NASA dealing with aging ISS and spacewalk hardware: ‘None of our spacesuits are spring chickens’

The commander of SpaceX’s Crew-8 astronaut mission says that NASA continues to prioritize safety while co-managing an aging space station.

The International Space Station (ISS) and the spacesuit that spacewalking NASA astronauts wear, known as the extravehicular mobility unit (EMU), are both decades old. And it’s the age of this hardware that has led to issues with both recently, NASA astronaut and Crew-8 commander Matthew Dominick told reporters on Friday (Nov. 8).

“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, as we would say, and so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use,” Dominick said at a press conference about Crew-8 livestreamed from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The four Crew-8 astronauts returned to Earth on Oct. 25.

The ISS, parts of which date to 1998, is experiencing a leak on its Russian side that was pegged as the top “safety risk” in a NASA audit published on Sept. 26. NASA and Russian partner Roscosmos have a plan to continue safely managing the leak, U.S. officials have emphasized.

Related: Top ‘safety risk’ for the ISS is a leak that has been ongoing for 5 years, NASA audit finds

Meanwhile, Crew-8 canceled a planned spacewalk June 24 after coolant briefly erupted from an umbilical connecting NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit to the ISS. No one was in any danger, NASA officials emphasized, and the affected part has been fixed for future spacewalks that will take place in 2025.

NASA’s EMU spacesuit was first developed in the 1970s and flown in the 1980s, during the space shuttle program. The EMU has experienced several coolant leaks in recent years, most famously an incident in 2013 when Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet filled with water during a spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA).

NASA officials continue to adjust procedures for spacewalking and, if issues arise, they pause and investigate to maintain safety, Dominick stressed.

“It’s one of those things that we are always at every second — or every point in a process — ready to stop, or ready to turn in another direction, or work a contingency procedure. And that is exactly what we did,” Dominick said of the canceled Crew-8 spacewalk.

As for the ISS leak, he said that NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have a “very open and transparent relation” that extends also to the respective mission controls in Houston and Moscow. Russia keeps a hatch closed between the U.S. and Russian sides of the ISS as a precaution, he emphasized, saying it really only affects the crew during unloading of certain cargo vehicles.

“It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides, and it’s something that we as a crew live with and enact,” Dominick said, adding that the ISS crew remains “in good hands” with the current situation.

NASA plans to replace the ISS with commercial space stations in the early 2030s, and is also working on next-generation spacesuits in partnership with industry for both the ISS and the moon. Collins Aerospace was expected to create the newer ISS suits, but the company withdrew from its contract in June because its anticipated timeline “would not support the space station’s schedule and NASA’s mission objectives.” NASA has not yet announced what will happen next.