NASA’s first all-women spacewalk inspires

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, soaring 260 miles above a wave of public interest, floated outside the International Space Station Friday for history’s first all-female spacewalk.

Floating in the Quest airlock, Koch, making her fourth spacewalk, and Meir, making her first, switched their spacesuits to battery power at 7:38 a.m. EDT to officially kick off a planned five-and-a-half-hour outing.

It’s the 221st spacewalk since the International Space Station assembly began in 1998. It’s also the first spacewalk in 54 years to be carried out by two women, a milestone that triggered widespread interest around the world.

Despite the unusual level of scrutiny, Friday’s spacewalk was a strictly-business affair to replace a faulty 232-pound battery charger in the lab’s solar power system. Any two of the space station’s four NASA-sponsored astronauts could have done the work — they all received similar training — but Koch and Meir got the nod.

“It’s a sign of the slowly growing number of women in the astronaut corps,” Kathy Sullivan, who became the first American female to walk in space in 1984, said in an email exchange with CBS News. “The occasional woman as a bit of a novelty on a crew or a spacewalk or on a mission control console is giving way to the normalcy of more gender-diverse teams in all these arenas and women regularly taking on high-stakes tasks and leadership roles.”

For identification, Koch, call sign EV-1, is wearing a suit with red stripes and using helmet camera No. 18. Meir, EV-2, is using an unmarked suit and using “helmetcam” No. 11.

Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov carried out history’s first spacewalk in 1965. Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space during an outing with a male cosmonaut in 1984, followed later that year by Sullivan, who joined astronaut David Leestma for a shuttle spacewalk.

While NASA managers and even the astronauts tend to view the all-female spacewalk as “just another milestone,” it has taken on heightened significance in the wake of a spacesuit sizing problem earlier this year that forced the station crew to call off plans for Koch and astronaut Anne McClain to make the first all-female EVA.

The station now is equipped with components for four suits, accommodating all three of NASA’s crew members as well as European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano.

Koch and Meir already were paired up for one of five spacewalks to replace aging solar array batteries. But after two of those excursions, a battery charge-discharge unit, or BCDU, failed knocking a newly-installed battery off line.

While the remaining battery installation spacewalks were put on hold, NASA managers opted to keep the Koch-Meir pairing intact, assigning them instead to the BCDU change out.

“One of these days, working in space like that is going to be routine,” said former astronaut Ken Bowersox, now deputy chief of NASA’s human space program. “We won’t get together to celebrate an occasion when two women, or two men, or a man and a woman, or three or four go outside, it’ll just be routine.

“That’s what we’re doing on ISS, we’re gathering that experience that we need to make spaceflight routine so we can move farther out into our solar system, to go to the moon and on to Mars someday. That’s what excites me the most, to see that progress happening.”

The mission of this spacewalk

The station’s electricity is provided by four huge solar wings, two on each end of a truss that stretches the length of a football field. Two dozen battery charge controllers, six per solar wing, divert electricity to powerful batteries for recharging when the lab is in sunlight and then deliver that stored power when the station moves through Earth’s shadow.

The flight plan calls for Koch and Meir to remove one of three spare BCDUs from its perch on an external storage platform, carefully move it to the left end of the truss more than 50 yards from the station’s airlock, remove the faulty unit from a solar array equipment bay and install the replacement.

That is expected to restore power to the lab’s electrical system that was lost when the original charger failed after 19 years of normal operation, knocking a newly-installed lithium-ion battery off line.

With the BCDU swap-out complete, Koch and Meir will carry the faulty unit back to the airlock for eventual return to Earth aboard a future SpaceX Dragon cargo ship for troubleshooting and, if possible, repair.

If time is available, they also plan to carry out a few more routine tasks, adjusting multi-layer insulation around spare components to make access easier, routing an ethernet cable and installing a fitting on the European Space Agency’s Columbus laboratory module that will be needed when an experiment platform is attached later.

Because batteries lose their ability to recharge over time, NASA is in the process of replacing all 48 of the space station’s older-generation nickel-hydrogen batteries with 24 more powerful lithium-ion power packs, along with circuit-completing “adapter plates” to fill in for batteries that were removed but not replaced. In the upgraded system, each lithium-ion battery is charged and discharged by a single BCDU.

In 2017, spacewalkers replaced the 12 right-side inboard solar array batteries with six lithium-ion units. Last March, the 12 left-side inboard batteries were replaced. NASA currently is working to replace the left-side outboard batteries. The final set of lithium-ion batteries will be installed in the right-side outboard arrays next year.

Three of six lithium-ion batteries were installed on the left outboard array during spacewalks Oct. 6 and 11 by Koch and Morgan. Shortly thereafter, engineers discovered one of the three BCDUs in that circuit had failed, sidelining one of the new batteries.

The failure is troubling because an identical charger failed last March after a new battery was installed for the left inboard array. NASA engineers want to make sure a generic problem of some sort is not present before proceeding with additional battery installations.