On October 18, 2019, NASA live-streamed the first all-woman spacewalk in world history. At 7:38 AM, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir began a seven hour spacewalk off the International Space Station. Kock and Meir are the 13th and 14th women to ever complete spacewalks since Svetlana Savitskaya first completed a spacewalk in 1984. NASA hopes that this is the beginning of all-woman spacewalks becoming normalized. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence congratulated the two women through a recorded video.
The two astronauts were on a spacewalk to fix a malfunctioning battery charge/discharge unit that was blocking new batteries from providing electricity to the station. Four sets of batteries assist main solar panels in delivering power to the International Space Station, so one set of faulty batteries would not put the station in danger.
Spaceflights are among the most physically intensive tasks on a space station.Â
Due to spacesuit availability, an earlier all-woman flight was scrapped in March. Because humans’ sizes change while in zero-gravity, there are often members of the crew that do not have spacesuits that fit them.
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