Seven months ago, we published a story about how the first all-female spacewalk was about to take place. That historic event wound up getting canceled, however, because the International Space Station (ISS) had only one medium-sized spacesuit on board. Flash forward to last Friday, and that all-female spacewalk has finally taken place, as Christina Lock and Jessica Meir floated feet-first out of the ISS, tasked with replacing a failed power control unit.
Video footage from the astronauts’ helmet cameras, as they dangled 260 miles above Earth, provided a live stream of the painstaking operation to carry the new hardware, install it, and then return the faulty battery to the airlock for a postmortem back on Earth into why it failed.
Koch, 40, is due to remain on the ISS until February, bringing her total time in space to 328 days, the longest single spaceflight by a woman and just short of Scott Kelly’s 340-day record. Researchers are collecting extensive biomedical data on the impact of spaceflight on Koch’s bod, which is important considering the majority of data available is on male astronauts.
