Station Crew Set for Second Spacewalk

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The international space station’s crew received last-minute instructions and encouragement Tuesday for a second shot at spacewalking repairs, not quite a week after a finicky switch on one of the suits terminated the first attempt.

“Good luck to you,” Mission Control radioed.

Astronaut Mike Fincke and cosmonaut Gennady Padalka will open the hatch at about 5:40 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and float outside with a spare circuit board, to replace one that stopped working and cut power to a crucial steering device in April.

Their spacewalk on Thursday lasted only 14 minutes.

Mission Control detected a rapid loss of pressure in Fincke’s primary oxygen tank, and ordered both men back inside. The problem was later traced to the oxygen-flow switch on the astronaut’s Russian-made suit.

The spacemen will wear the same Russian suits again, but pay greater attention to the switches and oxygen flow.

“Thank you for your patience,” Fincke told flight controllers. “I think this will go nice and smooth.”

Fincke and Padalka should be wearing NASA spacesuits for the excursion, but two of the three on board are unusable and no more can be sent up until shuttle flights resume. The switch to Russian suits requires the men to go out the Russian side of the station, 80 feet to 100 feet from the fried circuit breaker on the U.S. side.

They would have faced a 30-foot trek from the U.S. hatch.

Besides the unprecedented travel distance over potentially dangerous terrain, the planned six-hour spacewalk will be further complicated by an odd combination of Russian and U.S. gear, and expected communication blackouts. In addition, the spacewalk will require switching between Russian and English, and between control centers in Moscow and Houston.

It will be only the third time that the station is left empty during a spacewalk, a situation necessitated by the diminished crew size – a direct result of the Columbia accident and subsequent grounding of the shuttle fleet.

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