Suni Williams wasn’t planning to participate in a spacewalk when she arrived aboard the International Space Station last year—but she also wasn’t planning her eight-day trip to turn into a ten-month tenure, either.
At the time of writing, Williams and ISS crewmate, Nick Hague, are conducting NASA’s first spacewalk in over a year. The pair are scheduled to spend roughly 6.5 hours in the vacuum of space, where they will work on a number of long overdue external repairs and equipment assessments.
“The duo will remove and replace a rate gyro assembly that helps provide orientation control for the station, install patches to cover damaged areas of light filters for an X-ray telescope called NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer), and replace a reflector device used for navigational data on one of the international docking adapters,” NASA explained in its spacewalk preview on Wednesday. “The pair also will check access areas and connector tools that will be used for future maintenance work on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.”
It’s been an unexpected stay for Williams and her original mission partner, Butch Wilmore. The pair launched aboard Boeing’s (much-delayed) Starliner spacecraft on June 5th, 2024, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Force Station near Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shortly after docking with the ISS, however, mission engineers detected multiple issues with Starliner’s thrusters, putting the astronauts’ return timeline into question. The team ultimately decided to play it safe and remote pilot Boeing’s first commercial spaceship back to Earth, leaving Williams and Wilmore not “stranded” in the technical sense of the term—but very much lacking an immediate ride home.
After some ISS crew schedule reshuffling, NASA announced the pair would swap out for two of the astronauts previously scheduled for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 turnover mission. That, too, has since been delayed, however. Williams and Wilmore are currently slated to finally make it back to Earth in late March or early April. In the meantime, the astronauts have kept busy aboard the ISS by assisting in a number of onboard experiments—as well as watering plants and fixing urine pumps.
NASA initially expected to conduct its space walk last summer with astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matt Dominick, but scrubbed the mission after one of them reported a “spacesuit discomfort issue.” A further examination determined the suit’s cooling loop had sprung a leak, which subsequently allowed water to drip into the airlock chamber. The issue has since been fixed, allowing today’s spacewalk to proceed as originally intended. This marks the eighth spacewalk for Williams, who previously served aboard the ISS in 2006-2007.
And those jealous on behalf of Williams’ Starliner partner, don’t worry—Butch Wilmore is on the docket to exit the ISS during another spacewalk with Williams next week.
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