CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The only spacesuits now aboard the International Space Station failed a recent radio communications test, raising concerns about whether they could be safely used if an emergency forced a venture outside the outpost.
But officials at both NASA and the Russian company that makes the suits expect the apparent problem to be rectified during an additional test later this month, and they say the situation is not yet considered a serious threat to crew safety.
"Nobody right now on either side of the ocean is overly concerned about this," Greg Harbaugh, chief of NASAs spacewalk projects office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, told SPACE.com. "I would characterize it as a hiccup or glitch that we are looking at, and were looking at it very carefully."
Heres the situation:
Station commander Bill Shepherd and his two cosmonaut colleagues Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev now have two so-called Russian Orlan spacesuits at their disposal.
Launched aboard a U.S. shuttle mission last year, the suits only would be used in a crisis because Shepherd and his crew are not scheduled to do any work outside the outpost during their tenure at the complex.
During a suit checkout last month, though, the internal radio system that would enable a spacewalking duo to communicate with each other as well as with ground controllers and their other crew mate inside the station -- failed to operate adequately.
"The communications were very ratty, there was [radio frequency] interference, and at times during the checkout they were unreadable," Harbaugh said.
The visiting crew of shuttle Atlantis, which is scheduled to arrive at the outpost Friday, will drop off a U.S. spacesuit. That suit, however, cannot be used until an U.S.-built airlock capable of servicing it is delivered to the station in June.
The inability to communicate during a spacewalk, meanwhile, would make an emergency excursion outside the outpost dangerous, said Harbaugh, a veteran spacewalker himself.
"In an emergency, if the spacewalkers could not talk to each other let alone the crew member inside the station and ground controllers then I think we would have to think very long and hard about whether the appropriate thing to do is to send them out, or send them back to Earth."
Vitaly Svershchek, deputy general designer with Zvezda, the Russian company that makes the suits, told SPACE.com that the communications problem might be linked to a glitch with computer software aboard the station.
Engineers also are looking at the possibility that the failed test which was performed rather hastily because of the crews hectic work schedule -- might not have been conducted properly.
Consequently, Shepherd and his cosmonaut colleagues will rerun the test after the Atlantis crew departs the station during the final days of its ongoing mission to deliver the U.S. Destiny science lab to the outpost.
The follow-on test is expected to help engineers pinpoint the problem and determine whether the suits could be safely used during an emergency. But neither U.S. nor Russian officials are in a hurry to carry it out.
"Theres no sense of urgency here," Harbaugh said, adding that until the extra test is done, it is "premature" to assume the suits could not be pressed into service during a crisis.
"The Russian assessment seems to be that if we go back and do this procedure again, and we take it a little bit more slowly and carefully, that we just might be all right," Harbaugh said.
"Its entirely possible that there is a real technical issue here, but nobody is leaping off a tall building now with that assumption."
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