ISS commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov sends a message to his mother during a spacewalk on the station
Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, on his first spacewalk of 2026 on the International Space Station (ISS), sent a message to his mother to tell her that he remembered to wear his hat.
Current ISS commander Kud-Sverchkov and his fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev were performing scheduled installation and removal of scientific experiment hardware on the outer hull of the space station on Wednesday.
A stream of the spacewalk, broadcast by Russian space corporation Roscosmos, shows Kud-Sverchkov holding up a laminated piece of paper with the words "Mom, I'm wearing my hat" printed in Russian.
width="560"
height="315"
src="https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2026.05/6a1846a785f5400e826169ff.mp4" frameborder="0"
>
Over the course of more than six hours, the cosmonauts installed new hardware to observe the Sun in the previously unexplored terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and retrieved a slide from an experiment attempting to grow ultra-pure semiconductors in space.
width="560"
height="315"
src="https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2026.05/6a18618985f5403321726ea8.MP4" frameborder="0"
>
They also uninstalled a container used to test whether bacteria, fungi, and plant seeds could survive five years exposed to vacuum, cosmic radiation, and temperature fluctuations.
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev were launched to the ISS alongside NASA astronaut Chris Williams aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-28 in last November. Kud-Sverchkov then took over command of the ISS Expedition 74 from NASA astronaut Mike Fincke.
(RT.com)
