NASA’s spacewalk cancellation is literally a pain in the neck

NASA had to postpone a planned spacewalk to install new solar panels outside the International Space Station after one of its astronauts complained of a pinched nerve in his neck.

“Thank you for everyone’s interest”, Mark Vande Hei, Flight Engineer for Expedition 65, tweeted yesterday. “I have a nerve stuck in my neck that made us postpone today’s spacewalk. The support from family, friends and NASA leadership has been fantastic. I can’t wait to install this IRSA Mod kit. Today was just not a good day.

Once installed, iROSA, or International Space Station deployment Solar Array, will strengthen the power grid of the ISS and provide more electrical power for the “many scientific research and investigations carried out every day, as well as for the continued operations of the platform in orbit.” according to at NASA.

Vande Hei, along with JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, was scheduled to make the 6.5-hour spacewalk on August 24. NASA canceled it with less than 24 hours notice, saying the postponement was due to a “minor medical issue” a medical emergency,” through an agency Press release.

“A pinched nerve is a compressed nerve” according to at the Cleveland Clinic. “The surrounding tissue that presses on the nerve roots can cause pain, numbness and tingling in different areas of your body.” Pinched nerves, in this case the cervical nerves, can be painful, but they tend to go away with rest and can be treated with medication and physiotherapy.

A Russian Soyuz MS-18 crew capsule delivered Vande Hei to the orbital outpost on April 9, 2021, and he is expected to stay on the ISS for an entire year. The NASA astronaut was originally scheduled to a six-month mission, but Russian plans to shoot a movie aboard the station meant he lost her coming home. The filming from this film, called Vyzov (Challenge in English), is already proving to be another type of neck pain.

NASA says iROSA installation is not time sensitive and that he now assess the next best opportunity for spacewalk. It won’t happen anytime soon because of Events to come, namely the arrival of the SpaceX CRS-23 cargo mission, scheduled to launch on August 28, and two independent Russian spacewalks scheduled for September 3 and 9. Cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrovnik will install the newly arrived Nauka module, which caused all of this difficulty a few weeks ago.

Thus, at the earliest, NASA will make its spacewalk in mid-September. Vande Hei should be feeling better by then.