Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.
“Closing the airlock was like me grabbing her leg and using it as an end effector to lever it shut, and she just made it happen,” Barratt said. spoke. “Well, there was some drama. Everything went well. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.”
Barratt said the leak was not caused by a procedural error in the astronauts’ preparation of the suit for the spacewalk.
“It was definitely a hardware issue,” he said. “There was a small poppet valve on the interface that wasn’t securely seated, which raised the question of why it wasn’t seated. We solved that problem by replacing the entire umbilical. did.”
By then, NASA’s interest in the space station had shifted to other tasks, including experiments, the arrival of new cargo ships, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule, which was berthed at the complex. The ship departed, leaving the crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t an emergency, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to try the spacewalk again with another astronaut as early as January.
Barratt believes the space station’s spacesuit will be suitable for the next spacewalk. But the suit is decades old, with the original design dating back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the unit for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop alternative suits for use in low Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace terminated a NASA contract to manufacture new spacesuits to service the International Space Station and future orbiting research hubs.
“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we expect to see some hardware issues if we use them repeatedly without really upgrading them,” Barratt said.
