NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara was prepared for her first spacewalk, but not for the view.
O'Hara, along with SpaceX Crew-7 NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, performed the fourth all-female spacewalk at the International Space Station (ISS) on November 1, 2023. They spent 6 hours and 42 minutes performing maintenance on the station, such as replacing a bearing to keep the solar panels moving.
Everything went well, O'Hara told reporters at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, a success she attributed to hours of training with her spacewalking partner. And, she said, it was a moving experience to be in a space suit.
"Nothing compares to the feeling of stepping outside, sitting in your own little spacesuit and looking at Earth, right through your helmet bell," O'Hara told Space.com today (April 15) during livestream remarks . "It's one thing when you look out the window, look at the Earth... but then suddenly you're just immersed in the environment, and you're hanging there [with] the earth moving beneath your feet."
Related: NASA astronauts complete the fourth-ever all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station
NASA's Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU, space suits were designed in the 1970s, when the only people flying to space were men. So the spacesuits are designed to favor larger and stronger bodies, making it more difficult for women (or smaller bodies) to operate in the suit.
The newer generation of spacesuits (of which there are many designs created by private contractors for the ISS and future lunar missions of the Artemis program) will be friendlier to different body sizes. But in the meantime, NASA completed its first all-female spacewalk with EMUs in October 2019 with Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, and plans to continue.
Related: This month's rare all-women spacewalk won't be the last, NASA says
Although O'Hara was one of the lucky few to see Earth through a space suit, she missed a rare planetary sight in space by just a few days: a total solar eclipse that swept over parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico on April 8 which was also witnessed by astronauts from the space station.
Although O'Hara was back on Earth by then, she did not see the totality in person due to a slight landing delay, which delayed her arrival at JSC from her landing zone in Kazakhstan. She initially planned to leave Houston, under partial solar eclipse, to watch the total show elsewhere. However, she instead stepped outside JSC to watch the partial solar eclipse.
"I know they had a good show on the space station," O'Hara said in response to a question from Space.com, adding that she somewhat regretted not seeing the eclipse. That said, the sun was visible in other ways during its time in space; Auroras caused by high solar activity were a regular occurrence.
"We got a lot of good auroras during our mission... that was particularly beautiful, just seeing the space station fly through the auroras was one of my favorite things."
An underwater engineer by training, O'Hara was called back to her earlier days at sea while working her newer job in space. One of her favorite moments, she said, was receiving a video of a friend's team on a research cruise in the Pacific.
The friend "shared a video of a baby octopus hatching out there on the sea floor," O'Hara recalled. Later that day, the NASA astronaut flew over the same area of water where the video was taken.
"There's this exact moment where I'm standing in the dome," O'Hara said, referring to the wraparound window used for docking and photographing the ISS. "I'm in space, in this incredible space station that we built. And somewhere beneath all that water is a baby octopus, going through the first few days of its life.
"That's happening all over the planet in a million different ways," she continued. "It's just this recognition of how complex, diverse and beautiful the Earth is, and all the life that comes with it."
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NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos regularly fly astronauts aboard each other's spacecraft for policy reasons; O'Hara's Soyuz spacecraft seat was part of a set of four announced by NASA in mid-2022. (NASA and Roscosmos would also like to have a backup spacecraft available in case a malfunction occurs.)
However, O'Hara launched and landed with several Russian-led crew due to ISS personnel requirements. She launched into space on September 15, 2023 with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub aboard the Soyuz-designated MS-24. O'Hara spent six months in space, but left earlier than her Russian cosmonaut colleagues, who are currently in space on a year-long mission.
O'Hara returned home on MS-24 on April 6, along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and space flight participant Marina Vasilevskaya (Belarus' first woman to go to space).
Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya's return to Earth concluded their two-week mission that began on March 23. They launched the Soyuz MS-25 together with NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, who will spend six months in space. The launch of Novitskiy, Vasilevskaya and Dyson was delayed by two days due to a battery problem (quickly resolved) that caused a rare launch pad to be demolished on March 21.
