Expedition 71 Crew Prepares for Spacewalks Outside of Space Station

NASA astronaut and Expedition 71 flight engineer Matthew Dominick gives a behind-the-scenes look at the International Space Station’s airlock. Astronauts are scheduled to put on their spacesuits and work outside of the space station three times this summer, and Dominick demonstrates how he is helping to size the spacesuits while demonstrating some of their capabilities. Dominick became a NASA astronaut in 2017. He is from Wheat Ridge, Colorado, and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of San Diego, California, and a master’s in systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is an active-duty U.S. Navy astronaut. He flew to the space station as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission. This is his first spaceflight. For more on the upcoming spacewalks, follow the space station’s blog: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/

What is said in the film

Expedition 71 is getting ready in the next couple of weeks to go outside and do a couple spacewalks. Super awesome to go do that. We've been inside the space station for the past couple of months running research or fixing the inside of space station. But now we get to go outside and we have to go through this somewhat long multi-week process to get everything ready to go prepare our tools and the procedures. But one of my favorites, I think, is just getting a chance to work on the spacesuits.

So we have two spacesuits here in the in the, in the airlock getting ready to go outside and we have to prep the suits, inspect the suits. But today was all about sizing them to fit us. And before I show you some of the ways they're sizing, I just. I just like this part of the space suit. It's going to be really bright outside.

And so we have these little sun visors on the side, and then we have this big one in the middle that we can adjust to kind of protect our eyes from the sun. But then we just have the iconic, in my mind, just the gold, the gold visor that comes down to protect your eyes. And I just think that's pretty cool. So we'll keep that up to protect it because we want to scratch it before we go outside with the little side visors down. And I'll show you what we were doing today.

And we made a time lapse that we can show you here in a second. But I want to show you specifically what we're doing. So one of the things we're doing is we're sizing the suit to fit us in. So the upper part of the pants here, the lower part of the pants have these little connection points so we can disconnect these, too, to customize the suit. There's also these little straps that allow us to kind of do these micro adjustments to the length of the legs.

And we we also have some up here in the arms, but down here we can put these little sizing rings in here. And right now, this one does not have any sizing ring in it at all. And there's another spot down here to put another sizing ring on this boot. No sizing ring here, but you get these little connection points, these little locks to make sure these don't come out. But if I pull up the foot or the boot of this other space suit right here, you'll see that here is that part of the lower leg.

And here's the boot. But now there's this one inch sizing ring right here in the middle that we're able to put in here. So this is a spacer and we can put a half a one inch or even one and a half inch spacer and their spot to do it here and there spots to do doing the arms. And so we have to put those spacers in as well as have these little micro adjustments so we can size the spacesuit as best we can to each of the individuals. So today the focus was on getting these suits all sized up for everyone ready to go.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from NASA. NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.