Spacewalk Today as Crew Completes Final Preps

Expedition 14 crew members will exit the International Space Station on Wednesday, Nov. 22 at 6 p.m. EST. Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin will retrieve equipment, manually retract an antenna and photograph a docking port on the Zvezda service module. Tyurin will also hit a golf ball from the station's Pirs docking compartment. The golf swing is part of a Russian commercial activity.

The crew members have completed preparations for their mission’s first spacewalk. They had a final conference with Russian specialists, reviewed their timeline and looked over procedures for retracting a Kurs antenna on the Progress 23 cargo vehicle which is docked to the aft end of the Zvezda service module. A video camera for recording Tyurin’s golf swing was also recharged during final preps.

NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency have named two astronauts and two cosmonauts to the next International Space Station crew, known as Expedition 15. Astronauts Clayton Anderson and Daniel Tani will travel to the station next year and work as flight engineers. Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov will spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory.




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