NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot finished a six-hour, 49-minute spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Sept. 1, installing a new navigational aid on the Harmony module and swapping out a camera on the station’s truss. It was the fourth spacewalk outside the station in a month, NASA said, and the last currently on Expedition 75’s schedule.
Earlier in the week, President Donald Trump called the crew from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Aug. 28, after awarding the Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and signing an executive order creating a U.S. Space Academy, NASA said. The station crew was in the middle of spacewalk preparations at the time.
Watch: Sept. 1 spacewalk replay
NASA broadcast “U.S. Spacewalk 99,” the designation NASA uses to track spacewalks conducted in U.S. spacesuits since station assembly began, on Sept. 1. The replay below carries NASA’s full live coverage of Meir and Adenot’s excursion, recapped above.
Canadian connection
The Canadian Space Agency confirmed Sept. 2 that Joshua Kutryk’s Crew-13 flight is now targeting no earlier than late September. Kutryk is due to join NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov for a roughly six-month stay aboard the station.
Canadarm2 also had a hand in the Sept. 1 spacewalk: NASA flight engineer Anil Menon operated the Canadian-built arm to position Meir at her worksites, while Adenot moved by tethering herself directly to the station’s exterior, NASA said in its preview of the spacewalk.
SpaceQ looked this week at what comes after the space station itself: with the ISS due for retirement by 2030, the Canadian Space Agency is weighing which of four commercial successors — Vast, Axiom Station, Starlab or Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef — might carry Canadian research forward, and Canadian robotics builder MDA Space is involved in two of them.
Science and technology experiments
Aside from the spacewalk, the crew kept up a full slate of research. Adenot logged a session on a stationary bike fitted with sensors tracking her vital signs, part of ongoing work on how long stays in microgravity affect the cardiovascular system, while Menon and Hathaway relocated science hardware around the station as part of routine maintenance.
The spacewalk itself carried a research task: Adenot and Meir began preparing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle detector mounted outside the station that studies cosmic rays, for a future upgrade, and the pair also swabbed the station’s exterior to sample microorganisms, NASA said. Roscosmos cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev, Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina carried out their own round of research and system checks through the week, though NASA’s recaps did not detail specific experiments.
Looking ahead
NASA and SpaceX have not set a new launch date for Crew-13, saying only that they are targeting no earlier than late September while engineers finish testing and any rework tied to the propulsion leak. Both agencies said a specific date will be announced once one is confirmed.