After a months-long hiatus, NASA astronauts are ready to once again step outside the International Space Station (ISS) and do some orbital work.

NASA plans to resume spacewalks in 2025 after a spacesuit leak forced the agency to suspend extravehicular activity in June to address the issue. During a press conference earlier this week, Bill Spetch, director of operations and integration for NASA’s ISS program, told reporters that NASA is planning its next set of spacewalks “early next year,” Space.com reported.

“It’s just a matter of when is the right timing,” Spetch was quoted as saying. NASA replaced a seal and umbilical cord connecting the spacesuit to the ISS, and the leaking spacesuit was successfully restarted, according to Spetch.

Hopefully, that solves the problem, which could pose a life-threatening risk to the spacewalk astronauts. In June, two NASA astronauts prepared to leave the ISS for a spacewalk, which was suddenly canceled due to water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “There’s water everywhere,” Dyson could be heard saying during the live feed from the ISS.

NASA’s leaky spacesuits are, sad to say, a recurring theme on the ISS. In May 2022, NASA halted spacewalks outside the ISS following a series of potentially life-threatening incidents in which water leaked into the astronauts’ helmets during their spacewalks. NASA astronaut Raja Chari and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer were installing hoses on a radiator jet valve module outside the space station on March 23, 2022, when Maurer — who was embarking on his first spacewalk — noticed some water and moisture inside his visor toward the end of the seven-hour spacewalk .

Earlier in 2013, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano noticed a water leak inside his helmet that forced him to abruptly end the spacewalk. Parmitano was able to re-enter the ISS airlock but had difficulty breathing as 1.5 liters of water had formed inside his helmet. “I feel like it’s covering the sponge on my headphones and I’m wondering if I’m going to lose the audio connector. The water has also almost completely covered the front of my visor, stuck to it and is obscuring my vision,” said Parmitano retold.

The same suit worn by Parmitano nearly drowned another astronaut two years later. NASA astronaut Terry Virts, donning space suit #3005, noticed free flowing water droplets and a damp absorbent pad in the helmet at the end of his spacewalk.

It is clear that NASA has a problem with the space suit. The suits worn by astronauts aboard the ISS are more than 40 years old and are rapidly approaching the end of their useful lives. NASA’s extravehicular mobility units (EMUs) were first designed in the 1970s and used for its space shuttle program. Recently, NASA turned to its commercial partners to develop new spacesuits, award contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in June 2022 worth a combined value of $3.5 billion. Collins Aerospace lags behind in its task, while Axiom debuted the new threads last year.

The spacesuits are intended to be worn by astronauts as part of the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, but they will also fly to the ISS beforehand for a test run on the ISS. For now, the astronauts will continue to spacewalk in low Earth orbit while wearing the outdated spacesuits, but hopefully the temporary fixes will keep them safe.