Crew Preps for Spacewalk, Honors Veterans

Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Skripochka began a week of space walk preparations Monday as they checked out their Orlan spacesuits. The preparations will culminate in a full dress rehearsal Friday as Yurchikhin and Skripochka maneuver in the suits in the International Space Station’s Pirs docking compartment airlock.

Expedition 25 Commander Doug Wheelock (right) and Flight Engineer Scott Kelly pay tribute to U.S. servicemen and women in a Veterans Day message. Credit: NASA TV

The spacewalk is set for Nov. 15 at 9:25 a.m. EST. The two cosmonauts will install work platforms, move a camera on the Rassvet module and install experiment hardware on the Russian segment of the station.

Flight Engineer Scott Kelly worked with the Capillary Flow Experiment, which is a suite of fluid physics experiments that investigate capillary flows and flows of fluids in containers with complex geometries. Results will improve current computer models that are used by designers of low gravity fluid systems and may improve fluid transfer systems on future spacecraft.

Commander Doug Wheelock, an Army colonel, and Kelly, a Navy captain who will become station commander upon Wheelock’s departure on November 30, paid tribute to U.S. servicemen and women around the world in a Veterans Day message. During the message, Wheelock and Kelly displayed the Medal of Honor that was awarded to Army Sergeant Lester R. Stone, who gave his life in the line of duty in Vietnam on March 3, 1969.

Flight Engineer Shannon Walker inspected the portable breathing apparatus as well as fire extinguishers aboard the orbital complex to make sure the devices would be ready in the unlikely event of a fire inside the station.

Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri inspected filters in the Elektron oxygen generation system.

Space shuttle managers postponed the launch of space shuttle Discovery’s STS-133 mission to the station until no earlier than Nov. 30. That means the next launch attempt would be just six hours before the Soyuz 23/Expedition 25 landing at 10:09 p.m. Nov. 29. Discovery will deliver the Permanent Multipurpose Module and Robonaut 2.