Space, Technology

279th Spacewalk Supports Station Assembly, Maintenance, Upgrades

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May 25, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The 279th spacewalk in support of the International Space Station will begin at approximately 10:15 a.m. EDT as Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev venture outside the orbiting complex to install new equipment and retrieve existing hardware. Expedition 74 commander Kud-Sverchkov, distinguishable by red stripes on his spacesuit, will be conducting his second spacewalk, while flight engineer Mikaev, marked by blue stripes, will experience his first. The excursion focuses on mounting a solar radiation experiment on the Zvezda service module and removing science hardware from the Poisk and Nauka modules; the cosmonauts may also attempt to photograph a Progress 94 cargo spacecraft antenna that failed to deploy in March. This combination of assembly, maintenance, and potential problem-solving highlights the ongoing work required to sustain and upgrade the station.

Roscosmos Cosmonauts to Install Radiation Experiment on Zvezda Module

The upcoming Roscosmos spacewalk will not solely focus on routine maintenance; cosmonauts will be actively contributing to ongoing solar radiation research by installing a new experiment on the Zvezda service module. This installation is paired with the removal of existing science hardware from both the Poisk and Nauka modules, demonstrating a streamlined approach to upgrading and reconfiguring the Russian segment of the International Space Station. Expedition 74 commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergei Mikaev are prepared for approximately five hours of work outside the orbiting complex, beginning around 10:15 a.m. EDT. Beyond these primary objectives, the cosmonauts have a secondary task should the timeline permit: photographing the Progress 94 cargo spacecraft’s Kurs rendezvous antenna, which experienced a deployment failure in March. This proactive effort aims to assess and potentially address unexpected issues during the excursion.

Viewers will be able to easily distinguish between the two cosmonauts, as Kud-Sverchkov will be wearing a spacesuit with red stripes, while Mikaev’s suit will feature blue stripes. This marks Mikaev’s first venture into the vacuum of space and Kud-Sverchkov’s second. This spacewalk represents the 279th conducted in support of the station’s continued assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.

Expedition 74’s upcoming spacewalk demonstrates the ongoing need for both installation of new technologies and removal of completed experiments from the Roscosmos segment of the International Space Station, as cosmonauts actively manage the station’s scientific payload alongside structural maintenance.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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