Two astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday started preparations for a spacewalk scheduled for early November, announced the Russian Mission Control.

Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and NASA astronaut William McArthur will be studying the program of the spacewalk on the American segment of the station on Tuesday and hold consultations with US space engineers in Houston, Texas, said Russian Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

During the spacewalk, the two astronauts are to install new equipment on the station's outside surface.

Spacewalks from the ISS have been suspended since April 2003, two months after the Colombia disaster. Astronauts on US shuttle Discovery made three spacewalks from the shuttle when it visited the station in July.

The coming spacewalk will be the first for Tokarev while ISS commander McArthur has already made two spacewalks that totaled 13 hours and 16 minutes in duration. Another spacewalk is planned for December.

Tokarev and McArthur rode aloft to the orbiting lab on Oct. 1 on a Soyuz ship from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and hurtled two days in space before its rendezvous with the ISS.

Source: Xinhua