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 Station commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy
left the station's Pirs airlock at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) as the
complex sailed 260 miles over Australia, mission commentator Rob
Navias said during a NASA Television broadcast of the spacewalk.
It was the third spacewalk this week by members of the station's
six-man crew. NASA astronauts Rich Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins made
spacewalks on Saturday and Tuesday to replace a failed cooling pump.
During the first part of Friday's planned seven-hour outing, the
Russian cosmonauts set up a high-definition video camera on a
swiveling platform and a medium-resolution still imager for
Vancouver-based UrtheCast Corp.
The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, agreed to host the cameras on
the $100 billion station, a project of 15 countries, in exchange for
rights to use images and video taken over Russia. UrtheCast has
commercial rights to images and video of the rest of the world,
company Chief Executive Scott Larson told Reuters.
UrtheCast intends to sell data to companies and government agencies
that buy Earth-observing satellite imagery. It also plans to stream
images over the Internet for free to subscribers, with the aim of
attracting advertisers and sponsors.
Both ventures are on hold after an unknown glitch kept the cameras,
located outside the station's Zvezda command module, from
communicating with ground stations.
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"Unfortunately, those cameras ... did not provide any electrical
signals on the ground," Navias said.
In an email to Reuters, UrtheCast said there was "an issue with the
connectivity to the cameras."
"We decided to have the cameras brought back into the (space
station) while Roscosmos works on resolving connectivity," the
company said.
Kotov and Ryazanskiy disconnected the cameras and cabling, which cut
into time allotted to replace several science experiments. The
cosmonauts ended up spending eight hours and seven minutes outside
the space station, the longest spacewalk in Russian space history.
The world record longest spacewalk was an eight-hour, 56-minute
excursion by NASA astronauts Susan Helms and Jim Voss in March 2001.
(Editing by Kevin Gray, Steve Orlofsky and Andrew Hay)
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