>each time she would put on the suit and go to the outer hull
>area of the ship? At first I thought she was trying to
>systematically determine how to deactivate the explosives. But
>that clearly was not the case.

The first time she was finding a way to short circuit the broadcast to change the message. She was successful as at the end of thee episode the message had a bunch of blank spots indicating she was in control. Unfortunately it didn’t change anything as her crew still decided to come and rescue her.

The second time; episodes 9& 10 it was I think to release a thruster to make it too hard to dock with her and try to save her. It worked and slowed down Alex enough but she still had to jump out and try to signal the danger to them