NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will lead the first all-female spacewalk on either Thursday or Friday, after the planned excursion to install new batteries on the International Space Station was pre-poned from October 21 due to a failure on one of the ISS’s power modules.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the news on Twitter on Wednesday evening, saying, “@Space_Station update: our first all-female spacewalk with @Astro_Christina and @Astro_Jessica will be Thursday or Friday to replace a faulty battery charge-discharge unit,” adding that a telecon would be held later in the day.
According to a NASA blogpost, Koch and Meir have been readying their spacesuits and reviewing procedures for the planned spacewalk. They will have to replace the failed battery charge/discharge unit with a new one, with the old unit to be sent back to earth on board a SpaceX vessel so engineers can figure out why it failed.
Their spacesuits were at the centre of a controversy at NASA in March, as a previously-planned all-woman spacewalk had to be called off as the agency had only one medium-sized suit at the time. The incident led to allegations of sexism at NASA, although astronaut Anne McClain later said that the cancellation was on her recommendation.
Spacesuits are not designed to be for male or females, but rather, for medium or large sizes, and are made up of multiple parts put together. The decision to let her colleague Nick Hague make the walk was more out of logistics than a lack of planning.
"I was planning on changing sizes on the second suit, and because everything went so well on the first one, we realized ... we don't need to inject any additional unknowns into something that is as important and as dangerous as a spacewalk...It's very important that all of us are able to work as efficiently and safely as possible, and so Nick and I swapped,” McClain said.
On Wednesday, NASA also unveiled the look of the spacesuits that will be worn by the first woman on the moon. The Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) is more advanced than the suits worn by Neil Armstrong and company. While the suits used in the Apollo mission could only allow their wearers to ‘bunny hop’ on the moon, the xEMU will allow its users to actually walk on the moon’s surface. It allows for much greater mobility as well as dexterity, to allow astronauts to pick up rocks with ease.
The new suits are designed for users of all sizes, covering everyone from the “1st percentile female to 99th percentile male with two sizes in the xEMU HUT fleet system,” according to a paper presented by NASA at the 49th International Conference on Environmental Systems.
Astronauts onboard the Artemis moon mission will have two suits: One for moonwalks and one for use inside the shuttle or in space. The Artemis mission will land "the first woman and the next man" on the moon by 2024.
