Expedition 14’s spacewalk yesterday suffered a few glitches. The exit from Pirs was delayed by 1h 17m as Mikhail had to exit his spacesuit to straighten a kinked cooling suit hose. They also had some trouble opening the hatch because of an obstruction. There was also problems setting up for the golf stunt (wasting about 38m) and Mikhail only managed to get off one shot before having to move onto the other tasks. The initial order of the successive tasks was subsequently changed. The spacewalk was shortened as the initial delay meant they used up consumables (the lithium hydroxide CO2 scrubbers in their spacesuits); TsUP tend to be conservative with spacewalk length. You can follow the LIVE: ISS Expedition 14 Spacewalk and Golf Stunt thread at NASASpaceflight.com.
I initially thought cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov was doing the Russian communications between the cosmonauts and TsUP, but it turned out to be another Sergei K – Kireevichev – so I was rather disappointed about that!
The spacewalk lasted 5h 38m, from 00:17 to 05:55 UTC.
“Spacewalker takes orbital golf shot”, MSNBC.com. Naturally the golf stunt got the most attention from the media, no doubt pleasing the company who sponsored it, but (again) making the Russian Space Agency look like cheap salesmen who would pawn their own grandmothers to get some cash. (The media usually include the phrase “cash-strapped” whenever referring to the Russian space program.) I would like to have a few choice words with those in the RSA who make cosmonauts do these stupid promotions. It is not what the Russian space program should be about.
It follows other commercial ventures at the space station that the Russian space agency has allowed, sometimes to the chagrin of NASA. The cash-strapped Russians have allowed Pizza Hut to paint its logo on a rocket and have a pizza delivered to the space station. And it once charged PepsiCo $5 million to have cosmonauts float a replica of a soda can outside the Mir space station.
NASA has taken a grin-and-bear-it attitude. The U.S. space agency is indebted to its Russian partner for flying U.S. astronauts to the space station while shuttles were grounded after the Columbia disaster.
An unrelated source of dismay is that the daily ISS On-Orbit Status reports seem to have stopped (the last posted 6 October, and they have been very erratic this year). An email I sent to Spaceref came back with the reply that they had stopped receiving them, for some reason. The Reports are posted in the L2 section of NASASpaceflight.com, but that section is paid subscriber-only, which I can’t afford (I don’t have a credit card, anyway). I am very disappointed as they were the only detailed source of daily life on the ISS (I think they are for NASA personnel in the ISS program).
