Watch: Astronauts set out on rare all-female spacewalk
Two Astronauts Extend a Milestone in Spacewalk History
Ninoda.com – The International Space Station logged its sixth all-female extravehicular activity when NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot spent roughly six and a half hours working in the vacuum outside the orbital laboratory. The event, carried out as part of routine station upkeep, underscored how the composition of the astronaut corps continues to shift even as the physical demands of spacewalking remain among the most grueling tasks in human spaceflight.
What the Spacewalk Involved
Meir and Adenot donned their pressurized spacesuits and exited the station's airlock to perform maintenance and upgrade tasks on exterior hardware. The two worked in distinct roles: Meir was transported along the station's truss structure aboard the Canadarm2, the Canadian-built robotic manipulator that serves as both a cargo-handling tool and a mobile platform for astronauts. Adenot, by contrast, stayed tethered to the station's exterior, reaching out to service components within her fixed radius of motion. This division of labor is standard practice on multi-person EVAs, allowing one crew member to travel between distant work sites while the other handles tasks closer to the airlock.
The six-and-a-half-hour duration placed the activity squarely within the upper range of typical ISS spacewalks, which generally span three to seven hours depending on the scope of the work. Before the hatch opened, both astronauts spent hours in a preparation sequence that included suit checks, airlock depressurization, and a final review of task procedures. Once outside, they operated in near-total silence, communicating through headsets while their bodies floated in microgravity, each movement requiring deliberate muscular effort against the resistance of the bulky spacesuit.
A Second Chapter for Meir
For Meir, the outing carried particular historical weight. In October 2019, she and fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch stepped outside the station to complete what was, at the time, the first-ever spacewalk performed exclusively by women. That event broke a streak stretching back to the station's earliest crewed operations in 2000, during which every EVA had included at least one male participant. The 2019 walk was widely covered as a symbolic milestone, though the astronauts themselves emphasized that the primary purpose was straightforward engineering: replacing a failed cooling-loop component and installing new hardware.
Meir's return to the role in this latest EVA made her the second woman to participate in two separate all-female spacewalks, a distinction that highlights both the growing number of women qualified for EVA duties and the continued rarity of the pairing. Across the entire history of the ISS, only six such all-female walks have been logged, a figure that reflects the fact that women have constituted a minority of the station's rotating crew population for most of its operational life.
Context: The 284th Spacewalk
The activity was catalogued as the 284th spacewalk conducted in support of the station's assembly, maintenance, and upgrade programme since the first crew arrived in 2000. It also marked the seventh EVA of the current calendar year, a cadence that keeps pace with the station's aging systems. After more than two decades in orbit, the ISS requires regular exterior intervention: solar-array panels are repositioned, thermal-control loops are repaired, docking ports are inspected, and new scientific payloads are installed or swapped. Without these periodic interventions, the station's ability to host long-duration missions would degrade.
The Canadarm2, which ferried Meir to her work sites during this EVA, has been a cornerstone of station operations since its installation in 2011. Built by the Canadian Space Agency, the 17.6-metre manipulator can carry a 113,000-kilogram payload and has been used to berth visiting spacecraft, move large equipment, and position astronauts at hard-to-reach locations. Its role in this spacewalk exemplifies how robotic systems extend the reach of human crews without requiring additional suit time or airlock cycles.
Why the Distinction Matters
Space agencies have long tracked the gender composition of EVA crews, not as a quota but as an indicator of how broadly the astronaut pipeline has opened. When the first all-female walk occurred in 2019, commentators noted that the milestone was possible only because women had been systematically trained for EVA duties over the preceding decade. The fact that the sixth such walk has now taken place within roughly five years suggests that the pairing is becoming less exceptional, even as it remains statistically uncommon.
For the broader space community, each additional spacewalk—regardless of crew composition—represents hours of engineering that keep the station functional for the next rotation of astronauts. The symbolic resonance of an all-female EVA sits alongside, and does not replace, the practical reality that the work performed outside the airlock is identical to that performed by any other crew member: keeping a complex, aging machine alive in an environment where failure can be fatal.
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