NASA has suspended all spacewalks on the International Space Station (ISS) over spacesuit safety concerns after water seeped into an astronaut’s helmet while working on the spacesuit outside the station.
Dina Contella, NASA’s space station operations integration manager, said in June that NASA’s existing suits had been “the agency’s workhorse for 40 years” and had been worn on 169 250 spacewalks.
It was not the first time such an incident had occurred. In March, water was found in the helmet worn by European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer after a spacewalk.
In 2013, a European Space Agency astronaut, Luca Parmitano, had to abort a spacewalk when 1.5 liters of water entered his helmet and he was having trouble breathing. He described the experience as “a goldfish in a fishbowl”.
NASA unveiled the prototype of its next-generation spacesuit for its Artemis lunar program in 2019. However, due to development delays, the new suits will not fly to the moon in 2024 as planned.
A NASA report released in August 2021 blamed lack of funding, the COVID-19 pandemic and “technical challenges” for the delay, and estimated that the spacesuits would not be ready until April 2025 at the earliest.
