Science / live today
Watch Today’s ISS Spacewalk for the Part Everyone Misses
NASA plans live coverage this morning as Jessica Meir and Anil Menon work outside the International Space Station. The show is not only two astronauts in white suits; it is a maintenance shift for a 25-year-old machine that still needs more power.
What is happening
NASA’s live schedule lists coverage of U.S. Spacewalk 96 at the International Space Station at 7 a.m. Eastern today. The NASA+ event page says the spacewalk itself will last about six and a half hours. A NASA station update from Wednesday says mission managers cleared astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon for the work, and that the crew spent the day inside the Quest airlock staging tools, spacesuits, and procedures.
The task sounds small until you translate it. Meir and Menon are scheduled to install hardware that modifies the station’s 3B power channel and prepares it for a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array. A power channel is part of the station’s electrical system. The roll-out array is a newer, blanket-like solar wing that adds power without replacing the older rigid arrays in one step.
If you turn on the feed, watch the hands, not the view. The useful drama is tool control, tether discipline, and how slowly crews must work when one bad move can damage a suit, a cable, or a piece of station structure.
Why this one is worth a quiet half hour
Spacewalks often get framed as spectacle, but this one is closer to infrastructure work. The station has hosted people continuously since 2000. It keeps running because crews keep changing batteries, routing cables, replacing antennas, and preparing old mounting points for new hardware. The solar-array work belongs to that long repair log.
Menon is also scheduled for his first spacewalk, while Meir brings prior experience. That matters, but not as a hero note. NASA pairs astronauts this way because extravehicular activity is procedure-heavy craft. The suit is a small spacecraft. The airlock is a job site. The station moves at orbital speed while the crew follows a checklist written for handrails, foot restraints, torque limits, shadows, sunlight, and radio calls.
Known facts stop there. NASA has announced the planned work and the coverage window. The exact timeline can change because suit checks, station conditions, communications, and crew judgment can move the start time or shorten a task list. Treat any live social clip as a pointer back to NASA’s feed, not as the source of record.
How to watch without wasting the morning
Open NASA Live at 7 a.m. Eastern if you want the full run-up. If you only have a short window, check in after the astronauts leave the Quest airlock and reach the worksite on the starboard truss. That is when the job becomes legible: one astronaut stabilizes, the other works the hardware, and the camera view changes from floating bodies to a machine being serviced.
The best later artifact will probably be NASA’s own replay or station blog note, not a reposted clip. A good clip can show the motion; the official page will tell you what task actually completed.