A five-year effort to boost the International Space Station’s electrical power wrapped up on Thursday. NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk installed and deployed the eighth and final International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, or IROSA, during a spacewalk that ended at 3:35 p.m. EST. The facts below come from NASA’s November 5 space station blog and a detailed report from Spaceflight Now.

What the crew accomplished

The spacewalk lasted six hours and 59 minutes. Menon and Kutryk installed the final array on the station’s 3B power channel on the starboard truss and unfurled it to its full length of about 63 feet. NASA says the eight roll-out arrays together raise the station’s power generation capacity from 160 kilowatts to approximately 215 kilowatts.

Work on the upgrade began in February 2021. Since then, astronauts have completed 18 spacewalks to prepare power-channel equipment and install the eight arrays. Thursday’s outing was U.S. spacewalk 101, Menon’s fifth and Kutryk’s second, and the 286th spacewalk in support of station assembly, maintenance and upgrades.

A snag before the final unfurl

Spaceflight Now reported that flight controllers in Houston spotted lower-than-expected electrical current after the freshly connected array was hooked up. They held the deployment through another trip around Earth so Kutryk could inspect a power connector in orbital night. After that check, Mission Control radioed that deployment was complete.

That pause is a reminder that even “final” milestone spacewalks are live operations, not ceremonies. The crew still finished on the same day with the array fully deployed.

Why the upgrade matters

The station’s original solar wings were delivered by space shuttles between 2000 and 2009 and were designed for about 15 years of service. Their output has declined with age. Rather than replace them outright, NASA mounted smaller, more efficient roll-out arrays in front of the existing wings. Each IROSA generates about 8 kilowatts, Spaceflight Now noted, compared with roughly 19 kilowatts for each original wing when new.

NASA frames the extra power as essential to keep the outpost running through its final years, including preparations for a safe, controlled deorbit later this decade.

Crew context

Menon’s five spacewalks now total 33 hours and 30 minutes outside. Kutryk has logged 14 hours and 10 minutes across his two IROSA installation walks. Spaceflight Now identified the outing as the ninth U.S. spacewalk of 2026 and the sixth by Expedition 75 crew members.

What comes next

With the power upgrade finished, NASA’s next planned U.S. spacewalks are targeted for early January to work on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic-ray detector on the station truss, according to operations managers quoted by Spaceflight Now.

Continuity after Swift’s reentry

The same week NASA said farewell to the Swift Observatory after its November 4 reentry, crews on the ISS were still installing hardware designed to keep human spaceflight infrastructure alive through 2030. The contrast is useful: robotic observatories eventually fall, while the station’s power system is being reinforced for a controlled end-of-life plan. Thursday’s IROSA work sits in that longer maintenance story rather than a one-off spectacle.

Power numbers in context

Moving from roughly 160 to 215 kilowatts is about a one-third boost in generation capacity for a laboratory that must run life support, science racks and communications at once. NASA’s blog presents the figure as the payoff for 18 spacewalks since 2021. Thursday was the last bolt in a long campaign, not a standalone stunt.

The bottom line

Thursday’s spacewalk closed a multi-year hardware campaign that will quietly shape every experiment and system that needs electricity on the ISS. The arrays are not flashy from the ground, but 215 kilowatts of capacity is the kind of infrastructure milestone that keeps an aging laboratory useful until retirement.

Image: A view peering down a pair of the International Space Station's roll-out solar arrays (iss074e0403068) by NASA Johnson Space Center via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0