As soon as the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and started repressurizing the airlock.
“Getting the airlock closed was form of me grabbing her legs and utilizing her as an finish effector to lever that factor closed, and he or she simply made it occur,” Barratt stated. “So, yeah, there was this drama. Every thing labored out superb. Once more, regular processes and procedures saved our bacon.”
Barratt stated the leak wasn’t brought on by any procedural error because the astronauts ready their fits for the spacewalk.
“It was positively a {hardware} subject,” he stated. “There was a bit poppet valve on the interface that did not fairly seat, so actually, the query turned why did not that seat? We solved that downside by altering out the entire umbilical.”
By then, NASA’s consideration on the house station had turned to different duties, akin to experiments, the arrival of a brand new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked on the complicated, earlier than it finally departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t pressing, so it needed to wait. NASA now plans to aim the spacewalk once more as quickly as January with a distinct set of astronauts.
Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the house station are good to go for the following spacewalk. Nevertheless, the fits are a long time outdated, and their authentic designs date again greater than 40 years, when NASA developed the items to be used on the house shuttle. Efforts to develop a substitute swimsuit to be used in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to construct new spacesuits for servicing the Worldwide Area Station and future orbiting analysis outposts.
“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we’ll count on to see some {hardware} points with repeated use and probably not upgrading,” Barratt stated.
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