First all-female spacewalk scheduled for later this month
This article, First all-female spacewalk scheduled for later this month, originally appeared on CBSNews.com
After a prevented an all-female spacewalk earlier this year, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will get a chance to make history October 21 when they venture outside the International Space Station in the fourth of five excursions to install a new set of solar array batteries, NASA managers announced Friday.
It will be the first spacewalk by two women since Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov carried out history's first spacewalk in 1965 and cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space during a solo outing in 1984.
"Women (at NASA) are part of the team, I see women at every level of leadership, in technical areas as well as management," said Megan McArthur, a veteran astronaut who now serves as deputy chief of NASA's astronaut office. "It's not something that, fortunately, we have to stop and think about very often."
The swap-out prompted a bit of controversy on the ground, but NASA managers insisted the change was at McClain's request.
Only one of the four suits aboard the station at the time was configured with a medium-size upper torso section. Suits can be re-sized in orbit, but changing the fit of an upper torso requires repositioning coolant lines and other components and then retesting the systems, a process that can take 12 hours or more.
McClain wore the medium during her first spacewalk March 22 and initially planned to wear a larger suit for the second spacewalk while Koch used the medium. But McClain decided after the first outing that she preferred the medium. Given the time needed to re-size another suit, she opted to delay her second outing until the medium suit was again available.
Hague took her place and joined Koch for the March 29 spacewalk. McClain then replaced Hague during a third excursion April 8. While the crew reassignments were unusual, all the astronauts ended up with the same number of spacewalks as originally planned.
"That spacewalk that had originally been planned to be conducted by Anne McClain and myself was not canceled, it still happened with a different crew to make sure we matched the spacesuit sizes and conducted that spacewalk as safely as possible to get the mission done," Koch told a reporter in a recent interview from orbit.
"We currently do happen to have two medium spacesuits on board now. ... Jessica and I both have trained throughout our six years together in the sizes that are available on board right now."
The station's power truss stretches the length of a football field and features eight huge solar wings, four on each end arranged in pairs. The arrays slowly rotate like paddle wheels as the station flies through its orbit to maximize the amount of sunlight reaching the solar cells.
When the station is in sunlight, power is fed directly to the lab's myriad electrical systems. At the same time, the arrays recharge four sets of massive batteries mounted at the base of each set of arrays. When the station moves into orbital darkness, the batteries seamlessly kick in to keep the station powered.
The station's eight electrical power channels originally were supported by 48 nickel-hydrogen — NiH2 — batteries, six per channel. Twenty-four batteries, in two sets of 12, were mounted at the bases of the solar array wings on the starboard, or right, side of the station's main truss with two sets of 12 on the port, or left, side.
But the original batteries have lost strength over the years, and NASA is in the process of replacing all four sets with 24 smaller, more efficient lithium-ion — Li-Ion — batteries. The replacement units pack twice the punch, so only six are needed per set. The spacewalkers will install "adapter plates" with jumpers in the slots where batteries are removed but not replaced.
The upcoming battery swapouts are considered the most challenging yet because the spacewalkers will be working at the far left end of the station's power truss, beyond the reach of the lab's robot arm.
As a result, five spacewalks will be needed to give the astronauts time to manually move the big batteries from a pallet to the work site, to re-stow older batteries that are removed and to make all the required structural and electrical connections.
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