Spacewalking ‘cable guys’ begin work outside station

Two U.S. astronauts began a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk Saturday to lay cable outside the International Space Station, after a spacesuit equipment failure briefly delayed the mission. The spacewalk officially began at 7:45 am (1245 GMT) when Barry “Butch” Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts placed their suits on internal battery power, NASA said. Moments later, the pair – each carrying two suitcase-like bags of cables and tools – floated outside to begin preparing two new docking stations.

Pretty cool.

Flight engineer Terry Virts, speaking as he emerged from the space station at 435 kilometres above the South Pacific

The outing is the first of several spacewalks aimed at preparing the orbiting outpost for the arrival of US commercial crew capsules, bringing astronauts to low-Earth orbit in the coming years. Initially planned for Friday, the spacewalk was postponed by a day to allow NASA more time to wrap up an investigation into the suits’ fan pump separator – which helps control the suit’s temperature. The same system failed in 2013 when water flooded the helmet of a spacewalking Italian astronaut, nearly drowning him.

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