57-year-old breaks record for female space walks
Print Edition
AMERICAN astronaut Peggy Whitson made history when she floated outside the International Space Station yesterday, breaking the record for the most space walks by a woman.
Whitson, 57, is making her eighth career space walk, surpassing the record of seven previously held by American Suni Williams.
The space walk formally began at 7:29am when Whitson and her NASA colleague Shane Kimbrough switched their spacesuits to battery power before venturing into space.
“Be safe and enjoy your time out,” said French astronaut Thomas Pesquet as the hatch opened. “I will be waiting for you.”
The goal of the six-and-a-half hour space walk is to continue upgrading the International Space Station for the arrival of commercial spaceships in the years to come.
Yesterday’s walkabout is the second in a series of three space walks to outfit the exterior of the orbiting outpost with parking spots for a new generation of space taxis ferrying astronauts to the station.
SpaceX and Boeing are currently designing crew vehicles that will begin flying people to the ISS as early as next year.
Whitson earned a doctorate in biochemistry and served as the first female space station commander in 2008. A native of Iowa, she is known for her quick wit, sense of humor and ease in communicating complicated science topics to a lay audience.
She said in an interview this month on NASA television that she had spent her time at the orbiting lab growing stem cells for a science experiment on cell therapies for cancer.
She is also taking part in experiments to test how fire acts in micro gravity to better understand how it spreads in space, and growing seedlings to study how plants grow in orbit.
Now on her third long-duration space flight, Whitson is the oldest woman to ever fly in space.
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