Astronauts take a walk

Two spacewalking astronauts left the safe confines of the international space station today to take care of a little outside maintenance.

Russian Gennady Padalka and American Mike Fincke floated outdoors in the early-morning hours, on their third spacewalk in just over a month.

This time, the work involved relatively mundane housekeeping chores, such as installing laser reflectors and antennas for a new type of cargo ship due to arrive in another year.

All of the tasks today were on the Russian side of the 220-mile high complex, just a short hop from the main exit, making for a much easier task.

The European Space Agency is working on a cargo ship to supplement the US and Russian vessels that fly to the space station. The grounding of Nasa’s shuttles following last year’s Columbia disaster highlighted the need for a more diversified fleet.

To prepare for Europe’s supply ship, which has been in the pipeline for years and is running late, Padalka and Fincke had to hook up antennas and remove outdated laser reflectors and put in newer models.

Padalka and Fincke will venture out once more, early next month, again in Russian spacesuits. The US spacesuits on board are unusable because of inadequate cooling – engineers have yet to pinpoint the problem, after more than two months of analysis.