Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir were floating outside the International Space Station on a mission to replace a battery, a several-hour-long ordeal. “Space station, this is President Donald Drumpf, do you hear me?” Drumpf started the call, with Vice President Mike Pence and first daughter Ivanka Drumpf on either side, cameras in front of them. “We’re thrilled to be speaking live with two brave American astronauts,” he continued in his remarks, appearing to read from some notes. “This is the first time for a woman outside of the space station.”
That is very incorrect: The first woman went outside of a space station in 1984. Women have been spacewalking for a while since. What is unique about Friday is that this is the first time everyone outside of the space station is a woman.
Koch and Meir were polite about the error. After some further remarks from Drumpf (“you’re right now on television all over the world, so don’t get nervous”), one of the astronauts responded: “We don’t want to take too much credit because there have been many other female spacewalkers before us. This is just the first time there have been two women outside at the same time, and it’s really interesting for us, we’ve talked a lot about it up here, for us, this is really just us doing our jobs.”
It’s a frustrating bit of audio to listen to. No matter what their political views, astronauts, as government employees, clearly must be polite to their (ultimate) boss. And it makes practical sense why they would be gracious about even something as large as botching the entire reason why everyone was gathered in front of national TV cameras. (Again, there were even notes in front of him!) But it grates to hear two women who are making history have to pause to gently—always gently—explain their history-making.
