A Russian spacewalker had to rush back inside the International Space Station on Wednesday when the battery voltage in his spacesuit suddenly dropped. Russian Mission Control ordered Oleg Artemyev, the station commander, to quickly return to the airlock so he could hook his suit to station power. The hatch remained open as his spacewalking partner, Denis Matveev, tidied up outside. NASA said neither man was ever in any danger. Matveev, in fact, remained outside for another hour or so, before he, too, was ordered to wrap it up. Matveev's suit was fine, but Russian Mission Control cut the spacewalk short since flight rules insist on the buddy system.

Video From the department of "we've got this supercomputer on the space station, what shall we do with it?" Wear and tear is a problem for astronauts venturing out of the orbiting lab, and while helmets filling with water may have garnered all the headlines, decades of grabbing for handrails and maneuvering equipment takes its toll on gloves. The gloves have five layers – a rubberized coating, followed by a cut-resistant material called Vectran then three further layers to keep the person inside at just the right temperature and pressure. Problems come when wear reaches the Vectran layer, for beyond that lies the pressure bladder and a bit further, the squishy human. Since, by their nature, the gloves get quite a bit of use, NASA insists astronauts take photos of their gloves and send them back to Earth for inspection prior to reuse. While this is all very well on the ISS, doing something similar on (or in orbit around) Mars, or when communication is constrained, is less than ideal.

User interface design is a complex task that involves designers examining a wide range of options. We present Spacewalker, a tool that allows designers to rapidly search a large design space for an optimal web UI with integrated support. Designers first annotate each attribute they want to explore in a typical HTML page, using a simple markup extension we designed. Spacewalker then parses the annotated HTML specification, and intelligently generates and distributes various configurations of the web UI to crowd workers for evaluation. We enhanced a genetic algorithm to accommodate crowd worker responses from pairwise comparison of UI designs, which is crucial for obtaining reliable feedback. Based on our experiments, Spacewalker allows designers to effectively search a large design space of a UI, using the language they are familiar with, and improve their design rapidly at a minimal cost.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – Spacewalking astronauts carried out a high-flying, high-tech version of musical chairs Wednesday, rearranging pumps outside the International Space Station. Popping out early, NASA astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold quickly swapped the positions of two spare ammonia pumps that are part of the space station's critical cooling system. One pump got too cold because of a power shutdown 17 years ago and is called Frosty; flight controllers plan to test it in the coming days to see if it still works. The other, a failed unit dubbed Leaky, spewed out ammonia five years ago. Frosty took Leaky's spot on a robot-arm mechanism, while Leaky was moved to a long-term storage platform. Ammonia coolant is toxic, and Mission Control repeatedly warned the spacewalkers to be careful of any leaks.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – Spacewalking astronauts gave a hand to the International Space Station's big robot arm Tuesday. As the federal government geared back up 250 miles below, NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle successfully installed the new mechanical gripper. Because of the lingering effects of the government shutdown, the spacewalk got started in the morning without coverage on NASA TV. An on-air message simply stated: "We regret the inconvenience." Nearly an hour into the spacewalk, however, NASA TV came alive and began broadcasting the event with typical blow-by-blow commentary.

This is about 90 glorious seconds of footage from astronaut Randy Bresnik's GoPro from his spacewalk outside the International Space Station in October. While the ostensible reason for the jaunt was to refurbish a robotic arm on the station, Bresnik says that sometimes, "you just have to take a moment to enjoy the beauty of our planet."