Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/18/live-watch-the-first-all-woma.html
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So cool to watch. Also, I’ll never complain about tools wandering away again.
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As great as this is, and I see how it’s showing that in spite of the madness of the last three years we are still progressing in some ways, it’s annoying that the fact these two people doing their jobs while happening to be women is still news in 2019.
That said, I hope this really upsets that demographic of males that were angry at an all women Ghostbusters movie. Look guys! Now they are taking over SPACE! Commence frothing.
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With the video jumping so much, I needed to check I wasn’t using Real Player. 
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This is good and all but…
There are two of them and last time they did not have enough suits to fit an all female spacewalk???
Maybe the one that was called off due to size issues needed more astronauts but it is still making me feel like my facepalm over that should be retroactively be increased in magnitude.
Good thing Ivanka’s at the table.
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Those spacesuits are so frickin’ huge!!
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Womanizing, dumbest, greased through college, most useless person ever to sit in the oval office… speaking for honestly successful super-smart people. The bile rises with the urge to spit in this fuckhead’s eyes.
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That’s not true.
They had enough suits, but when Anne McClain discovered, on orbit, that while she could use either the Med or Large hard torso during training in the Neutral Buoyancy Facility on Earth, she wasn’t really comfortable in the Large torso in actual “zero-G” microgravity.
That change was possible, but reconfiguring the suit for a different-sized hard torso is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, and it would need to be done twice in a short period (once before and once after) to preserve the initial order of personnel assignments.
But if Anne simply swapped assignments with one of the Large-suit guys on a later spacewalk , no reconfiguration would be necessary at all.
So she did. It was her decision to do so. She chose to avoid the unproductive busy-work of multiple config swaps over the symbolic PR value of “first all-female spacewalk.”
It was just happenstance anyway, not a planned PR stunt, so Anne had no problem with the trade.
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Part of the oddness of that is that NASA is genuinely gender-blind in these matters - EVA schedule assignments are determined by things like specialist training and minimizing torso swaps and the like, without regard to gender.
Women have been spacewalking from NASA spacecraft for decades. Women have made 41 EVAs. The only former Shuttle commander to set records for both total hours in space AND most spacewalks, while commanding the ISS, was NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson.
The fact that there’s never been an all-female EVA before now is just gender-blind chance - just as the earlier-planned all-female EVA was also gender-blind chance. Indeed, schedulers didn’t initially notice that they’d set up an all-female EVA, and when it was pointed out, no one was sure if it was the first, so they had to check the records to be sure.
It wasn’t a PR stunt, or it would have happened sooner. Any agency with a diverse workforce will eventually end up with a high-profile event staffed entirely by women. Maybe sooner if it’s just tokenism, or possibly later if it just happens organically - and highlighting it when it does happen doesn’t make it a PR stunt.
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The faces of the youngsters when they realize grandpa forgot to take his meds…
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I just saw some pictures of the new aluminum body NASA space suit from somebody who made it.
Join your local hackerspace go meet some cool people!
Misread this that ISIS was doing a spacewalk and was thoroughly confused
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