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 Station commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 52, and flight engineer
Terry Virts, 47, left the station’s Quest airlock shortly before 8
a.m. EST/1300 GMT to begin a planned 6-1/2-hour spacewalk, the first
of three outings over the next eight days.
The work will prepare docking ports for upcoming flights by Boeing
Co and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX,
which are developing capsules to ferry crew to and from the station,
which flies about 260 miles (418 km) above the Earth.
The United States has been dependent on Russia for station crew
transportation since the space shuttle were retired in 2011.
The first test flight of a new U.S. crew craft isn’t expected until
late 2016, but the station, a $100 billion laboratory owned by 15
nations, needs to undergo a significant transformation to prepare
for the new vehicles, NASA said.
 That work began on Saturday with Wilmore and Virts installing six
cables to a docking port on the station’s Harmony module, the same
site where space shuttles used to berth.
"This will be the most complicated cable-routing task that we have
performed (by spacewalkers) to date,” Karina Eversly, lead spacewalk
official, told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.
After two more spacewalks scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 25, and
Sunday, March 1, the station will be outfitted with a total of 764
feet (233 m) of new cabling, as well as a communications system to
support Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s upgraded Dragon capsules.
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The work sets the stage for the launch and installation of two
international docking systems, built by Boeing and scheduled for
launch aboard SpaceX Dragon cargo ships later this year.
To make room for a second berthing port on Harmony and two docking
slips for cargo ships, NASA also plans to relocate another module
using the station’s robot arm.
"We're doing a lot of reconfiguration this year," Kenneth Todd,
station operations manager, said at the news conference. "We are
really trying to take the station into this next phase.”
(Editing by David Holmes)
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