Sophie Adenot EVA-98: The French Astronaut Who Just Walked in Space Twice in Two Weeks

Two weeks ago, she floated outside the International Space Station for the first time in her life. Yesterday, she did it again.

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon completed US EVA-98 on Tuesday, August 25, 2026 — wrapping up at 20:57 CEST after hours of work in one of the most hostile environments a human being can occupy. No atmosphere. No gravity. Temperature swings that would kill you in seconds without a suit.

It was Sophie's second spacewalk. In fourteen days. And it etched her name into a very short list: the 32nd time a European astronaut has ever walked in space.

What does a spacewalk actually feel like?

The scariest part isn't the height. It's the temperature.

Outside the ISS, the environment swings between −157°C in shadow and +121°C in direct sunlight — sometimes within minutes, as the station crosses the terminator line between night and day every 46 minutes. Your suit is the only thing between you and that 278-degree swing.

And the whole time, the station is moving at 7.66 kilometres per second. Fast enough to cross France in under two minutes. Sophie and Anil weren't floating in peaceful silence. They were hurtling around the planet at 22 times the speed of sound. They just couldn't feel it.

Who is Sophie Adenot?

Before ESA selected her in 2022, Sophie Adenot was a French military helicopter test pilot — someone whose entire career was built around taking experimental aircraft to the limits of their design envelope and bringing them back safely. The kind of person trained to stay calm when every alarm is going off at once.

That skill transfers to spacewalks more directly than you might think. An EVA is four to seven hours of painstaking physical work, in a pressurised suit that fights every movement, on the exterior of a structure the size of a football field, while the planet scrolls beneath you at orbital speed. Panic is not an option.

Two EVAs in fourteen days says something about how EVA-98's planners view her capabilities. You don't send a rookie outside twice in a fortnight by accident.

Who is Anil Menon?

Her EVA partner tells an equally strange story. Anil Menon spent years as a flight surgeon — a doctor trained specifically to keep pilots and astronauts alive in extreme conditions. He was involved in early crewed SpaceX missions, sitting in mission control, keeping the humans in those Dragon capsules safe from the ground.

Then NASA selected him in 2021. And eventually, he became one of those humans.

It's a disorienting career arc: years ensuring other people could safely cross the boundary between Earth and space, then finally crossing it yourself. EVA-98 added another chapter.

What does 'US EVA-98' actually mean?

The ISS is 25 years old. It was designed to last 15. Every year, components age, cables degrade, and equipment needs replacing — most of it mounted on the exterior, accessible only by a human in a suit, hanging off the truss in vacuum.

EVA-98 is the 98th US-segment spacewalk in ISS history. It's part of a maintenance schedule that never fully stops. The specific tasks — ESA hasn't published a detailed manifest yet — involve external hardware work that robotic arms can't complete alone. Some jobs still need hands. Human hands, in thick gloves, in a pressurised glove box that used to be an arm.

You can watch the ISS pass over your location in real time on the SkyLens live tracker — a white dot moving faster than any aircraft you've ever seen, carrying Sophie, Anil, and their crewmates right now.

Why two spacewalks in fourteen days?

Back-to-back EVAs within a mission aren't common, but they're not unheard of either. There are two likely explanations: the station needs a high volume of external work completed before the maintenance window closes, or — more likely — mission planners found in Sophie's first EVA exactly the performance that earns a rapid follow-up assignment.

In either case, Sophie Adenot is now one of the most EVA-experienced astronauts currently aboard the station. That matters in ways beyond résumé points. In a real emergency — a micrometeorite strike requiring rapid external assessment, an unexpected hardware failure — recent EVA experience isn't something you improvise. You go to whoever has been outside most recently.

How many Europeans have walked in space?

Thirty-two times. The first was French cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien in 1988 — outside the Soviet Mir space station, in a Soviet Orlan suit, after years of training with cosmonauts in Star City. In the decades since, astronauts from France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have all made it outside.

Sophie's second EVA adds one more line to that ledger. The SkyLens orbital guide covers how the ISS stays up and what these orbits actually look like from the ground, if you want the geometry behind the numbers.

What happens next?

With two EVAs logged, Sophie returns to the internal rhythm of the station — scientific experiments, system checks, the constant low-level work of keeping a small group of people alive in a place where the environment will kill them the moment any barrier fails. Her mission continues, and there may be further EVAs before she rotates home.

This is what human spaceflight looks like in 2026. Not weekly launches. Not drama for its own sake. The sustained, grinding, extraordinary work of existing — and working — somewhere no living thing was ever supposed to reach.

More stories like this every day on the SkyLens blog.