During a 6 hours 23 minutes US Spacewalk 97 (or Extravehicular Activivity, EVA) which began at 1229 UTC outside the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday (Aug. 18), two Expedition 75 crew members NASA's Anil Menon (EV-1) and European Space Agency (ESA)'s Sophie Adenot (EV-2) successfully removed a failed Space-to-Ground antenna from the orbital station's Z1 truss.

With assistance from inside the station by NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway operating the Canadarm2 robotic arm and Jessica Meir assisting with suit-ups, the primary goal of the EVA was to replace a high-speed communications antenna that had failed in November, disrupting high-bandwidth data transmission between the ISS and Mission Control Houston. Though the station continues to operate with a fully functional Space-to-Ground antenna, which provides high-data rate communications with NASA’s Tracking Data and Relay Satellites and control centers across the world, including the agency’s Mission Control Center in Houston.

During the spacewalk, Menon and Adenot completed the removal of the failed Space-to-Ground antenna and performed a long-duration tie down of the unit on the space station truss structure. The crew members needed more time than expected to disconnect electrical cables and loosen bolts, delaying work to install a replacement antenna.

"We got into this with the mindset that we wanted everything to go perfectly," said Menon as the spacewalk came to an end. "Things were a lot different than expected, but what I would say that I am really impressed with is that all of those contingencies were well thought out."

Mission managers will decide whether to add the task of installing the replacement antenna to a spacewalk already planned for next Tuesday (Aug. 25) or to leave it for a later outing.

"We are looking at times," radioed Mission Control to the spacewalkers. "We are going to go directly to the long-duration tie-down of this SGANT on the Z-1 truss."

Near the end of the spacewalk, the crew also performed clean up tasks and an inspection and swap of a portable foot restraint near the Quest airlock. Their EVA ended once they were back inside the U.S. Quest airlock and re-pressurization began at 1852 UTC.

Spacewalk 97 was the first EVA for Adenot, making her the first female and fifth citizen of France to perform a spacewalk after Jean-Loup Chrétien, Jean-Pierre Haigneré, Philippe Perrin, and Thomas Pesquet. This also marked Menon's second EVA, bringing his total spacewalking time to 12 hours and 50 minutes.

The EVA is the fifth conducted out of the ISS this year, the second for Expedition 75, the 97th using U.S. extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuits and overall the 282nd EVA to date in support of ISS assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.

Cursor, now owned by SpaceX, launched Origin, a code hosting platform built for AI coding agents, on Monday. The platform is currently in beta for paid users and allows developers to sync existing repositories from GitHub, with real-time two-way synchronization available--mirrors commit history, branches, and PR activity, keeping GitHub as the canonical source of truth until a team chooses to detach.

Built by the Graphite team acquired in late 2025, Origin is designed to handle high-frequency commits and parallel agent workloads, featuring AI-powered automated merge conflict resolution and sub-400-millisecond global sync latency.

Unlike GitHub, which was built for human-first developers, Origin is architected to manage fleets of AI agents committing simultaneously, addressing the bottleneck of manual code review. Early previews highlighted capabilities such as 296,000 clones per hour and the ability to handle 22 commits per second per repository.

The platform integrates directly into the Cursor IDE, featuring a Codebase tab for repository management and a Review tab for automated pull request processing. Instead of forcing developers to jump between a local editor and an external browser tab to check pull requests or review builds, Origin integrates repository management straight into Cursor.

Initial integrations include Vercel, Buildkite, and Depot, with support for existing GitHub Actions workflows to facilitate CI/CD pipelines.

"You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online 😁" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!"

Origin was first unveiled at Cursor’s Compile conference on June 16, 2026, alongside a new iOS app and a 1.5-trillion-parameter model. The launch follows SpaceX’s $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor, which aims to consolidate control over the entire software development pipeline from editor to infrastructure.

By launching Origin, SpaceXAI and Cursor are shifting AI development from the editor level down to the infrastructure layer. Rather than relying on Microsoft-owned GitHub to store code while using Cursor to write it, Origin creates a vertically integrated ecosystem.

GitHub has been unreliable, in recent years and was down for several hours Monday, as Cursor launched Origin. An analysis by LeadDev counted 257 incidents between May 2025 and April 2026, 48 of them major — roughly one significant disruption per week. February was the worst month on record with 37.

GitHub Actions alone accounted for 57 outages in twelve months. Chief technology officer Vlad Fedorov has said the platform "wasn't built for the scale it's now being asked to handle" and must design for 30 times today's load. In an April engineering post covered by InfoQ, the company acknowledged it "failed to meet its own reliability standards," citing rapid growth, tight architectural coupling and inadequate load shedding. Monday's outage was the seventh incident on GitHub's status page in fifteen days.

The fatigue is audible. "GitHub really doesn't feel built for the agent era," one developer wrote on X as Origin went live. "It goes down way too often, but until now there haven't been many real alternatives."