A spacewalk by two NASA astronauts on the International Space Station ended almost as soon as it began Monday morning when water from one of the space suits began spewing into the airlock.
“There’s water everywhere,” Tracy Dyson, one of the astronauts, reported to mission control.
That was a few minutes after she and Mike Barratt, the other astronaut participating in the spacewalk, switched their spacesuits to battery power, marking the start of the spacewalk at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Time.
“I got an arctic blast across my visor,” Mrs. Dyson reported.
She wiped away a layer of ice, revealing that ice crystals were coming from a maintenance and cooling umbilical cord connected to her space suit. The connections provide power, oxygen and water while astronauts are in the airlock. The leak started when Mrs Dyson unplugged the unit.
“I could see the ice crystals pouring out of there,” Ms Dyson said. “Just like a snow cone machine, ice formed in that harbor.”
Space station controllers in Houston subsequently called off the spacewalk. NASA said the astronauts were never in danger.
The shortened spacewalk was the latest in a series of problems NASA has encountered this month. Other problems included a previously postponed spacewalk and delays in returning a pair of astronauts to Earth aboard a Boeing space capsule known as Starliner, which is on its maiden voyage to the space station with astronauts on board.
On Monday the leak stopped when Mrs Dyson reconnected the umbilical cord. She and Mr Barratt were back on the space station and out of their spacesuits 45 minutes later. Although they never floated outside the hatch, they were still assigned a 31-minute spacewalk – the time from when they turned on the internal batteries to when the airlock was repressurized.
They would spend six and a half hours outside. Their main tasks were to remove a faulty electronics box from a communications antenna and collect samples from the exterior of the space station as part of scientific research to see if microorganisms can survive the harsh, airless, radiation-damaged environment of space .
It was Ms Dyson’s second interrupted spacewalk this month. She and Matthew Dominick, another NASA astronaut currently on the space station, were scheduled to perform the spacewalk on June 13, but that was postponed when Mr. Dominick reported a “space suit discomfort issue.”
NASA provided no additional details about what happened, and Mr. Barratt subsequently replaced Mr. Dominick, who was already scheduled to participate in another spacewalk. “We had a suit ready for him,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s space station program manager, said at a June 18 news conference. “We decided it was wise to go ahead and use Tracy and Mike.”
NASA has another spacewalk planned for July 2, but those plans could now change.
The space suits that NASA astronauts currently wear during space walks are more than forty years old and date back to the beginning of the space shuttle era. The space agency has hired the company Collins Aerospace to supply replacements for use on the space station. (Another company, Axiom Space, is developing spacesuits that NASA astronauts can wear when they walk on the moon.)
Failures in current spacesuits are rare, but potentially serious. In 2013, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned when water pooled in his helmet after a fan pump became blocked. Monday’s problem involved a different part of the space suit.
NASA managers are also still working to understand the problems experienced by Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. With two NASA astronauts on board, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, Starliner successfully docked with the space station on June 6. The mission is part of a shakedown flight of the spacecraft and Starliner’s propulsion system has leaked five times the helium, which is used to push the spacecraft. propellant to the thrusters. Several of the thrusters also malfunctioned when Starliner docked.
Boeing and NASA engineers believe the helium leaks are minor and will not pose a serious problem during the return trip. All but one of the thrusters now appear to be working properly after brief test firings a week ago.
However, NASA managers have also decided to spend more time reviewing the data and have postponed the return until a July date at the earliest. The Starliner spacecraft has been approved for 45 days of docking with the space station, or until July 21. The mission was originally scheduled to last just eight days, and Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams have now been on the space station for 18 days. .