How fast do astronauts move while spacewalking?

7/29/2018

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Science Story: How fast do astronauts move while spacewalking?

Their speed is limited mainly by how often they have to do 'tether swaps'. To prevent floating away, they must have a tether attached to a handrail at all times in addition to their safety tether line that moves along with them and extends to a max length.

So you attach to the next handrail, detach from the previous, move to the end and repeat. As Calvin mentioned their path is planned out and rehearsed and they are trained to move slowly and deliberately.
His 0.5 m/s is a good top estimate. If there were an emergency, they could detach their other tethers and simply pull themselves along their safety tether back to the airlock as fast as they could go hand over hand.

When they enter the foot restraint on the station robotic arm and are moved around by it, the arm programming is set to limit its max movement rate to less than 20 cm per second.

While theoretically things could be done faster everything is VERY SLOOOOW to minimize risk.

This information was taken from Quora. Click here to view the original post.

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What are your thoughts on this subject?

22 Comments

Shelley Durocher

Tom Erskine, It means the speed of their human power relative to what they are tethered to.

kandilarson

Slow and steady doesn't float away.

Nancy Gardner

I was trying to guess and I was estimating much faster.

jimsclads

Michael Doherty, earth is rotating at 1,000 mph at the equator too which changes as you go north due to shorter distance around the earth at that point. So 725 mph at 45 degrees.

Finakees

AB, Slowly? They are moving as fast as the vehicle the are spacewalking from, orbiting earth. How slowly is that? They are asking a question that is ambiguous.