Without any doubt, NASA does many wonderful stuff, and now it’s time for the notorious space agency to promote women as astronauts. Probably we all know highly intelligent women who are working for NASA as astronomers, like Michelle Thaller and Amy Mainzer. But astronauts are something else, we could say that it requires some extra courage to do what they do.
Two female astronauts, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, stepped outside the International Space Station to replace a broken battery charger. Thus they did the first all-women spacewalk in history.
7 hours of spacewalk
The spacewalk began at 7:38 a.m. Koch was first to venture out of the ISS with a red tether attached, and Meir soon followed her at 7:49 a.m., carrying a tool bag as she made her way out of the hatch. Even though the mission was initially intended to have 5-and-a-half hours, Koch and Meir have spent 7 hours overall because they did some additional jobs.
NASA wanted to complete earlier the first all-women spacewalk, but unfortunately, the event got canceled for a minor flaw. NASA didn’t manage to get the right sizes for the spacesuits of its female astronauts. And of course, you’re thinking right now about women’s exigency regarding clothes, but no, that wasn’t the case this time.
“One giant leap for WOMANkind!”
Rep. Katherine Clark wrote this message on Twitter. She adapted Neil Armstrong’s notorious quote after he became the first human to walk on the moon.
“In the past, women haven’t always been at the table,” Koch said in an interview with NPR from the space station. “It’s wonderful to be contributing to the human spaceflight program at a time when all contributions are being accepted, when everyone is having a role, and that can lead in turn to an increased chance of success.”
Meir said the spacewalk “shows all the work that went in for the decades prior – all of the women who worked to get us to where we are today. The nice thing for us is we don’t even really think about it on a daily basis. It’s just normal. We’re part of the team. . . . It’s really nice to see how far we have come.”
