{"id":589678,"date":"2026-08-19T17:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T17:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/589678\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T17:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T17:26:10","slug":"sophie-adenot-became-the-first-french-woman-to-spacewalk-on-18-august-2026-but-the-job-she-went-outside-to-finish-remains-unfinished-stubborn-electrical-cables-ate-the-time-she-needed-to-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/589678\/","title":{"rendered":"Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to spacewalk on 18 August 2026, but the job she went outside to finish remains unfinished \u2014 stubborn electrical cables ate the time she needed to install a new antenna"},"content":{"rendered":"

The suits switched to battery power at 8:29 a.m. EDT on 18 August 2026, and the clock that governs every spacewalk began to run. Six hours and twenty-three minutes later, when the airlock was re-pressurized at 2:52 p.m. EDT<\/a>, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot had made history and left one job half done. Both of those things are true, and the second one is not the failure it might sound like.<\/p>\n

Adenot became the first French woman and fifth French citizen<\/a> to perform a spacewalk, and the second European woman<\/a> to do so after Samantha Cristoforetti in 2022.<\/p>\n

That is the headline that will stick, and it deserves to. What strikes us just as much is the ordinary, stubborn engineering that shaped the rest of her day outside.<\/p>\n

What actually happened outside the station<\/p>\n

Adenot went out alongside NASA astronaut Anil Menon on U.S. Spacewalk 97, the 282nd spacewalk<\/a> in support of station assembly, maintenance and upgrades.<\/p>\n

The task was a swap: remove a failed Space-to-Ground antenna and bolt a fresh one onto the station\u2019s Z1 truss. The old unit had been dead weight for months. Since November<\/a> it had stopped being able to track NASA\u2019s data-relay satellites, which is what a Space-to-Ground antenna, an SGANT in station shorthand, exists to do.<\/p>\n

The pair got the failed antenna off and secured. What they ran out of time for was the install. Disconnecting the electrical cables and loosening the bolts took longer than the plan allowed, and flight controllers waved off the second half of the job. Mission Control radioed up<\/a> the revised plan: \u201cWe are going to go directly to the long-duration tie-down of this SGANT on the Z-1 truss.\u201d In plain terms: stop trying to finish, secure what you have, come home.<\/p>\n

Communications with Houston never dropped. A second, working antenna carried the high-speed link throughout, so the failed unit was a maintenance item rather than an emergency.<\/p>\n

Why a routine swap turned into a two-visit job<\/p>\n

Planners had budgeted about six and a half hours<\/a> for the full remove-and-replace. The EVA came in at six hours and twenty-three minutes, so the crew was not slow. The work was simply more resistant than the schedule assumed.<\/p>\n

The official account is undramatic and precise. As the station blog put it, the crew \u201cneeded more time than expected to disconnect electrical cables and loosen bolts, delaying work to install a replacement antenna.\u201d<\/a> Cables and bolts, not some exotic malfunction, ate the margin.<\/p>\n

Menon was candid about the gap between the plan and the reality. \u201cWe got into this with the mindset that we wanted everything to go perfectly,\u201d<\/a> he said afterward. \u201cThings were a lot different than expected.\u201d That is about as honest a summary of maintenance work as you will hear, on the ground or off it.<\/p>\n

Cables, bolts, and the clock<\/p>\n

A pressurized glove turns fingertip work into a workout. Every bolt has a torque spec and a tool that has to be tethered so it does not float away. A connector that pops loose in a second in a lab can fight you in vacuum, in gloves, with the station\u2019s day-night cycle flickering past every forty-five minutes or so. The clock is not a suggestion either. It is set by consumables in the suit, and when it runs down, the outing ends whether the checklist is complete or not.<\/p>\n

A job that reads as \u201cunplug the cables, undo the bolts, lift the box, bolt on the new one\u201d is really a long series of careful, tethered, gloved movements, each of which can take twice as long as the estimate. Our read of the 18 August timeline is that the crew hit that reality at the disconnect step, and the ground did the sensible thing rather than the ambitious one.<\/p>\n

A deferred task is not a failed one<\/p>\n

Waving off the install was a choice made from a menu of options written before launch.<\/p>\n

Menon said he was struck less by the surprise than by the preparation for it. \u201cWhat I would say that I am really impressed with is that all of those contingencies were well thought out,\u201d<\/a> he said. The plan for not finishing existed before anyone knew it would be needed.<\/p>\n

The replacement antenna is expected to go on during the next spacewalk, currently planned for Aug. 25<\/a>. A working antenna is already carrying the traffic in the meantime. The cost of the deferral is a second trip outside, not a degraded station.<\/p>\n

That is the shape of methodical EVA work. The safe move is to secure what you have and stop, not to chase a checklist into overtime with dwindling suit margins. \u201cUnfinished\u201d in this context reads to us less like a shortfall and more like the system doing what it was designed to do when the hardware pushed back.<\/p>\n

Adenot, for her part, kept the focus on the people rather than the task list. \u201cMy deepest gratitude goes to everyone who made this possible,\u201d<\/a> she said, \u201cpioneers who came before us, but also the incredible teams working behind the scenes today.\u201d Those behind-the-scenes teams are the ones who wrote the fallback plan she and Menon ended up using.<\/p>\n

Standards<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tSpace Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards<\/a> and masthead<\/a>.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The suits switched to battery power at 8:29 a.m. EDT on 18 August 2026, and the clock that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-589678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}