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NASA is making history on Friday, October 18, with the first-ever all-woman spacewalk. The spacewalk will be conducted by astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir. The trip was made to replace a broken battery charger in the International Space Station.
The walk began at 7:40 a.m. ET and is expected to continue into the early afternoon.
“I think it’s important because of the historical nature of what we’re doing and that in the past, women haven’t always been at the table,” said Koch, according to CNN. “It’s wonderful to be contributing to human spaceflight at a time when all contributions are being accepted, when everyone has a role and that can lead, in turn, to increased chance for success.”
If anyone is interested in watching the historic moment, you are in luck.
NASA has made a live stream of the spacewalk available on YouTube and on their official website. You can watch the YouTube live stream in the embedded video below.
Meir added: “What we’re doing now shows all the work that went in for the decades prior, all of the women that worked to get us where we are today.
“I think the nice thing for us is we don’t even really think about it on a daily basis, it’s just normal. We’re part of the team, we’re doing this work as an efficient team working together with everybody else, so it’s really nice to see how far that we’ve come.”
The battery charger being replaced was placed at the International Space Station on October 11, but it failed to activate. As a result, the women’s spacewalk was moved up three days in order to quickly fix the problem. According to the New York Post, the battery charge/discharge unit is to “regulate the charge for batteries that draw energy from the station’s solar collectors to provide power as the station — which is powered by solar arrays and four sets of batteries — orbits at night.”
