There are some issues the Crew-8 astronauts aren’t prepared to speak about

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 she or he simply made it occur,” Barratt mentioned. “So, yeah,  there was this drama. All the pieces labored out high-quality. Once more, regular processes and procedures saved our bacon.”

Barratt mentioned the leak wasn’t attributable to any procedural error because the astronauts ready their fits for the spacewalk.

“It was positively a {hardware} situation,” he mentioned. “There was just a little 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 area station had turned to different duties, resembling experiments, the arrival of a brand new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked on the advanced, earlier than it in the end 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 area station are good to go for the following spacewalk. Nonetheless, the fits are many years outdated, and their authentic designs date again greater than 40 years, when NASA developed the items to be used on the area shuttle. Efforts to develop a substitute go well with 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 House Station and future orbiting analysis outposts.

“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we are going to count on to see some {hardware} points with repeated use and probably not upgrading,” Barratt mentioned.