NEW YORK (AFP) – US astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir became thefirst all-female pairing to carry out a spacewalk Friday, a historicmilestone as NASA prepares to send the first woman to the Moon.
The mission was originally planned for earlier this year but had to beaborted due to a lack of properly fitting spacesuits, leading toallegations of sexism.”Christina, you may egress the airlock,” spacecraftcommunicator Stephanie Wilson said as the pair set out to replace a powercontroller on the International Space Station at 1138 GMT.
They began their mission with standard safety checks on their suits andtethers, before making their way to the repair site on the station’s portside, as the sunlit Earth came into view.
In a call to reporters a few minutes earlier, NASA administrator JimBridenstine emphasized the symbolic significance of the day. “We want tomake sure that space is available to all people, and this is anothermilestone in that evolution,” he said. “I have an 11-year-old daughter, Iwant her to see herself as having all the same opportunities that I foundmyself as having when I was growing up.”
The first all-female spacewalk was supposed to take place in March but wascanceled because the space agency had only one medium-sized suit, with amale-female combination performing the required task at a later date.
Traditionally male-dominated NASA’s failure to be adequately prepared wasdenounced in some quarters as evidence of implicit sexism. When they hadbeen outside space station for about five hours, President Donald Trumpreached the astronauts in a video call and told them they had made history.
“You are very brave, brilliant women,” Trump told Koch and Meir. “Yourepresent this country so well,” the president added. “We are very proud ofyou.”
Koch, an electrical engineer who is leading the mission, is carrying outher fourth spacewalk and was hooked up to the station’s robot arm.
Meir, who holds a doctorate in marine biology and is making her first everspacewalk, made her way carefully across using handles. The two wereworking to replace a faulty battery charge/discharge unit, known as a BCDU.
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The station relies on solar power but is out of direct sunlight for much ofits orbit and therefore needs batteries, and the BCDUs regulate the amountof charge that goes into them. The current task was announced Monday and ispart of a wider mission of replacing aging nickel-hydrogen batteries withhigher capacity lithium-ion units.
The US sent its first female astronaut into space in 1983, when Sally Ridetook part in the seventh Space Shuttle mission, and has now had more womenastronauts than any other country.
But the first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in1963, followed by compatriot Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, who was also thefirst woman spacewalker two years later. Ken Bowersox, NASA actingassociate administrator, said he hoped that an all-female spacewalk wouldsoon be a “routine” matter that would not require celebration.
Asked why it had taken so long — Meir is the 14th US woman spacewalker — hesaid men’s added height provided an advantage. “There have been a lot ofspacewalks where very tall men who are the ones that were able to do thejobs because they were able to reach and do things a little bit moreeasily,” he said.
“But we’ve also brought women into the crews, because of their brainsright, they come in and they bring different skills, they think of thingsdifferent ways. “And by using their brains, they can overcome a lot ofthose physical challenges.”
NASA plans to return to the Moon by 2024 for the first time since theApollo landings of 1969 – 1972. The new mission is named Artemis, after thetwin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology.
The mission will see the first woman to set foot on the lunar surface,likely as part of a male-female combination, as the space agency looksahead to a crewed Mars expedition in the 2030s. – APP / AFP
