It wasn’t the original plan for the pallet to be discarded like this. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, caused a disruption to the spacewalking schedule, leading to the leftover pallet. NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was notable in that it concluded a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store energy collected by solar arrays, but in 2011 NASA decided to make the...
