Friday, March 8, 2019

Milestones

PHOTO: NASA
SAVE THE DATE: My social media feeds have been all atwitter with news about an upcoming space walk of historic importance. March 29, will mark the first all-woman space walk ever - and one of the woman walkers is Washington's own Anne McClain, a NASA astronaut. McClain will be working with Christina H. Koch. 

 Also worth noting, the two will be supported on the ground by Canadian Space Agency flight controller Kristen Facciol, who will be at the console at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

 Koch will be headed to the ISS on March 14 (on board a Soyuz capsule with cosmonaut Cmdr. Alexey Ovchinin, and NASA flight engineer Nick Hague. It will be Koch's first spaceflight. 

 While it's great that the all-woman EVA is finally taking place, one obvious question is, "What took so long? Women have been going to space since Russia sent a female cosmonaut up in 1963. (Unfortunately, the United States didn't follow suit until Sally Ride, in 1983.) But still, that's 30-plus years of international female astronauts. This micro-gravity women's march is long overdue!

 In other space news, a few days ago, the crew on the ISS welcomed SpaceX's Dragon crew compartment. No live astronauts on board quite yet (that should happen next year), but a manikin, Ripley, was along for the ride, as was this cute little Earth plushie. 

Friday morning, the Dragon capsule splashed back down to Earth, looking a little worse for the wear. 
Photo: NASA TV
It rather resembles a toasted marshmallow, don't you think? Can't wait to hear the results back from this test mission. If all went well, a manned mission is the next step!

 FLYING COLORS: Thursday we took our final tests for the Sequences unit of Algebra. Happy to report we all passed. 
Now, it's on to "Systems of Equations."
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