WASHINGTON: US
astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir have became the first all-female
pairing to carry out a spacewalk-a historic milestone as NASA prepares to send
the first woman to the Moon. "It symbolizes exploration by all that dare
to dream and work hard to achieve that dream," Meir said after the 7-hour,
17-minute spacewalk to replace a power controller on the International Space
Station.

The mission was
originally planned for earlier this year but had to be aborted due to a lack of
properly fitting spacesuits, leading to allegations of sexism. Koch and Meir
began the walk with standard safety checks on their suits and tethers, before
making their way to the repair site on the station's port side, as the sunlit
Earth came into view.

In a call to
reporters just a few minutes before, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine
emphasized the symbolic significance of the day."We want to make sure that
space is available to all people, and this is another milestone in that
evolution," he said. "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."

Suit flub

The first
all-female spacewalk was supposed to take place in March but was canceled
because the space agency had only one medium-sized suit. A male-female team
performed the required task at a later date. The failure by traditionally
male-dominated NASA to be adequately prepared was denounced in some quarters as
evidence of implicit sexism.

When Koch and
Meir had been outside the space station for about five hours, President Donald
Trump reached them in a video call and told them they had made history.
"You are very brave, brilliant women," Trump said. "You
represent this country so well," the president added. "We are very
proud of you." Meir, a 42-year-old marine biologist who was recruited by
NASA in 2013, answered by paying tribute to female pioneers of the past.
"We don't want to take too much credit because there have been many other
female spacewalkers before us," she said.

"There's
been a long line of female scientists, explorers, engineers and astronauts. We
have followed in their footsteps, to get to where we are today." After the
call, the astronauts got back to their repair work. "That is a view,"
one of them-it was not clear which-said at one point, as the earth was lit up
in bright light from the sun. Koch, an electrical engineer who is leading the
mission, was carrying out her fourth spacewalk and was hooked up to the
station's robotic arm.

Meir, making her
first spacewalk, carefully made her way using handles. 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. 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. 

Artemis

The US sent its
first female astronaut into space in 1983, when Sally Ride took part in the
seventh space shuttle mission, and has now had more women astronauts than any
other country. But the first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina
Tereshkova in 1963, followed by compatriot Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, who was
also the first woman spacewalker two years later.

NASA acting
associate administrator Ken Bowersox said he hoped that an all-female spacewalk
would soon be a "routine" matter that would not require
celebration.  Asked why it had taken so
long-Meir is the 14th US woman spacewalker-he said men's added height provided
an advantage. "There have been a lot of spacewalks where very tall men
were the ones that were able to do the jobs because they were able to reach and
do things a little bit more easily," he said.

Democratic
presidential hopeful Kamala Harris said the spacewalk was more than historic.
"It's a reminder that for women, even the sky doesn't have to be the
limit," she tweeted. NASA plans to return to the Moon by 2024 for the
first time since the Apollo landings of 1969-1972. The new mission is named
Artemis, after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology. The mission will likely
see the first woman set foot on the lunar surface, perhaps as part of a
male-female combination, as the space agency looks ahead to a crewed Mars
expedition in the 2030s. - AFP