Astronauts Christina Koch (right) and Jessica Meir pose for a photo on the International space station on October 4. NASA has climbed on the first female spacewalk due to a power failure on the space station.

NASA via AP

The first female spacewalk in NASA’s 61-year history is finally happening and will even take place a few days ahead of schedule.

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, who were originally scheduled to leave the International space station on October 21, are currently scheduled to make their historic excursion this Friday. NASA announced the planning and other changes this week in light of problems with the space station’s battery discharge unit, which Koch and Meir will replace. The international space station’s Twitter account tweeted Tuesday night that the spacewalk would take place “no earlier than Friday,” updating an earlier NASA statement that it would happen either Thursday or Friday morning.

“We expect to stick,” NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz told NPR in an email.

Friday’s spacewalk will begin at 7: 50 a.m. edT and last about 5 and a half hours, according to NASA. Two astronauts will replace a faulty power regulator that has been in operation since 2000 and is not activated after new lithium-ion batteries were installed on the space station last week. NASA said the station outage posed no danger to any of the station’s operations, crew members, laboratory experiments or General power supply. However, the faulty unit prevents new lithium-ion batteries from providing additional power to the station.

Catherine Sullivan became the first American woman to complete a spacewalk in October 1984, and there have been 220 spacewalks on the International space station since December 1998. But, according to Space.com, only 15 women participated in the spacewalks, and all were accompanied by men. This record-breaking spacewalk will be Koch’s fourth and Meir’s first.

In a NASA TV video this month, the two discussed how they felt about having their achievements discussed in terms of gender, agreeing that it is important to note the progress that female astronauts have made.

“In the past, women were not always at the table, and it is wonderful to contribute to the human spaceflight program at a time when all contributions are accepted, when everyone has a role, and that can lead, in turn, to an increased chance of success,” said Koch, who has been in space since March and is scheduled to remain in orbit until February 2020. She is on track to set the record for the longest single female spaceflight, breaking Peggy Whitson’s record of 288 days from November 2016 to September 2017.

The spacewalk was originally scheduled for March, but NASA replaced astronaut Ann McClain due to a lack of”spacesuit availability.” Only one of the two medium-sized suits on the space station was prepared for the spacewalk, so astronaut Nick Hague wearing a large size accompanied Koch a on a March walk instead. McClain, who returned to Earth in June after spending 204 days in space, tweeted words of support for Koch and Meir on Tuesday, calling their four-man crew ” team A.”

? Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) October 15, 2019

Koch and Meir are members of NASA’s 2013 astronaut class, an eight-person cohort with equal numbers of men and women. Meir told NASA TV that gender is not necessarily what she thinks about on a daily basis.

“It’s just normal. We’re part of a team. We do this work as an effective team working together with everyone else, ” she said. “So it’s really nice to see how far that we’ve come.”

Rachel Trisman is an Intern at NPR’s National Bureau.