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Russian spacewalk begins BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: July 15, 2008 Space station commander Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko depressurized the Pirs airlock module today and opened an outer hatch at 1:08 p.m. to officially kick off a five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to install equipment and experiment hardware on the hull of the international lab complex. This is the 114th spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in December 1998, the 15th so far this year and the second for Expedition 17 commander Volkov, 35, and flight engineer Kononenko, 44. Going into today's excursion, space station EVA time stood at 712 hours and 54 minutes. Unlike a dramatic spacewalk last Thursday to remove an explosive bolt from the crew's Soyuz TMA-12 lifeboat, the goals of today's excursion are more typical. The cosmonauts plan to attach a docking target to the Zvezda command module's upward-facing port where another Russian module will be attached next year; inspect bolt holes that will be used later to mount a rendezvous antenna on the Zvezda module; install a high-energy physics experiment; and remove a biorisk experiment canister installed last year. While the goals of the two spacewalks are different, one safety precaution remains in force: NASA flight engineer Gregory Chamitoff will ride out today's EVA inside the Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft docked to Pirs. The docking module must be depressurized for the spacewalk and if the cosmonauts had problems repressurizing the compartment at the end of today's spacewalk, Chamitoff would be unable to reach the spacecraft in an emergency. For that reason, he'll remain in the Soyuz throughout today's excursion and if repressurization problems are encountered later, Volkov and Kononenko would join him in the TMA-12 spacecraft and move it to a different docking port later. Any such contingency is considered extremely remote.
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VIDEO:
AIRLOCK HATCH CLOSED TO CONCLUDE THE SPACEWALK 