Live in orbit: ISS spacewalk begins

American astronaut Mike Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov officially began a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, more than 200 miles above Earth, at 12:22 p.m. EST.

The two spacewalkers first completed leak checks of their Russian Orlan spacesuits and opened the hatch of the station's Pirs compartment - the official start of a spacewalk choreographed by Russia's space agency.

You can watch the entire spacewalk, expected to last five hours and 45 minutes, by clicking on the still image on the right side of this page to launch a live NASA TV viewer. And refresh the page for updates.

You can tell who's who by looking at the stripes on the spacesuits - Fincke's are red, Lonchakov's are blue.

The spacewalkers' first major task is to install an exposed European science experiment that they had difficulty installing on a spacewalk late last year.

But first, a potentially dangerous task - using cutters to shorten six straps on the Pirs docking compartment that have been seen flapping during thrusts by docking and departing spacecraft.

The straps, located near two antennas on a docked Progress cargo ship, are not expected to pose any danger, but to be safe are being shortened to a length of 20 to 50 millimeters.

Needless to say, handling a sharp object like cutters in the vaccuum of space requires extreme caution.

The spacewalk is the 120th in support of space station assembly and maintanence.

It's the sixth spacewalk for Fincke, the commander of Expedition 18, and the second for flight engineer Lonchakov.

IMAGE NOTE: In the image above, NASA astronaut Mike Fincke can be seen outside the International Space Station's Pirs docking compartment. Ficke left the hatch first, followed by cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov.