Russia antenna repair issues push spacewalk into overtime

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A crucial Russian antenna outside the International Space Station ended up getting stuck and then extended too far Friday following spacewalking repairs.

NASA’s Mission Control reported that the antenna was still working. Nevertheless, Russian space officials were convening a special team to see whether further action would be necessary. The antenna is used for communications with Russia’s Mission Control outside Moscow.

The trouble arose toward the end of the longer than expected spacewalk, after Commander Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov successfully replaced an electronics box as part of the antenna’s upgrade.

The pair watched in dismay as the antenna got hung up on the Russian side of the complex and could not be extended properly. The antenna — a long boom with a 4-foot dish at the end — had been folded up at the beginning of the spacewalk so its electronics package could be replaced.

Misurkin and Shkaplerov pushed, as flight controllers near Moscow tried repeatedly, via remote commanding, to rotate the antenna into the right position. Finally, someone shouted in Russian, “It’s moving. It’s in place.”

By this time, it was seven hours into what should have been a 6½hour spacewalk. NASA’s Mission Control said from Houston that the antenna somehow wound up in a position 180 degrees farther than anticipated.

Earlier, Misurkin removed the obsolete electronics box and used both gloved hands to shove it away from the space station. The bundle tumbled harmlessly away, high above the North Atlantic.

“There it goes,” NASA’s Mission Control reported from Houston. The 60-pound box — measuring just a couple of feet, or less than a meter — was hurled in a direction that will not intersect with the space station, according to NASA officials.