Two spacewalks are planned for this month to service science experiments attached to the outside of the International Space Station (ISS)—the first time NASA astronauts are set to step outside the orbital lab since a series of water leak incidents halted the extravehicular activities.
Following the long pause, NASA is set to resume spacewalks, with four astronauts preparing for two separate missions outside the ISS on January 16 and 23, the space agency announced in a blog post this week. NASA astronauts will exit the space station for the first time in nearly seven months after faulty spacesuits previously put crew members at risk. Russian crews weren’t affected, as a pair of cosmonauts conducted work outside the station this past December.
NASA suspended spacewalks after a terrifying spacesuit leak forced the space agency to halt all extravehicular activity. In June 2024, two NASA astronauts were preparing to exit the ISS for a spacewalk when it was abruptly called off due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit on astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “There’s water everywhere,” Dyson could be heard saying during the live feed from the ISS.
A few months later, NASA announced that it had resolved the issue by replacing a seal and umbilical cord connecting the spacesuit to the ISS and re-pressurizing the leaky spacesuit.
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Nick Hague will be the first two astronauts to exit the ISS on January 16 at 7 a.m. ET to replace a rate gyro assembly, 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 particle physics experiment module mounted on the ISS, for future upgrades.
Another pair of astronauts, Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore, will carry out the second spacewalk on January 23. Williams and Wilmore launched to the ISS on board Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft in June 2024, and have been stuck waiting in low Earth orbit for a ride home. The astronauts are scheduled to return back to Earth in March on board a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
NASA’s spacesuits are in desperate need of an upgrade. The suits donned by astronauts outside the ISS are more than 40 years old and nearing the end of their lifeline. NASA’s extravehicular mobility units (EMUs) were first designed in the 1970s for the space shuttle program. The spacesuits have not had the best track record in the past few years. In May 2022, NASA suspended spacewalks outside the ISS following a series of potentially life-threatening incidents of water leaking into astronauts’ helmets during their spacewalks. Earlier in 2013, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano noticed a water leak inside his helmet that forced him to abruptly end the spacewalk.
NASA turned to its commercial partners to develop new spacesuits, handing contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in June 2022 worth a combined value of $3.5 billion. Hopefully the spacesuits keep it together for the upcoming spacewalks while NASA preps its new line of suits.
