Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.
“Getting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just made it happen,” Barratt said. “So, yeah, there was this drama. Everything worked out fine. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.”
Barratt said the leak wasn’t caused by any procedural error as the astronauts prepared their suits for the spacewalk.
“It was definitely a hardware issue,” he said. “There was a little poppet valve on the interface that didn’t quite seat, so really, the question became why didn’t that seat? We solved that problem by changing out the whole umbilical.”
By then, NASA’s attention on the space station had turned to other tasks, such as experiments, the arrival of a new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked at the complex, before it ultimately departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t urgent, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to attempt the spacewalk again as soon as January with a different set of astronauts.
Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the space station are good to go for the next spacewalk. However, the suits are decades old, and their original designs date back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the units for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop a replacement suit for use in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to build new spacesuits for servicing the International Space Station and future orbiting research outposts.
“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use and not really upgrading,” Barratt said.
