‘Arctic Blast’ of Leaky Water Halts Spacewalk by NASA Astronauts

A spacewalk by two NASA astronauts at the International Space Station ended almost as soon as it began on Monday morning when water started squirting from one of the spacesuits into the airlock.

“There’s water everywhere,” Tracy Dyson, one of the astronauts, reported to mission control.

That was a couple of minutes after she and Mike Barratt, the other astronaut taking part in spacewalk, had switched their spacesuits to battery power, which marked the start of the spacewalk at 8:46 a.m. Eastern time.

“I got an arctic blast all over my visor,” Ms. Dyson reported.

She wiped away a layer of ice, allowing her to see that ice crystals were coming from a service-and-cooling umbilical unit that connected to her spacesuit. The connections provide power, oxygen and water while astronauts are in the airlock. The leak started when Ms. Dyson disconnected the unit.

“I could see the ice crystals flowing out there,” Ms. Dyson said. “Just like a snow cone machine, there was ice forming at that port.”

Space station controllers in Houston then called off the spacewalk. NASA said the astronauts were never in any danger.

The shortened spacewalk was the latest in a series of glitches that NASA has experienced this month. Other issues have included an earlier postponed spacewalk and delays in returning a pair of astronauts to Earth aboard a Boeing space capsule, known as Starliner, which is on its first trip to the space station with astronauts aboard.