Sophie Adenot is set to become the first French woman to perform a spacewalk, carrying out a mission to repair a communications system on the International Space Station.
Issued on:
2 min Reading time
In a photograph published by NASA on the ISS blog, Adenot is smiling as she tries on a white spacesuit.
“It will be my turn to head outside the Station,” Adenot wrote on social media.
A spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), is “an adventure within the adventure”, she said at a press conference before travelling to the ISS.
Together with US astronaut Anil Menon, Adenot will leave the station Tuesday in a spacesuit weighing around 250kg to repair a high-speed communications antenna used to communicate with mission control in Houston, Texas.
Who is Sophie Adenot, the French engineer destined for space?
According to NASA, which announced EVA mission last week, the two astronauts will spend around six and a half hours outside the station.
The meticulous preparation for the EVA began months ago and included training in a swimming pool long before the astronauts left Earth.
Using a full-scale model ISS, Adenot learned safety procedures, including how to secure herself to the station, handle tools, and communicate with her partner and mission control.
Terrifying and awe-inspiring
In a spacesuit, “every movement of the hand on a carabiner is like squeezing a tennis ball in half”, French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré told public broadcaster Franceinfo.
Haigneré carried out a spacewalk in 1999 during the final mission to Mir, the predecessor to the ISS.
An EVA is both terrifying and awe-inspiring, according to astronauts who have done them.
“When you leave the airlock and tip out into the void, 450 kilometres of nothingness, you need to have a strong heart. But very quickly, your brain understands that you are not going to fall, that you are going to float,” Thomas Pesquet told France 2 television in January 2017.
France’s second woman in space prepares for launch after 30-year wait
Pesquet, the most recent French astronaut to carry out an EVA said the work requires intense concentration, but after a few hours, “I found myself looking up and taking in the Earth… and it was even more beautiful than from inside the Station”.
Adenot, who could carry out a second spacewalk on 25 August, is the second French woman to travel into space, after Claudie Haigneré, who flew missions in 1996 and 2001, but who did not do any EVAs.
Adenot will become the second European woman to perform a spacewalk, after Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti, who did so in 2022.
International space cooperation will no doubt be a key topic discussed at the International Space Summit in Paris on 9 and 10 September.
The gathering, organised at the initiative of France and Germany, is due to bring together major space powers and private-sector companies to discuss how to guarantee access to space while adapting international rules to the rapid expansion of commercial and government activity in orbit.
