5…4…3…2…1…blast off!!

Oct.18, NASA made space history. Christian Koch and Jessica Meir assembled a milestone, as they both attributed to the first all-female spacewalk to work together to restore the BCDU, a piece of hardware connected to the space stations solar arrays.

This was supposed to take place in March but was postponed because NASA didn’t have the two appropriate-sized spacesuits. Koch and Meir are the “Spacewalking duo” who aren’t just colleagues in the same astronaut class but are best friends, too. This was Koch’s forth spacewalk and Meir’s first. “It’s crazy that women are able to walk in space now,” Karla Reyna, 10, states, “because years ago women weren’t even allowed to vote. Now,” she adds, “we are allowed to do many things we couldn’t before.” This historical event officially began at 7:38 EDT when both astronauts switched to battery power in their spacesuits. It lasted seven hours and 17 minutes.

While the spacewalk was occurring, a call came in from the White House for the astronauts. On the phone was President Donald Trump, calling to congratulate Koch and Meir and to let them know how proud he was. However, many female astronauts, like Tracy Caldwell Dyson, hope that after this milestone, events like these can just be considered normal.

There are more female astronauts today than ever before. Out of 564 spacewalkers, 65 are women. Even though the numbers are skyrocketing, there are still not enough women to fill out spacewalking teams.