Science & Astronomy

Watch 2 cosmonauts conduct spacewalk outside the ISS today

Space.com April 25, 2024 2 min read

Watch 2 cosmonauts conduct spacewalk outside the ISS today_662a60bb91bb8.jpeg

Watch 2 cosmonauts conduct spacewalk outside the ISS today (Image Credit: Space.com)

Two Russian cosmonauts will perform a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today (April 25), and you can watch the action live.

Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub are scheduled to venture into the void at around 10:55 a.m. EDT today, then “spend about seven hours configuring hardware and installing experiments on the Roscosmos segment of the space station,” NASA officials said in an update on Wednesday (April 24). (Roscosmos is Russia’s space agency.)

You can watch it live here, courtesy of NASA; coverage will begin at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT).

Related: International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub work to inspect an external radiator on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module while conducting a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station on Oct. 25, 2023. (Image credit: NASA TV)

Today’s excursion will be the second spacewalk for Chub and the seventh for Kononenko. The duo conducted an extravehicular activity together in October 2023, during which they inspected a leaky radiator on the outside of Russia’s Nauka module.

Chub and Konenko launched to the ISS together back in September 2023, on a Soyuz spacecraft that also carried NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara. The liftoff kicked off the first spaceflight for Chub and O’Hara and the fifth for Kononenko.

Kononenko isn’t just an off-Earth veteran; he’s a record-breaker. The cosmonaut has spent more total time in space than anyone in history — 957 days as of today.

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— Cosmonauts on ISS spacewalk encounter coolant ‘blob’ while inspecting leaky radiator

— Spacewalks: How they work and major milestones

— International Space Station leaks coolant into space, but astronauts are not in danger

Today is shaping up to be a busy day in human spaceflight. China plans to launch the Shenzhou 18 astronaut mission to its Tiangong space station at 8:59 a.m. EDT (1259 GMT), for example.

And NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida today ahead of their planned May 6 launch to the ISS on the first-ever crewed flight of Boeing’s new Starliner spacecraft.

You can watch all of this action live here at Space.com. Coverage of Williams and Wilmore’s KSC arrival will begin at 1 p.m. EDT (1500 GMT), in the middle of the Russian spacewalk. (NASA will air the KSC event on its main YouTube channel and switch the spacewalk to its media channel at that point.)