ISS commercial crew missions: NASA astronauts rigged cables in 7-hour spacewalk

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MEXICO: The first step in reconfiguring the International Space Station (ISS) for commercial crew missions was completed successfully over the weekend, with NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Terry Virts rigging cables during a nearly 7-hour spacewalk.
The pair “rigged a series of power and data cables at the forward end of the Harmony module and Pressurized Mating Adapter-2 and routed 340 of 360 feet of cable,” NASA said in a statement.
The cable rigging is being done to prepare the ISS for the arrival of new International Docking Adapters aboard an unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule later this year. NASA is planning seven spacewalks in total to install docking ports for Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsules by the end of 2015.
The trickiest part of the task, relocating the ISS’s Leonardo multipurpose module from the Unity to the Tranquility connection nodes, will be conducted robotically by ground control.
Boeing and SpaceX expect to begin flying crewed missions to the ISS in 2017.
Wilmore has now logged 13 hours and 15 minutes outside the safety of a spacecraft over the course of two spacewalks. It was the first spacewalk for Virts, who tweeted about the experience and shared a selfie taken outside the orbiting space lab
The weekend’s work involved a 6-hour, 41-minute spacewalk that “completed all the scheduled tasks … and one get ahead task,” NASA said.
Wilmore and Virts are scheduled for another work session in the void of space on Wednesday at 7:10 a.m. ET, when they’ll lay more cable and lubricate the end of the space station’s robotic arm, according to the space agency. You can catch the upcoming spacewalk on NASA TV (embedded below), with coverage beginning at 6 a.m.
NASA said the total amount of time astronauts have spent assembling the ISS and doing maintenance tasks during 185 spacewalks is now 1,159 hours and 8 minutes.