>> Coming up on Thursday, the Expedition 30 crew will also have a spacewalk,
two Russian crew members Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov.
They're going to be stepping outside to conduct a Russian EVA out of the Russian segment
of the International Space Station.
We are pleased to be joined by Glenda Brown who is here inside Mission Control.
She's going to be the Lead Space Walk officer for the Houston Team here inside Mission Control
on Thursday, during all those activities.
So, Glenda, welcome.
First of all, tell us a little bit about what the crew's going to be doing
on Thursday whenever they step outside.
>> Well, they've got a couple of activities, they're on their nominal time line.
The first of which will be move the Strela One from the Pirs' airlock
up to the new air lock for use on future EVAs.
And they'll be using one Strela to move the other Strela.
You can see that coming up here on the video that we're playing.
So the first part of this EVA, they'll egress out of the Pirs' airlock onto the EVA ladder
and then move over to the Strela One.
One crew member gets in position to epic controls, they have a little footplate
that they stand on and then some hand cranks that move it around.
The other crew member gets down at the end effect or end of it,
releases it from some straps that they have that are just holding it in position,
move it around to the Strela Two, which on the, kind of on the other side of the Pirs' airlock.
And once they're translated over to the other side, they begin to release the other one.
Oh, then I guess before they do that, they have an extension boom that goes onto the first one,
that's needed so that it can actually reach around onto the other side.
You can see it, it, it, it telescopes out
and then it has a gimbal mechanism so it can kind of bend around.
Then the one operator bends it around to, to the other Strela, as you can see here in the video.
>> These, these Strela booms are kind of interesting because they, they, they're,
they basically telescope out, right?
And then the crew can use them to move around, it's a little bit different
with how we do things in the U.S. segment, sort of a hand over hand sort of maneuver down,
down the tress segment, things like that, which people have seen during shuttle missions,
but talk about some of the other differences between Russian spacewalks and U.S. spacewalks
in terms of how the crew gets prepared for it, what they do whenever they're outside, you know,
how do you interact with the Russian team.
It's, it's really kind of a different world.
>> It is a different world and it starts right there with the Strela boom,
so that's a hand operated telescoping pole where we have a robotically operated SSRMS, the,
the Canadian robot arm that's on the U.S. segment.
So the crew members on U.S. EVA, which is right on that arm,
while a robot operator inside kind of drives them around.
That's one difference in the actual execution of the EVA.
You mentioned translation, that's a little bit different.
We have a single [inaudible] tether that you anchor down in one, at one point
and then basically reel out to the end of it, translating around wherever you like.
The Russians have been using a different hand over hand technique from the very beginning
of their first spacewalks, just two different techniques of how you do EVA.
You asked about preparation, the preparation for us on these EVAs is completely different
for a U.S. EVA, our team here in Houston puts the whole thing together.
We run it over in the neutral buoyance laboratory, we build the procedures,
train the crew, all of that is done right here in Houston.
For the Russian EVAs, they have a, a similar development process, but they basically have two
or three specialists that develop a short list of tasks that they're going to do.
They'll write their procedures and then they train in the hydro lab.
Then tend to do more skills based training, which is just the very how do you the task part.
They don't train end to end like we do where they start at the airlock and go through all
of their EVA tasks for the day, kind of practicing in the dress rehearsal kind of way.
They just go one individual task [inaudible] We are starting to train some more like that here
on the U.S. side as well in preparation for the maintenance EVAs.
We never know what's going to go wrong on the station, so we have to prepare
in a skills based way all those various tasks.
>> Let's talk about the suits themselves and for those of you who are going
to be watching tomorrow, we're actually going to have a live shot
from the space [inaudible] lab here at the Johnson Space Center where we have one
of the Orlon space suits, which is what the crew will be using on Thursday.
They're quite different than the EMUs.
The -- or the, the white space suits that people know from the U.S. side,
but they're at a different pressure too, so the U.S., you know, the U.S. suits are down at
like a 4.3 or something like that, PSI and,
and the Russian suits are a little bit higher, right?
>> That's right, Josh, and what that does for the crew member on our side
when we use the lower suit pressure, the good part of that is
that it's less resistance in the suit, so...
>> Easy to use.
Yeah.
>> Yeah. It's a little easier to use, you don't have to push so hard against the suit,
compressing the hand is a little bit easier in the gloves, it's not just all blown up and, and,
and stiff and hard at 8 PSI, like the Russian suit, it's at 4 PSI, so a little easier to move.
So that's one difference with the pressure.
On the other side of things because they're at a higher pressure, they,
they don't have to pre-breathe as long, so...
>> Which has to get their bodies ready to get all the nitrogen out of their blood [inaudible]
>> Right. To prevent the bends.
>> Right. So, you know, people saw that during the shuttle missions and,
and station space walks that they would camp out, used to camp out inside the Quest airlock
and now we kind of changed that little bit.
We do sort of an exercise [inaudible]
>> Right. Right.
So, we used to bring the whole -- let's see on the shuttle world long ago,
we brought the whole cabin down to 10.2 PSI, then we went over to the space station
and we were able to just depress the equipment lock and the crew lock
down to 10.2 PSI overnight and that would allow us to pre-breathe at that lower pressure,
purging the nitrogen from the tissues to prevent bends.
And then recently, we've moved to the exercise protocol or the aisle protocol,
it's in suit light exercise and that allows us to pre-breathe in the suit for a short period
of time, about an hour or so in addition to what we had been doing.
And, and the pressure in the suited portion of it, and they just move around a little bit
and that helps purge those, purge the nitrogen from their systems as well.
So that's how we do it on the U.S. side, but on the Russian side,
because it's a higher suit pressure, they just basically bring the suit pressure down,
ingress the suits, bring the suit pressure down to their nominal operating pressure,
pre-breathe there for just a little while and basically as long as it takes them
to do their other operations to get out the door and then they're out.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Done. It's impressive.
So everything has checked out today, the Orlon suits, they, they [inaudible] them on and,
and made sure everything was ready to go and everything was okay from I heard, right?
>> Yeah, we'll call that a dress rehearsal.
They started about 2 a.m. local Houston time.
They started checking out all of their airlock systems and then got into the space suits
and tried, tried the suit sizing.
They had to make a few adjustments.
The way their suit adjust in size is different than ours.
Ours has a bunch of different components that we size pretty specifically to the crew member.
For the Russians, they have kind of a one size fits all, and they have some cam adjustments
and some arm and leg length adjustments, basically think of it as a big cinch cord
that you pull to make the legs shorter or the arms shorter.
And they have to make some of those adjustments.
They do that in their dry run, which is what they were doing today.
They got all that suit sizing taken care of, it took one crew member a little bit longer
than the other one, Oleg has some more experience than Anton does.
So it took them -- him just a little longer to get his done.
And then after that, they actually practiced some translations while they're
in their airlock.
It's a pretty good size airlock so they can move around quite a bit, give them a chance
to acclimated before they actually go outside to do their spacewalk.
They checked some of the tools, some of the tools
that are being provided by -- from the U.S. side.
They're using some of our tools, some tethers and stuff that give them some added capability
that they don't have on their own tools.
So they checked out some of those and all of that worked really well.
>> Well, I think everything's set for Thursday.
If you're going to be watching live with us, we'll have our live coverage at about --
a little after 7:45 a.m. Central Time, 8:45 a.m. Eastern Time,
and the spacewalk will get kicked off about 30 minutes later
at 8:15 a.m. Central Time, 9:15 a.m. Easter time.
It will run about five and a half, six hours if everything goes according to plan.
So, Glenda, thank you very much for coming by.
We'll see you Thursday.
>> Okay. See you then.