Astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren will step out of the International Space Station to attach equipment used for receiving commercial crew vehicles. Michael Lammers is Flight Director at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“U.S. spacewalk 32 is scheduled for October 28th, and U.S. spacewalk 33 is planned for November 6th,” Lammers said. “Each spacewalk is planned for our standard six-and-a-half hours outside the airlock.”
The International Space Station
Spacewalks have been curtailed this year a bit, after unsuccessful launches of some cargo vehicles over the past few months. Kenneth Todd is ISS Operations Integration Manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“Probably one of the most important objectives that we had laid for this year was to do some reconfigurations as part of getting ready for some of our commercial crew vehicles in the next couple of years. And so we had set some milestones forward for ourselves to try and accomplish this year,” Todd said.
The manager said the work will go on, even though some of those commercial space transports suffered setbacks.
“And while we haven’t been able to do everything we hoped we would, just because some of that cargo didn’t get to orbit, we did have a significant amount of cargo that was on orbit that allowed us to move forward with those tasks,” Todd said.
November 2nd is the 15-year anniversary of having a human constantly in orbit. Scott Kelly just celebrated his 208th day in space, as part of a year-long mission.