Cosmonauts go for a record walk
Camera glitch forces Russians to spend eight hours outside space station
It was a day of headaches and broken records for two Russian spacewalkers as the cosmonauts spent over eight hours installing two cameras on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS), only to remove them when they failed to work.
"Back and forth, back and forth," quipped one as they hauled the two bulky cameras back into a space station airlock. "It was actually easier to take it out than put it in."
Commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy had installed the two cameras ahead of schedule, but had to reverse course when the cameras failed to transmit telemetry and other data to ground controllers.
In the process of installing and uninstalling the equipment, the cosmonauts spent eight hours and seven minutes in space - a Russian record.
The longest international spacewalk record is eight hours, 56 minutes and was set by astronauts from US space agency Nasa, by Jim Voss and Susan Helms on March 11, 2001.
The primary goal of Friday's mission was to attach two high-fidelity cameras to a platform on the Zvedza service module of the ISS, according to Nasa. The cameras were to be operated by the private company UrtheCast, of Vancouver, Canada.
