NASA orders urgent spacewalks to fix the International Space Station
IF IT weren't real, you'd think it was straight out of the film Gravity. A crisis situation is unfolding on the International Space Station.
IF it weren't real, you'd think it was straight out of the film Gravity. A crisis situation is unfolding on the International Space Station.
NASA has today ordered up a series of urgent spacewalks to fix the system that controls the temperature of the equipment on the station.
While the astronauts - station commander cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, Americans Rick Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins, Russians Mikhail Tyurin and Sergey Ryazanaskiy, and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata - are safe and comfortable, NASA wants the system back up to full strength.
Another failure could leave the orbiting outpost even more vulnerable than it is right now.
The US space agency decided to send two American astronauts out as soon as possible to replace a critical cooling pump that contains a bad valve.
It's a big job that will require two and possibly three spacewalks on Saturday, Monday and next Wednesday, Christmas Day.
US-led spacewalks have been on hold since July, when an Italian astronaut almost drowned because of water that leaked into his helmet.
As the blockbuster film Gravity so effectively portrays a space walk can turn into disaster. In the film, medical engineer Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) spiral out into the abyss of space when disaster strikes during a space walk to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
Half of the station's cooling system shut down last week. The six-man crew had to turn off non-essential equipment, including science experiments.
Flight controllers tried in vain to fix the valve remotely, then came up with a plan to use another valve to regulate the temperature.
Some success was reported, and for a while, engineers thought the space station could limp along with this short-term solution. But on Tuesday, managers opted for spacewalks right now
The issue is the same type of pump - a bulky 780-pound (354kg) bundle - that was replaced by spacewalking astronauts in 2010. Three spacewalks were needed then.
The lessons learned may enable astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Michael Hopkins to finish the job more quickly.
Mastracchio, a veteran spacewalker, and Hopkins, a first-time space flyer, trained for such a repair before rocketing into orbit. They have been prepping all week, just in case.
"Have not looked out the window in 4 days," Mastracchio said in a tweet. "Too busy building space suits. Where did I put my gloves?"
What happens if everything goes wrong? NASA said there are two Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the space station for an evacuation.
"If there were an emergency on the space station, the crew could use the Soyuz to leave the space station and return to Earth," according to NASA.
"Russia helps the United States run the International Space Station ... but only Russian spacecraft carry people to it right now."
Astronauts have ventured outside of their spaceship on Christmas Day only once, way back in 1973 during Skylab, America's first space station.
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