Space Is Hard

Astronauts Chris Williams and Jessica Meir completed a 7-hour, 20-minute spacewalk at 3:40 p.m. EDT today after replacing a malfunctioning wrist joint on the Canadarm2 robotic arm. More... https://t.co/KLpldoLE5U pic.twitter.com/UMR98FXghs

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) June 30, 2026

Before they could go outside:

Williams and Meir spent Monday organizing spacewalking tools and checking spacesuits inside the Quest airlock where they will exit the space station for the robotics maintenance job. Flight engineers Jack Hathaway of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) assisted the upcoming spacewalkers with the tool work and studied the delicate maneuvers they will use to position the Canadarm2 for its repair job. 

Hathaway and Adenot will monitor the spacewalkers on Tuesday, help them in and out of their suits, and carefully maneuver Canadarm2 into position for repair access. All four astronauts gathered together at the end of Monday’s shift for a final procedures review and a readiness conference with specialists on the ground.

EVAs are pretty routine at this point, and never easy, but we've learned a lot about managing them since Alexei Leonov made his pioneering adventure back in '65.  Speaking of the first spacewalker, he was witness to the only deaths to happen in space (above the Kármán line) on this date in '71:

[A]s Soyuz 11 prepared for reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere I was following events closely in the bunker of a new Mission Control center in Kaliningrad, near Moscow. It was customary for the commander of the back-up crew to monitor events at this time, together with the head of the mission and the chief constructor, to maintain radio contact with the crew and to pass on any advice and necessary instructions. So I was there monitoring the control of all on-board systems in a logbook. 

As the crew went through the control of positioning the air vents located between the landing and orbital modules, I advised them to close the vents and not to forget to reopen them once the parachute had deployed. 

“Make a note of it in your logbook,” I instructed them. 

Although this deviated from the flight regulations, I had trained for a long time for the mission they were flying, and in my opinion this was the safest procedure. According to the flight program the vents were supposed to close and then open automatically once the parachute had deployed after reentry. But I believed there was a danger, if this automatic procedure was followed, that the vents might open prematurely at too high an altitude and the spacecraft depressurize. 

It seems the crew did not follow my advice. Unfortunately my intuition proved right. The pressure equalization vents did open prematurely—before the capsule reentered the Earth’s atmosphere—and the capsule depressurized. Soyuz 11 landed where expected, but when the recovery team opened its hatch they found the crew dead. Their bodies were still warm, and the recovery team tried to resuscitate them, but it was too late. According to their cardiogram records, Dobrovolsky had died two minutes after the landing capsule had depressurized, Patsayev after a hundred seconds and Volkov after only eighty seconds. 

On every mission following Soyuz 11, the flight program was changed to incorporate my advice. The vents were also redesigned. 

When the rescue forces reported that the crew were dead, I was instructed to fly to the landing site immediately with fellow cosmonaut Alexei Yeliseyev. We were appointed members of the government committee dealing with the aftermath of the disaster, and our main task was to secure the spacecraft and take photographs of the scene. It took us about three hours to reach the site, by which time the bodies of the crew had already been removed. Their blood-soaked seats, and signs that attempts had been made to resuscitate them, were the only evidence of the tragedy.

In addition to changed procedures and vents, the Soviets decided that cosmonauts would wear spacesuits on re-entry, which meant they could only support 2-person crews until the Soyuz-T was developed in the late-70s.  Space is hard.

Selah.