cord. She and Mr Barratt returned to the space station and emerged from their suits 45 minutes later. Although they never floated outside the hatch, they were still credited with a 31-minute spacewalk—the length of time from when they turned on the internal batteries until the hatch was re-pressurized.
They were scheduled to be out for six and a half hours. Their main tasks were to remove a malfunctioning electronics box from a communications antenna and collect samples from the outside of the space station as part of a scientific study to see if microorganisms could survive in the harsh, airless, radiation-scarred environment of space.
For Ms. Dyson, it was the second aborted spacewalk this month. She and Matthew Dominik, another NASA astronaut currently on the space station, were due to perform the spacewalk on June 13, but that was postponed when Mr Dominik reported a “spacesuit discomfort issue”.
NASA did not provide further details about what happened, and Mr Barratt then replaced Mr Dominique, who was already scheduled to take part in the next spacewalk. “We had a suit ready for him,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s space station program manager, said at a June 18 news conference. “We decided it made sense to move forward and use Tracy and Mike.”
NASA has another spacewalk planned for July 2, but those plans may change.
The spacesuits that NASA astronauts currently wear for spacewalks are more than four decades old, dating back to the dawn of the space shuttle era. The space agency has hired Collins Aerospace to provide replacements for use on the space station. (Another company, Axiom Space, is developing spacesuits for NASA astronauts to wear when they walk on the moon.)
Malfunctions of current spacesuits are rare but potentially dangerous. In 2013, Luca Parmitano, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, nearly drowned when water pooled in his helmet after the ventilator pump became blocked. Monday’s problem involved a different part of the suit.
NASA managers are also still working to understand the problems facing Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Carrying two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, the Starliner successfully docked with the space station on June 6. The mission is part of a spacecraft flight, and the Starliner’s propulsion system suffered five leaks of helium, which is used to push propellant to the thrusters. Several of the thrusters also failed as the Starliner made its docking approach.
Boeing and NASA engineers believe the helium leaks are small and will not pose a major problem during reentry. All thrusters except one now appear to be working properly after brief test firings a week ago.
However, NASA managers also decided to spend more time reviewing the data and delayed the return until a date in July at the earliest. The Starliner spacecraft has been approved for a 45-day docking with the space station, or until July 21. The mission was originally planned to last just eight days, but Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams have now been on the space station for 18 days.
