Cancelation of NASA Spacewalk Is Literally a Pain within the Neck

NASA needed to postpone a scheduled spacewalk to put in new photo voltaic arrays outdoors the International Space Station after considered one of its astronauts complained of a pinched nerve in his neck.

“Thanks for everyone’s concern,” Mark Vande Hei, flight engineer for Expedition 65, tweeted yesterday. “I have a pinched nerve in my neck that caused us to reschedule today’s spacewalk. The support from family, friends, and NASA leadership has been fantastic. I’m looking forward to installing this IROSA Mod kit. Today just wasn’t the right day.”

Once put in, iROSA, or International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, will increase the ISS’s energy grid and supply extra electrical energy for the “numerous research and science investigations conducted every day, as well as the continued operations of the orbiting platform,” according to NASA.

Vande Hei, together with JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, have been scheduled to do the 6.5-hour spacewalk on August 24. NASA referred to as it off with lower than 24 hours discover, saying the postponement was attributable to a “minor medical issue” that “was not a medical emergency,” per an company press release.

“A pinched nerve is a compressed nerve,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. “Surrounding tissues that press on nerve roots can cause pain, numbness and tingling in different areas of your body.” Pinched nerves, on this case the cervical nerves, will be painful, however they have an inclination to go away with relaxation and will be handled with medicines and physiotherapy.

A Russian Soyuz MS-18 crew capsule delivered Vande Hei to the orbital outpost on April 9, 2021, and he’s anticipated to stay on the ISS for a complete yr. The NASA astronaut was initially scheduled for a six-month mission, however Russian plans to movie a film on board the station meant he misplaced his trip residence. The filming of this film, referred to as Vyzov (Challenge in English), is already proving to be a special type of ache within the neck.

NASA says the iROSA set up just isn’t time delicate and that it’s now evaluating the subsequent greatest alternative for the spacewalk. It received’t occur any time quickly on account of upcoming occasions, specifically the arrival of the SpaceX CRS-23 cargo mission, which is scheduled to launch on August 28, and two unrelated Russian spacewalks scheduled for September 3 and 9. Cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov will likely be establishing the not too long ago arrived Nauka module, which induced all that hassle just a few weeks in the past.

So on the earliest, NASA will do its spacewalk in mid-September. Vande Hei will hopefully be feeling higher by then.