Spacewalk today: International Space Station acquires new mooring port for essential upgrade of Boeing and SpaceX tours

Two NASA astronauts floated in front of the International Space Station Wednesday morning to attach a second mooring port for commercial crew ships built by Boeing and SpaceX. They also planned to route the cables to extend the lab's external wireless network and provide backup power to the station's robot arm.

Floating in the airlock of the station, astronauts Nick Hague and Drew Morgan turned their spacesuit into a battery at 8:27 am EDT to officially begin an exit in the space of six and a half hours, the fifth since the beginning of the year and the fourth by NASA astronauts.

For identification, the Hague EV-1 call sign wears a red striped jumpsuit with the # 11 helmet camera. Morgan, EV-2, wears an unmarked jumpsuit and uses Helmetcam 18. This is the third exit in the Hague space, which launched at the station on March 14, and the first for Morgan, who reached the outpost on the 20th. July.

Astronauts Nick Hague (left) and Drew Morgan float outside the Quest Airlock for an exit into space in order to secure a new docking port at the International Space Station.

Credit

Hague and Morgan planned to electrically connect the new International IDA Adapter (IDA) to the front port of the Harmony front module, using power cables routed three years ago in the previous two outlets.

Once the flight controllers confirmed that IDA, which amounted to $ 22.5 million, was well locked, the astronauts were planning to install cables to expand the network. external wireless lab and to connect a jumper providing backup power to the robot arm.

The IDA cables previously routed "have been baked in the sun and have been exposed to UV (ultraviolet rays) and AO (Atomic Oxygen) .We therefore expect them to be very difficult to handle and route", said Alex Kanelakos, the officer in charge of space walking in space. Johnson Space Center in Houston. "This is mainly due to the fact that they are going to be stiff and want to keep the shape rolled up."

The US segment of the space station includes four ports where the visiting vehicles can dock alone or be moored by the robotic arm of the laboratory. The Russian segment also includes four ports used by unmanned Progress freighters and Soyuz crew ferries.

The space shuttles were moored to the front of the Harmony module, and this port was already equipped with an international docking adapter built by Boeing that could accommodate the SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry or the CST- 100 Boeing Starliner.

Two Earth-facing ports, one on Harmony and the other on the Unity Core Module, are used to dock visiting cargo ships built by SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency. . Cargo ships are fired to dock by the robotic arm of the station and these ports do not require capture mechanisms in an IDA.

NASA launched the first IDA aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship in June 2015, but its Falcon 9 rocket suffered a catastrophic failure on its way to orbit, destroying the Dragon and its payload. IDA-2 was successfully launched later and installed on the front port of Harmony. IDA-3, the subject of the release in the space of Wednesday, replaces the one that had been lost in 2015.

Space shuttles were once moored at the station where IDA-2 is now installed. IDA-3, connected to the upper port of the Harmony module, will provide a second port for US commercial and second generation cargo ships.

NASA

"This really creates the second docking port for not only commercial crew vehicles, but one of our cargo vehicles will dock there in the not-too-distant future," said Kirk Shireman, Station Program Manager. space at the Johnson Space Center. "It's really important that we have this extra capacity."

Boeing hopes to launch the Starliner capsule on an unmanned test flight in October, followed by a test flight with three crew members on board before the end of the year. . SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft on an unmanned flight to get to the station in March, but the company is still recovering from a failure of the April tests and it is unclear when its first mission with crew could take off.

But the first flights will be moored at the advanced port of the station. Later, SpaceX's second-generation crew ships and cargo Dragon will also begin using the upper port. Shireman said having two ports with active mooring mechanisms will allow NASA to ensure that US astronauts are still on board the space station.

"It really helps us make sure we have people on board all the time," he said. "It's number one." "Number two is that at least one of our freight vehicles will come to the dock (at an IDA) so you need to have an open port.

"And finally, NASA has launched this great initiative to do all kinds of business activities.One of them is the mission of private astronauts .We therefore expect that other private vehicles go up and bring visitors into the ISS on this docking port. need to have this capability. "