A record-breaking Russian spacewalk ends with a technical setback

Space · Published 12 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy just completed an 8-hour excursion that surpassed previous Russian records. However, a mission intended to deploy new Earth-observation cameras hit a sudden snag, forcing the crew to abandon their primary hardware mid-mission.

During an 8-hour, 7-minute spacewalk on a Friday, Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy successfully attached two high-fidelity cameras to the International Space Station. This Canadian commercial project was designed to transmit Earth observation imagery back to Earth. The cameras were mounted onto a biaxial pointing platform and workstation that had been previously placed on the Zvezda service module in November.

The mission faced a critical complication when the Russian Mission Control Center near Moscow failed to receive expected telemetry or electrical connectivity from the cameras. Because the flight controllers could not confirm the equipment was functioning, the cosmonauts were ordered to remove the cameras and bring them back to the airlock for investigation. They were also tasked with photographing the electrical connectors to assist in the post-spacewalk analysis.

This technical failure prevented the crew from finishing several other objectives, such as installing a payload boom or removing a frame that previously housed Japanese space exposure hardware, including three units for studying micro-particles and the space environment. Despite the setback, the crew did manage to replace the Vsplesk experiment package—a seismic monitoring tool installed in July 2008—with the more advanced Seismoprognoz hardware.

This excursion was significant not only for its technical hurdles but also for its duration. At 8 hours and 7 minutes, it surpassed the previous Russian record of 7 hours and 29 minutes set by Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin on August 16. For Kotov, the mission marked his fifth spacewalk, bringing his total time outside the station to 30 hours and 43 minutes.

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