By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA said a “spacesuit discomfort issue” forced the cancellation of a spacewalk planned for two U.S. astronauts outside the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, about an hour before their repair mission was scheduled to begin.
NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matt Dominick, two of the orbiting laboratory’s six U.S. astronauts, donned their spacesuits early Thursday morning to prepare for a roughly six-hour trip outside the ISS to conduct routine repairs and a science mission, a NASA livestream showed.
While other U.S. crew members prepared the two astronauts in the station’s Quest airlock – the exit module that separates the station’s interior from the vacuum of space – NASA astronaut Mike Barratt asked flight controllers in Houston for a private communications line to discuss a medical problem.
A few minutes later, a NASA spokeswoman said in the live stream: “Today’s spacewalk will not proceed as planned.”
“The spacewalk today, June 13, at the International Space Station could not be completed as planned due to a spacesuit discomfort issue,” NASA later stated on its website.
The spacewalk was to be the 90th in the space station’s 23-year history and the second this year. It would have been the fourth spacewalk for Dixon, who first flew into space in 2007, and the first for Dominick.
It was not clear what caused the spacesuit discomfort or whether a medical problem of another astronaut played a role.
Previous spacewalks have been canceled because of problems with the station’s spacesuits, which were designed nearly half a century ago and have only undergone minor revisions and refurbishments. NASA’s inspector general has said they are ripe for an upgrade, which NASA is having Raytheon’s Collins Aerospace perform.
Before canceling Thursday’s spacewalk, NASA inadvertently broadcast a simulated emergency involving astronauts on the ISS being treated for decompression sickness on its live YouTube feed on Wednesday night, sparking public concern about the health of the U.S. crew members.
NASA stated that there was no real emergency and that “the audio was inadvertently misdirected from an ongoing simulation in which crew members and ground teams train various scenarios in space and does not relate to a real emergency.”
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
