ESA's Sophie Adenot to conduct second spacewalk for critical antenna installation

Sophie Adenot will step back into the vacuum of space on Tuesday, August 25th, this time to finish what a stuck bolt prevented her from completing a week earlier. The French astronaut, alongside NASA's Anil Menon, will exit the International Space Station through the Quest airlock around 2:35 p.m. British Summer Time to install a Space-To-Ground antenna—the kind of unglamorous but essential hardware that keeps mission control in Houston talking to the orbiting laboratory.

This is Adenot's second spacewalk in as many weeks. On August 18th, during what NASA calls EVA-97, she and Menon spent six hours and twenty-three minutes outside the Station removing the failed antenna that had stopped working back in November 2025. The work should have been straightforward enough to allow them to install its replacement that same day. But space has a way of resisting human schedules. Bolts and connectors that should have come free stuck fast, eating up time and forcing mission planners to split the job across two separate excursions.

The antenna they're installing this time is a spare, held in reserve for exactly this kind of failure. Its purpose is to restore what engineers call redundancy—the ability of the Station's communication system to keep functioning even when one component fails. Without it, the ISS relies on a single antenna for all its high-speed data transmission back to Earth. For a facility that costs billions of dollars and carries human lives, that's an unacceptable margin of error.

Menon, wearing the red-striped suit that marks him as EV1, the lead spacewalker, will handle most of the heavy work. Adenot, in an unstriped suit as EV2, will assist and perform secondary tasks. They're expected to work for about six and a half hours, moving methodically through the installation and connection procedures. Inside the Station, commander Jessica Meir and flight engineer Jack Hathaway will operate the Canadarm2 robotic arm, the Station's mechanical hand, to help position equipment and support the spacewalkers as needed.

The livestream begins at noon British Summer Time, with the actual airlock opening scheduled for roughly 1:35 p.m. BST. For Adenot, this second walk marks a personal milestone—she becomes the fifth French astronaut ever to conduct a spacewalk, and France's contribution to this particular spacewalk is now the thirteenth by a French citizen. Zoom out further and Adenot is the thirty-second European astronaut to perform this kind of work, part of a long lineage of European space exploration stretching back decades. This is her sixth spacewalk as part of the epsilon mission, the designation for her time aboard the Station.

What makes this moment worth watching isn't just the technical accomplishment, though that matters. It's the reminder that space exploration, even now, remains a fundamentally human enterprise. A bolt that won't turn, a schedule that has to bend, a second chance to finish the job—these are the textures of real work in the harshest environment humans have ever tried to operate in. Adenot and Menon will be back outside that airlock because the first attempt, for all its success in removing the broken antenna, left the work incomplete. This time, they'll complete it.