NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot completed a six-hour, 49-minute spacewalk outside the International Space Station, the sixth all-female extravehicular activity in human spaceflight history. It was the first since May 2025.
What they did out there
Designated U.S. spacewalk 99, the excursion ran from 8:40 a.m. to 3:29 p.m. Eastern. The main task was installing a new retroreflector on the forward port of the Harmony module. That hardware is a navigation aid: visiting spacecraft bounce laser ranging off it to measure distance and closing rate precisely during rendezvous and docking. The pair also carried out maintenance on exterior station hardware.
Why all-female spacewalks were rare for so long
The reason is less about crew assignment than about suit inventory. The station has long operated with a limited number of Extravehicular Mobility Unit hard upper torso sections in each size, and the smaller sizes were in short supply. NASA had to scrub a planned all-female spacewalk in 2019 for exactly this reason, when only one properly fitting medium torso was ready on orbit. That is a hardware-availability constraint, and as suit configurations on station changed, these EVAs stopped being remarkable for logistical reasons and started simply happening.
Where Meir now ranks
This was Meir’s seventh career spacewalk, moving her to third all-time among NASA women, behind Suni Williams with nine and Peggy Whitson with ten.
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