The 100th U.S. Spacewalk From the ISS Was Also a Solar Array Installation, and That's the Point
Astronauts Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk turned a milestone EVA into the seventh of eight roll-out solar array deployments, putting the station within one installation of a 30 percent power boost.
On October 29, 2026, astronauts Anil Menon and Joshua Kutryk spent seven hours and eleven minutes outside the International Space Station doing what you might call, in the vocabulary of infrastructure work, a punch list item: installing and deploying the seventh of eight Roll-Out Solar Arrays on the station’s truss structure. It was also, by count, the 100th U.S. spacewalk conducted from the ISS, a number that lands more quietly than you might expect because by the time you reach a hundred, the individual excursions have long stopped being anomalies. The work is work. You go out, you bolt a panel, you unfold it, you come back, you file the log. The milestone is a book-keeping event, not a physical one.
What the physical event actually accomplishes is more consequential than the headcount. Each iROSA panel, once rolled out and locked into place on the truss, adds to a power generation system that the station has been running at roughly 160 kilowatts for the better part of a decade. NASA’s own accounting puts the cumulative boost from the full eight-panel set at up to 30 percent, bringing total output to approximately 215 kilowatts. That is not a cosmetic difference. It is the difference between running the station’s existing science racks, life support, and crew systems within a comfortable margin and having to ration power when a new payload or a long-duration science campaign comes online. The arrays are, in the most literal sense, the station’s metabolic upgrade.
For Kutryk, the seven-hour stretch outside the airlock carried a second, smaller weight. It was his first spacewalk, and it made him the first Canadian astronaut to work untethered from the station since April 2019. That gap — a span of more than seven years without a Canadian on a spacewalk — is not a record that was being watched for, exactly, but it is the kind of quiet marker that a national space agency notices and files. For Menon, it was another entry in an already substantial EVA log. The two of them shared the task the way any two crew members on a maintenance rotation would: one holds, one bolts, they trade tools, they come back.
One array remains. NASA has a spacewalk scheduled for November 5 to install the eighth and final iROSA, which will close out a deployment sequence that has spanned multiple crew rotations and, by now, a significant stretch of station time. Once that last panel is rolled out and its wiring is confirmed, the power system will be at full capacity, and the station will enter a new baseline of available wattage for whatever science or commercial payloads are queued behind it. The installation itself is, in EVA terms, unremarkable: the motions, the tool swaps, the post-deployment checks. What is unremarkable is the point.
A hundred spacewalks from one platform is not a story about any single one of them. It is a story about the fact that the 100th was spent bolting a solar panel to a truss, not conducting a symbolic gesture or a press event in a spacesuit. The milestone is the count. The work is the work. Two astronauts went out, installed a panel, came back, and the station is, as of October 29, seven-eighths of the way to a power ceiling it has not had before.