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Station crew troubleshoots spacesuit problems BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: May 19, 2004 Space station astronauts Gennady Padalka and Mike Fincke were forced to interrupt a planned seven-hour rehearsal today for an upcoming spacewalk when they ran into a series of cooling problems with their NASA spacesuits.
Two hours into the test, Padalka and Fincke were ordered out of their suits for detailed troubleshooting. After making sure there were no problems with the water-cooled undergarments that interface with the suits, Fincke was able to get his spacesuit to operate normally. But the cooling system in Padalka's suit remained out of action, possibly due to froth and bubbles in the coolant loops. The astronauts then ran a procedure to eliminate the bubbles, but Fincke reported "no flow" in the cooling system. Flight controllers told the astronauts to take a break for lunch while engineers debated additional corrective action. Finally, just before 12 p.m., troubleshooting was called off for the day. The spacewalk is needed to restart one of the station's massive gyroscopes. The gyro, which helps stabilize and re-orient the station, shut down April 21 when an electronic control box suffered an internal failure. Spares are on board, but a spacewalk is required to replace the faulty unit. Because of its location on the Z1 truss atop the Unity module, engineers want to stage the spacewalk from the nearby U.S. Quest airlock module using NASA spacesuits. Spacewalks also can be staged from the Russian Pirs airlock module using Russian suits, but it would be much more difficult to reach the Z1 truss from there. Given the apparent failure of Padalka's cooling system, it appears unlikely a spacewalk can be mounted on June 10 as planned. But troubleshooting is not yet complete and no final decisions have been made. |
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