US astronauts make history with first all-woman spacewalk

Washington, October 18 

US astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir became the first all-woman pairing to carry out a spacewalk on Friday, following a spacesuit flub earlier this year that caused the historic mission to be aborted. 

"Christina, you may egress the airlock," spacecraft communicator Stephanie Wilson told the pair shortly after they set out to replace a power controller on the International Space Station at 1138 GMT. They began their mission making standard safety checks on their suits and tethers, before making their way to the repair site. 

In a call to reporters a few minutes earlier, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine emphasised its symbolic importance. "We want to make sure that space is available to all people, and this is another milestone in that evolution. I have an 11-year-old daughter, I want her to see herself as having all the same opportunities that I found myself as having when I was growing up.”

The first such mission was supposed to take place in March but was cancelled because the space agency had only one medium-sized suit, with a male-female combination performing the required task at a later date. 

Koch, an electrical engineer, was leading Meir, who holds a doctorate in marine biology and is making her first ever spacewalk. The two were working to replace a faulty battery charge/discharge unit, known as a BCDU. The station relies on solar power but is out of direct sunlight for much of its orbit and therefore needs batteries, and the BCDUs regulate the amount of charge that goes into them. The current task was announced Monday and is part of a wider mission of replacing aging nickel-hydrogen batteries with higher capacity lithium-ion units.  — AFP