NASA sets spacewalk dates for Expedition 63 crew

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy during a 2013 spacewalk when he was part of Expedition 36. Credit: NASA

With everything reportedly going well for the Demo-2 Crew Dragon mission aboard the International Space Station, NASA has announced dates for a series of upcoming spacewalks to continue replacing batteries aboard the outpost’s exterior truss.

NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have been aboard the ISS since May 31, 2020, some 19 hours after launching inside Crew Dragon Endeavour from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to mark the first orbital human spaceflight from U.S. soil in nearly nine years. They joined the in-progress Expedition 63 crew, which includes NASA astronaut and station commander Chris Cassidy as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who have been at the outpost since April. 

The Demo-2 mission is a crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. Initially envisioned as a two week flight, Hurley and Behnken are now expected to remain aboard the ISS until August in order to augment the three-person Expedition 63 crew before the first Commercial Crew Program crew rotation flight as early as late summer.

NASA astronauts Doug Hurley, left, and Bob Behnken discuss the performance of the Demo-2 Crew Dragon with controllers on the ground. Credit: NASA

In addition to evaluating features of Crew Dragon, Hurley and Behnken are also expected to help out with science and maintenance tasks around the outpost, including a series of spacewalks.

“Two NASA astronauts will exit the orbital lab on June 26 and July 1 to continue replacing batteries that store and distribute power collected from the solar arrays,” NASA’s Mark Garcia updated in an agency news blog.

According to NASA, Cassidy and Behnken are slated to begin work on the final series of spacewalks to replace aging nickel-hydrogen batteries on the S6 truss segment on the station truss’s far starboard side. They’ll be swapping them out with new, more-efficient lithium-ion batteries, which were brought to the ISS via the recent Kounotori 9 cargo ship, which launched in May from Japan.

Four spacewalks are being planned with the final two penciled in for July 6 and July 11. However, these are subject to change.

A fifth spacewalk is also planned for Cassidy and Behnken in late July. That outing would see the duo work to install a Ka-band antenna on the Columbus module and activate the recently-delivered Bartolomeo experiment platform.

Once all of those are done, Hurley and Behnken are expected to return to Earth, splashing down in their Crew Dragon capsule in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A view of the Kounotori 9 spacecraft berthed to the Harmony module with Crew Dragon Endeavour seen docked to the Harmony module in the background. Credit: NASA