APOD: All Female Spacewalk Repairs Space... (2019 Oct 19)

[APOD Robot]

All Female Spacewalk Repairs Space Station

Explanation: The failed unit was beyond the reach of the robotic Canadarm2. Therefore, this repair of the International Space Station would require humans. The humans on duty were NASA's Jessica Meir and Christina Koch. This was the fourth spacewalk for Meir, the first for Koch, and the first all-female spacewalk in human history. The first woman to walk in space was Svetlana Savitskaya in 1984. Koch (red stripe) and Weir are pictured hard at work on the P6 Truss, with solar panels and the darkness of space in the background. Working over seven hours, the newly installed Battery Charge / Discharge Unit (BCDU) was successfully replaced and, when powered up, operated normally.

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[Ann]

NASA wrote:

Jessica U. Meir was selected by NASA in 2013.
...
Born and raised in Caribou, Maine. Recreational interests include skiing, hiking, running, cycling, soccer and SCUBA diving. She is a private pilot and is conversational in Swedish and Russian.

Basically no one is conversational in Swedish unless they lived here for a while, or if they have some Swedish family. (Our favorite Chris Peterson may disagree.)

Well, Swedish media are calling Jessica Meir Swedish! I guess her mother might be Swedish.

Tiny Swedish flag.png (7.16 KiB) Viewed 13720 times

[geckzilla]

Removing any and all misogynistic posts that end up here. If you have nothing good to say about women, feminism, or this event in particular, keep it to yourself.

[Ann]

Removing any and all misogynistic posts that end up here. If you have nothing good to say about women, feminism, or this event in particular, keep it to yourself.

Good, Geck.

I cheer the women on! Go, Jessica and Christina (and all the other spacefaring women who have come before you, and will come after you)!

Ann

[madtom1999]

Looking forward to the day when this will just be 'meh'. It wont be a great leap forward for women, it will be a leap forward for the men who currently dont like it,

[JohnD]

Basically no one is conversational in Swedish unless they lived here for a while, or if they have some Swedish family. (Our favorite Chris Peterson may disagree.)

As an aside, having lived and worked in Sweden in the past, I'm not surprised. I diligently learnt and practiced my Swedish, to be answered universally by, "Oh, you are English! How nice, I do like to practice my English", and on we would go, but not in Swedish!

Yes, roll on the day when women doing something, as women, is not headine news!

John

[heehaw]

We have a big anti-discrimination event on at my university last two days. I have a suggestion: don't introduce 'they' for those who want it; better to simply drop he, him, his entirely: she, her, hers for everyone. That removes sex references entirely.

[orin stepanek]

They had it on the news Yesterday!

KochMeirISS_NASA_960.jpg (61.58 KiB) Viewed 13643 times

[Rcdavison100]

Momentous occasion, for sure!
There is a typo where you refer to suit identification for astronaut Meir as “Weir” .

[RJN]

Momentous occasion, for sure!
There is a typo where you refer to suit identification for astronaut Meir as “Weir” .

Yes thank you, this has been fixed. Also it was Koch's 4th spacewalk, not Meir's. Both of these have now been corrected on the main NASA APOD. I apologize for the errors.

- RJN

[neufer]

NASA wrote:

Jessica U. Meir was selected by NASA in 2013.
...
Born and raised in Caribou, Maine. Recreational interests include skiing, hiking, running, cycling, soccer and SCUBA diving. She is a private pilot and is conversational in Swedish and Russian.

Basically no one is conversational in Swedish unless they lived here for a while, or if they have some Swedish family. Swedish media are calling Jessica Meir Swedish! I guess her mother might be Swedish.

<<Jessica Meir was born in Caribou, Maine, to a Swedish mother who was a nurse and an Israeli father of Iraqi-Jewish descent, who worked as a physician. She attributes her abiding dream of personally participating in space exploration to the love of nature she learned from her mother, and from her father’s predilection for wandering and adventure. “And it might have had something to do with the fact that the stars shone so brightly in rural Maine,” Meir added.>>

[sc02492]

This is certainly not the first time women have space walked, and I'm proud to see that this is continuing. Too many men have risked (and lost) their lives in the name of their country in general and in space exploration in particular. I would like to see more women contribute equally to this effort.

[neufer]

This is certainly not the first time women have space walked, and I'm proud to see that this is continuing. Too many men have risked (and lost) their lives in the name of their country in general and in space exploration in particular. I would like to see more women contribute equally to this effort.

Too many women have risked (and lost) their lives in propagating the species.
I would like to see more men contribute equally to this effort.

[MarkBour]

I am happy that we've finally had an all-female spacewalk. Not too remarkable, really ... plenty of women have been doing EVAs for decades, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. They were out for about 7 hours, though. That kind of gets to me. I see that the spacewalk length record is currently held by another fantastic female astronaut, Susan Helms, who shared that record 8 hr 56 min spacewalk with James Voss. 7 straight hours (or more) in a spacesuit sounds like a very long day to me.

Now, I'm looking forward to the first all-android spacewalk ...

[MarkBour]

Too many women have risked (and lost) their lives in propagating the species.
I would like to see more men contribute equally to this effort.

LOL. Good one, Art. However, in truth, I doubt that most women would support this suggestion.
(Probably they'd have a reaction more like ... no, you've done quite enough already, thank you.)

[geckzilla]

Too many women have risked (and lost) their lives in propagating the species.
I would like to see more men contribute equally to this effort.

LOL. Good one, Art. However, in truth, I doubt that most women would support this suggestion.
(Probably they'd have a reaction more like ... no, you've done quite enough already, thank you.)

No no, please, do help contribute (beyond the first phase). And also the housework.

[Ann]

Basically no one is conversational in Swedish unless they lived here for a while, or if they have some Swedish family. (Our favorite Chris Peterson may disagree.)

As an aside, having lived and worked in Sweden in the past, I'm not surprised. I diligently learnt and practiced my Swedish, to be answered universally by, "Oh, you are English! How nice, I do like to practice my English", and on we would go, but not in Swedish!

John

Click to view full size image

John Taylor, chief gardener in a park in Malmö.
Photo: Thomas Carlén, Tjolöholms Slott.

Ha ha! I know what you mean, John. The man in the picture at left if the chief gardener of the nicest park in Malmö. He's an Englishman, but he moved to Sweden when he met a girl here. He lives in my street. I have talked to him several times, and at first I wanted to speak to him in English, but he said: No, speak Swedish, I have to practice my Swedish! Everyone speaks English to me!

Ann

[Chris Peterson]

NASA wrote:

Jessica U. Meir was selected by NASA in 2013.
...
Born and raised in Caribou, Maine. Recreational interests include skiing, hiking, running, cycling, soccer and SCUBA diving. She is a private pilot and is conversational in Swedish and Russian.

Basically no one is conversational in Swedish unless they lived here for a while, or if they have some Swedish family. (Our favorite Chris Peterson may disagree.)

Well, I feel like my conversational Danish is good. But nobody would mistake me for a native Danish speaker. To make your mouth move in that way you almost need to be born to it. If "conversational" means comfortable with the idioms and idiosyncrasies of actual usage, that just comes from experience. If it means having no accent... well, that's a lot harder. I imagine the situation with Swedish is pretty much the same.

[Chris Peterson]

Ha ha! I know what you mean, John. The man in the picture at left if the chief gardener of the nicest park in Malmö. He's an Englishman, but he moved to Sweden when he met a girl here. He lives in my street. I have talked to him several times, and at first I wanted to speak to him in English, but he said: No, speak Swedish, I have to practice my Swedish! Everyone speaks English to me! :lol2:

Yeah, the biggest impediment to me learning Danish when I was in Denmark was that all my friends spoke English so well, and liked speaking it. A lot of my Danish I picked up speaking to the parents of my friends, people born in the 1930s who didn't routinely learn English and generally didn't speak it, or didn't speak it well enough to prefer it to Danish.

[neufer]

Jessica Meir and Christina Koch

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