Astronauts prep for long-awaited Russian lab
Old spacewalking compartment will be junked to make room
The International Space Station’s two Russian astronauts ventured out on a spacewalk Wednesday to prepare for next year’s arrival of a long-delayed lab.
Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-sverchkov — dubbed Sergey1and Sergey 2 by flight controllers — left four Americans and one Japanese inside.
The space station population grew to seven late Monday with the arrival of a Spacex capsule, making the company’s second astronaut flight.
Ryzhikov and Kud-sverchkov, on their first spacewalk, spent nearly two hours doing extra leak checks before exiting from an air lock.
The compartment has been at the space station since 2009, but it was being used for the
first time by spacewalkers.
“Congratulations. You are out!” Russian Mission Control radioed from near Moscow.
Russia’s old spacewalking compartment will be removed and junked next year to make room for the research lab Nauka — Russian for “science.” Sev
eral Russian-directed spacewalks will be required to deal with all this. The plan calls for attaching a cargo ship to the old Pirs module in order to guide it to a fiery re-entry.
The new 20-tonne lab — stretching13 metres long — is so big that it will be launched from
Kazakhstan by a powerful Proton rocket. Once at the orbiting outpost, it will double as an air lock and docking port.
The science lab’s launch — nearly a decade late because of a long string of repairs — is targeted for sometime early next year.