20191776 Club
Two women step out together to fix the station's power grid
Jessica Meir and Christina Koch spend seven hours and 17 minutes outside the ISS; the president calls to say so.
For nine years, every NASA spacewalk had paired at least one man with a crewmate, the result of spacesuit sizing and crew rotation, not policy. On October 18, 2019, astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch floated out of the International Space Station's airlock together, without a male crewmate, bound for the Port-6 truss to swap a failed battery charge-discharge unit. The job took seven hours and 17 minutes. Partway through, President Trump called to congratulate them and misspoke, saying it was the first time a woman had been outside the station. Meir corrected him on the spot…
