World’s First All-Female Spacewalk Is Happening

This March 29 is going to be a historical day as two NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain are joining the first all-female spacewalk, which will happen outside the ISS.

On July 25, 1984, Svetlana Saviskaya, a Soviet cosmonaut, was the first woman to take part in a spacewalk. Now, after 35 years, history is about to repeat itself. At the end of this month, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, two NASA astronauts will carry out the first all-woman spacewalk.

Canadian Space Agency’s Kristen Faccio will offer the needed ground support from Johnson Space Center of NASA in Houston. From her tweets, you can tell that she is equally excited.

There have been about 500 people traveling to space. Women account for less than 11% of that. Up until now, spacewalks have either involved all-male teams or both-gender teams.

So, to have an all-female spacewalk is a pretty big thing.

A NASA spokesperson said in an interview with CNN:

Coverage of this historical spacewalk from NASA television is set to start at 6:30 a.m ET and will last for around 7 hours. The plan for this spacewalk is to replace all the batteries installed in the previous summer. For Koch and McClain, both became an astronaut in 2013; this will be their first-ever spacewalk.

At the moment, McClain is aboard the International Space Station as one of Expedition 58’s crew member. The whole team arrived at the ISS in December 2018. Koch is appointed to be the flight engineer for the upcoming Expedition 59 and 60. The former one will be launched on March 14. Along with Koch in this journey are Nick Hague, a NASA astronaut, and Alexey Ovchinin, a Russian cosmonaut.