NASA held its media briefing at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Thursday, one day before these words are published, and the message was simple: August is going to be busy outside the International Space Station. Three spacewalks in three weeks, targeting the station’s power generation, communications backbone, and electrical wiring. All of it is oriented toward the same endpoint: keeping a 25-year-old orbital laboratory alive, useful, and capable of a safe controlled reentry by the end of 2030.
The first of those walks — U.S. Spacewalk 96, scheduled for Thursday, August 6 — will put two astronauts outside the Quest airlock for roughly six and a half hours. One of them, NASA station commander Jessica Meir, has done this five times before. The other, flight engineer Anil Menon, will be stepping into the vacuum of space for the first time in his life.
NASA astronauts Meir and Menon are scheduled to exit the Quest airlock at 8:35 a.m. ET on Thursday, August 6, to begin U.S. Spacewalk 96 — Menon’s first career extravehicular activity. Their task: install hardware on the station’s exterior that will modify the 3B power channel, preparing it to accept the electrical output of an incoming seventh ISS Roll-Out Solar Array, or iROSA — a wing whose delivery by SpaceX Cargo Dragon is scheduled for later this year.
That seventh wing matters in a way the first six did not. NASA’s own release language makes the purpose explicit: the additional power will “support critical station operations, including its safe and controlled deorbit.” This is not routine expansion. It is the terminal round of power augmentation — the last major upgrade the station will ever receive — designed to sustain avionics, attitude control, and operational systems through the reentry sequence itself.
Meir will wear a suit with red stripes as Spacewalk Crew Member 1. Menon, Crew Member 2, will wear an unmarked suit. Live coverage on NASA+, Amazon Prime Video, X, and YouTube begins at 7:35 a.m. ET, giving viewers nearly an hour of pre-EVA coverage before the hatch opens.
The iROSA that will eventually occupy the channel Meir and Menon are preparing this week is not a conventional solar panel. Traditional rigid solar arrays — the kind the ISS launched with in the early 2000s — use mechanical hinges to fold banks of rigid photovoltaic panels together for launch, then unfold them in orbit. They are heavy, volume-intensive, and mechanically complex. The iROSA is none of those things.
Each iROSA wing uses 30.7%-efficient XTJ Prime triple-junction photovoltaic cells, manufactured by Boeing’s Spectrolab subsidiary. Triple-junction means the cell stacks three photovoltaic layers, each tuned to absorb a different part of the solar spectrum — capturing photons that a single-junction silicon cell at 20-22% efficiency would simply miss. The cells are bonded to a flexible substrate and rolled around composite boom spars that behave like a measuring tape: when the deployment signal comes, the spars unroll under their own stored elastic energy, extending the array without motors, gears, or complex actuation hardware. Fewer moving parts means fewer failure modes in an environment where orbital thermal cycling swings temperatures from roughly -157°C (-251°F) in shadow to 121°C (250°F) in direct sunlight.
The practical result: each iROSA wing is 20% lighter and one-quarter the volume of a rigid array with equivalent power output, delivering more than 28 kilowatts at beginning of life. The seven wings’ combined contribution will extend the station’s power margin, which has degraded significantly as the original Solar Array Wings — designed for a 15-year service life — operate well past that lifespan.
Each iROSA installs in front of an existing Solar Array Wing rather than replacing it, so the legacy arrays continue generating power from their unshaded portions while the new wing adds fresh capacity to the same channel. The 3B channel modification EVA-96 will perform is necessary because the channel’s power management electronics must be updated to accept electrical input from both the old wing and the new one simultaneously.
The August campaign runs across three consecutive weeks and addresses three distinct infrastructure needs. The three walks are U.S. Spacewalks 96, 97, and 98 — the 281st, 282nd, and 283rd U.S. spacewalks conducted in support of ISS assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.
The second spacewalk — U.S. Spacewalk 97, targeted for Thursday, August 13 — will replace a Space-to-Ground communications antenna on the station’s exterior. That antenna is the radio link that carries two-way voice, high-definition video, telemetry, and command traffic between Mission Control in Houston and the orbiting laboratory. It routes through NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, a constellation of geosynchronous relay satellites that allow continuous contact despite the ISS’s 90-minute orbital period. A degraded or failed S/G antenna doesn’t end communications — it compresses bandwidth and can cut HD video downlink entirely. Replacing it is pure maintenance against aging hardware.
The third — U.S. Spacewalk 98, scheduled for Tuesday, August 25 — will connect power and data cables as part of ongoing maintenance and also replace a navigational aid on the Harmony module’s forward docking port, which spacecraft use to approach for berthing. NASA has not yet announced which astronauts will conduct the August 13 and 25 walks; those assignments are expected before each EVA.
Together, the three walks reflect the degree to which in-orbit component replacement, rather than design margin, is what has kept this laboratory operational for 25-plus years.
For Meir, August 6 will be her sixth career EVA — and she arrives at it with a track record that started with history.
On October 18, 2019, Meir and NASA astronaut Christina Koch stepped out of the Quest airlock together, replacing a battery charge-discharge unit on the station’s power system in a seven-hour, 17-minute EVA. It was the first all-female spacewalk in history. The two went on to complete two more EVAs together, and Meir then conducted two additional walks during her current tour, on March 18 and June 30, 2026, both alongside NASA astronaut Chris Williams — one to install a solar array modification kit and one to replace a failed wrist joint on Canadarm2.
Meir is a Norwegian-American marine biologist who holds a doctorate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She was selected to NASA’s astronaut class in 2013 and launched to the ISS in February 2026 as commander of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission aboard Dragon Freedom. She now commands both the Dragon spacecraft and the ISS itself for the duration of Expedition 75 — a dual command role reflecting how tightly commercial vehicles and the government station are operationally linked in this final chapter of the ISS program.
Menon’s path to the Quest airlock is improbable by any measure.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a medical degree from Stanford, and he is a Colonel in the U.S. Space Force. Before joining NASA, he was SpaceX’s first-ever flight surgeon — the physician who certifies crews as medically fit to fly — building the company’s medical program from scratch and serving as lead flight surgeon on five launches, including the Demo-2 mission that put the first humans into orbit aboard a Dragon capsule.
He also spent years as a first responder: to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2015 Nepal earthquake, and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident. In those roles, he treated mass-casualty events on the ground. On August 6, he will conduct a six-and-a-half-hour technical operation in the vacuum of space — his first.
Menon launched aboard Soyuz MS-29 from Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 14, 2026, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, and docked at the station’s Prichal module the same day. He graduated with NASA’s 2021 astronaut class.
A personal note his official biography omits: Menon is married to Anna Menon, a former SpaceX operations engineer who flew aboard the Polaris Dawn commercial mission in September 2024 and conducted the first commercial spacewalk in history. With both parents now having spacewalked, the Menon household has a particular claim on August 6 that no other family on Earth shares.
The August EVA series is not the first phase of the iROSA program and will not be the last. The first pair of wings went up in June 2021 and was installed during three spacewalks on June 16, 20, and 25 of that year. The second pair launched in November 2022 and was installed in December. A third pair followed. The six-wing baseline program was designed to augment the ISS’s power generation capability by 20 to 30 percent, taking total available power from a degraded 160 kilowatts to approximately 215 kilowatts at peak.
The seventh wing goes further — it is the margin for deorbit. The controlled reentry NASA plans for end of 2030 requires powered attitude control, active avionics, interface systems with the SpaceX-built deorbit vehicle, and continuous monitoring through what will be a multi-hour reentry sequence. The 3B channel modification Meir and Menon will perform on August 6 is the first physical step in making that sequence possible.
Read more: ISS Crew Launch on July 14 Hinges on a 6.5-Hour Spacewalk Starting Tomorrow
For Expedition 75 — the crew Meir commands — the August walks are the first major external operations of their time together. The July 30 briefing confirmed that Meir and Menon spent that day reviewing spacewalking procedures, staging their suits in the Quest airlock, and working through the hardware components they will handle outside. The station’s newly repaired Canadarm2 will play a supporting role in positioning tools and equipment for the August 13 and 25 walks.
The research the station supports during this campaign is not pausing for EVA prep. On July 30, flight engineers Jack Hathaway and Sophie Adenot were running bioprinting operations in the Kibo module — injecting cartilage cells into cartridges for the InSPA-Auxilium Bioprinter, continuing an investigation into scaffold-free vascular and cartilage tissue manufacturing in microgravity. Those samples will return to Earth for analysis that could eventually shape treatments for cartilage injuries. The August EVAs are the shell that keeps all of it alive.
Read more: Space Cancer Therapy and Chip Research End With Expedition 74 Crew Return This Weekend
NASA will stream U.S. Spacewalk 96 beginning at 7:35 a.m. ET on Thursday, August 6, on NASA+ (plus.nasa.gov), Amazon Prime Video, X (Twitter), and NASA’s YouTube channel. The walk itself is scheduled to begin at approximately 8:35 a.m. ET and is expected to last about six and a half hours. Coverage is free on all platforms.
iROSA uses triple-junction photovoltaic cells — specifically XTJ Prime cells from Boeing’s Spectrolab — bonded to a flexible substrate and wound around composite boom spars. The spars deploy without motors: stored elastic energy in the composite material causes the array to unroll like a measuring tape extending from its case. Each wing generates more than 28 kilowatts at beginning of life. The design is 20% lighter and one-quarter the volume of a rigid-panel array with equivalent power output, which is how it fits in a Dragon trunk for delivery. Installing iROSAs in front of the station’s original solar array wings — which were designed for a 15-year lifespan now long exceeded — adds fresh power capacity while letting the degraded originals continue contributing from their unshaded portions. The seventh iROSA specifically provides the power margin needed for the station’s controlled deorbit sequence at the end of 2030.
Menon is a physician (Harvard neurobiology, Stanford MD), mechanical engineer, U.S. Space Force Colonel, and NASA astronaut who arrived at the ISS on Soyuz MS-29 on July 14, 2026. He was SpaceX’s first-ever flight surgeon — the person who certified crews as medically fit for flight on Demo-2 and subsequent Crew Dragon missions — before joining NASA’s 2021 astronaut class. As an emergency medicine physician, he was a first responder in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake, and at the 2011 Reno Air Show accident. August 6 will be the first time he has conducted a spacewalk. His wife, Anna Menon, conducted the first commercial spacewalk during the Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024, making August 6 the day both members of a single family will have walked in open space.
U.S. Spacewalk 97, scheduled for August 13, will replace a Space-to-Ground communications antenna — the radio system the station uses to relay voice, high-definition video, and telemetry between the crew and Mission Control in Houston. U.S. Spacewalk 98, scheduled for August 25, will connect power and data cables as part of ongoing electrical system maintenance and replace a navigational aid on the Harmony module’s forward docking port. NASA has not yet announced which astronauts will conduct those two walks.
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