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Christina Koch and Jessica Meir accomplished the
much-anticipated milestone for NASA during a relatively routine
mission to swap faulty batteries on the station's exterior.
"Mission accomplished!" NASA chief Jim Bridenstine tweeted on
Friday. "Today’s historic achievement paves the way for our
#Artemis program, which will send the first woman to the Moon in
2024."
"Ad Astra!" he added, Latin for "to the stars".
NASA aims to return to the moon with crewed missions by 2024
under the program dubbed Artemis, who in Greek mythology was the
twin sister of Apollo, the name of the original moon program.
Koch and Meir, clad in white spacesuits and tethered by cords to
the station some 254 miles (408 km) above Earth, stepped into
outer space at 7:38 a.m. Eastern time (1138 GMT) to replace a
faulty power unit designed to help condition energy stored from
the station's solar panels, NASA announced online as it showed
live video of the action.
A first attempt at an all-female spacewalk in March was called
off because one of the astronauts' medium-sized spacesuits was
not configured and ready for the journey.
U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Koch and Meir by phone
from the White House during the final stretch of the spacewalk.
"Station, this is President Donald Trump. Do you hear me?"
The president, flanked by his daughter Ivanka Trump and vice
president Mike Pence, said the astronauts were "brave, brilliant
women" and mistakenly lauded the two as the first women to step
outside the space station, prompting a gentle correction from
Meir.
"We don't want to take too much credit, because there have been
many other female space-walkers before us. This is just the
first time that there have been two women outside at the same
time," Meir, the 15th woman to conduct a spacewalk, responded.
Astronauts on the space station, which became operational in
2000, have tallied 221 maintenance spacewalks, 43 of which
included women astronauts, according to NASA.
Friday's spacewalk, formally called extravehicular activities,
is in line with the U.S. space agency's aim to ramp up
inclusivity in space.
Koch is scheduled set to complete the longest single space
flight by a woman by remaining in orbit aboard the station until
February 2020. She said gender milestones such as the spacewalk
are significant.
"There are a lot of people who derive motivation from inspiring
stories from people who look like them, and I think that it's an
important aspect of the story to tell," she said at a NASA
briefing in Houston this month.
Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut who spent 136 days on the
International Space Station, told Reuters she did not want
events like Friday's spacewalk to become gimmicks.
"We want them to happen because people have the skill sets and
they're available to do the job," said Magnus.
"On the other hand, it's important for young women to see women
role models doing extraordinary things," she said. "So there's
two sides of the coin. You want it to be normal but yet you want
it to be special."
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Additional reporting by Steve
Holland in Washington; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Daniel
Wallis)
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