NASA moves up first all-female spacewalk to fix ISS power issue

Emre Kelly
Florida Today

Teams have decided to move up the previously planned first all-female spacewalk to this week to tackle a power issue on the International Space Station, NASA said on Tuesday.

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will venture outside the orbiting outpost starting at 7:50 a.m. Thursday or Friday, depending on station schedules, and spend more than three hours replacing a faulty battery charge / discharge unit, or BCDU. The units have previously been replaced using a robotic arm, but the newly failed unit is too far away for it to reach.

The units regulate how much energy flows from the station's massive solar panels to battery units, which are used to provide power during nighttime passes around Earth. Three previous spacewalks had been planned to replace lithium-ion batteries, but those will be rescheduled until the latest BCDU issue is resolved.

The hardware failure does present some concern, especially since another BCDU was replaced in April and there are only four more backups on station. In total, there are 24 operational BCDUs.

"There's some level of concern," said Kenny Todd, manager of ISS operations and integration. "It's absolutely a concern at this point when you don't know what's going on and we're still scratching our heads looking at the data."

This week's spacewalk – Koch's fourth and Meir's first – will see the astronauts move the new hardware, install it, then return the faulty version to the airlock for future investigation. Todd said SpaceX's next uncrewed Dragon flight to the ISS, its 19th, can pick up the BCDU and return it for inspection after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean in December or January.

Koch and Meir will have some leftover time during their extravehicular activity, or EVA, to finish additional tasks like hardware installations for the European Space Agency.

The planned EVA comes almost seven months since the first all-female spacewalk was canceled due to a lack of properly sized spacesuits for astronauts Koch and Anne McClain. Astronaut Nick Hague ended up joining Koch instead.

But this time, the right spacesuit hardware is in place.

"It will be an exciting event and something that we'll reflect on certainly after the fact," said Megan McArthur, deputy chief of NASA’s astronaut office. "In truth, in terms of looking at the workload that we have coming forward, this was the right crew to send out to do this set of tasks."

"All of our crew members are completely qualified to do this and I think the fact that it will be two women is a reflection of the fact that we have so many capable, qualified women in the (astronaut) office," she said.

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.