On October 18, 2019, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir Stepped Into History Outside the ISS

On October 18, 2019, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir opened the hatch of the International Space Station and drifted out into open space, becoming the first all-female team to conduct a spacewalk in the six-decade history of extravehicular activity. Their task was technical — replacing a failed power controller — but the moment carried a weight far beyond hardware.

The Long Way Up

The spacewalk almost happened months earlier, in March 2019, when Koch and fellow astronaut Anne McClain were slated to go out together. NASA scrubbed that plan after discovering there weren't enough medium-sized spacesuit torsos aboard the station to fit both women, a logistical gap that drew sharp public criticism about how spaceflight infrastructure had been designed. Koch went out instead with a male colleague, and the milestone waited. By October, the suit situation was resolved, and Meir, on her first spaceflight, joined Koch for a seven-hour, seventeen-minute excursion. They successfully swapped the faulty battery charge-discharge unit, restoring full power capacity to the station's solar array circuit. The fix worked precisely as engineers had hoped, a quietly competent end to a walk that the whole world had been watching for reasons that had nothing to do with batteries.

Inside the station, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir spoke with President Donald Trump and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine during the walk, fielding a call that framed the moment as a national milestone rather than a routine repair. Koch would go on to spend 328 days in space, setting a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, while Meir's own path back to Earth carried the quiet distinction of having been part of the first spacewalk performed entirely by women. NASA had conducted more than 200 spacewalks since 1965 before this one finally matched its astronaut corps to its long-overdue moment, a gap closed not by grand ceremony but by two women fixing a battery a few hundred miles above the planet that had kept them waiting.