Mission Reports

Complex spacewalk repair work begins Friday

After four years of brainstorming, custom tool development and training, two astronauts plan to venture outside the International Space Station Friday for the first of four spacewalks to repair a $2 billion cosmic ray detector. The excursions are considered the most challenging since work to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Mission Reports

Koch, Meir conclude first all-female spacewalk

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir carried out history’s first all-female spacewalk Friday, floating outside the International Space Station and successfully installing a 230-pound replacement battery charger in the lab’s solar power system. The historic excursion was carried out in a blaze of public interest that rose all the way to the White House.

News

NASA names new chief of human space operations

Douglas Loverro, a veteran manager with broad experience in national security space operations, has been selected by NASA to lead the agency’s human space flight programs. He takes over at a critical moment as the agency assesses the readiness of new commercial crew ships amid a full-court press to land astronauts on the moon in 2024.

Mission Reports

All-female spacewalk on tap this week

Two NASA astronauts will take part in the first all-female spacewalk this week, a critical outing to restore lost power in the wake of an equipment failure that cropped up after new batteries were installed in the International Space Station’s solar power system during two earlier spacewalks.

News

Alexei Leonov, world’s first spacewalker, dies

Legendary cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space — an experience that almost killed him — and later the commander of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that docked with a NASA Apollo capsule, symbolizing a historic thaw in the Cold War, has died after a long illness, the Russian space agency confirmed Friday. He was 85.