Richland, WA astronaut ready for her 2nd spacewalk. 1st was ‘awesome’

NASA’s astronaut from Richland called her first spacewalk “awesome,” and now she’s preparing for a repeat.

Kayla Barron, a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, spent more than six hours tethered outside the station Dec. 2 to replace a faulty antenna.

On Tuesday, she’s scheduled to make her second spacewalk, this one to assemble and install modification kits required for upcoming solar array upgrades.

With a second flight engineer, Raja Chari, who will be making his first spacewalk, she will install brackets and supports.

Additional solar arrays will increase the station’s total available power from 160 kilowatts to up to 215 kilowatts.

The spacewalk will be shown live on NASA.gov under the NASA TV tab and on YouTube in the video titled “Spacewalk at the Space Station with NASA Astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari.”

Coverage will start at 4:30 a.m. for those watching from the Tri-Cities, Washington, and the spacewalk will begin about 35 minutes later at 5:05 a.m.

Like Barron’s first spacewalk, it is expected to last about six and a half hours, so viewers should have most of the morning to catch some of her spacewalk.

Barron will be the astronaut in the suit with red stripes and Chari will wear a suit with no stripes.

Barron joked on her Facebook page recently that the “term ‘spacewalk’ is a bit of a misnomer” whether it is inside or outside the space station.

When she first floated through the hatch into the station, she crashed into a fellow astronaut for a big hug and realized she had a lot to learn about how to move around in microgravity, she said.

Now she zooms around the space station almost without thinking about it, she said.

Barron, a graduate of Richland High and the U.S. Naval Academy, arrived at the space station Nov. 12 for her first NASA space mission and is scheduled to stay until April.