A friend on Facebook started a watch party today for the first all female space walk from the International Space Station. I wouldn't have realised it was happening otherwise, but she gave me the chance to see it happening live, which was absolutely brilliant!
Women astronauts have been doing space walks for 35 years, but this was the first one where both astronauts were women. Only this March, an all woman space walk was planned, but they found that they didn't have enough space suits of the right size - an unintended consequence of designing for the average man. They tend not to have enough smaller sizes. Mary Robinette Kowal has been eloquent on this sort of design problem.
But, today was the day when Christina Koch and Jessica Meir floated out of the airlock together. Christina Koch is an electrical engineer, and Jessica Meir is a marine biologist - she was interviewed on 'Houston, We Have a Podcast' before she went into space, which was a fascinating insight into her life and career, and how she finally achieved her dream of becoming an astronaut.
They were replacing a battery unit, and once they get into position they have to be tethered to the space station, and all the tools have to be tethered, too. There are rails all over the space station that they use to pull themselves around.
The most fascinating thing to me was that they showed what the astronauts could see via a helmet cam. This really is the closest I will ever come to being in space! There were also good views of the space station itself and, behind it, the Earth in startlingly bright blue and white.
Down on earth, the commentator was also talking to another astronaut about what the space walkers were experiencing, and how they trained - there's an entire replica space station in a pool that they practice on. They can't remove the gravity, but they can have neutral buoyancy by practicing in the water.
