Trump Calls Astronauts During First All-Female Spacewalk
WASHINGTON (NASA PR) — President Donald Trump, second from left, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, left, Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, right, speaks with NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir during the first all-woman spacewalk on Friday, Oct. 18, 2019, from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington.
The first all-woman spacewalk in history began at 7:38 a.m. EDT with Koch and Meir venturing outside the International Space Station to replace a failed battery charge-discharge unit. This is the fourth spacewalk for Koch and Meir’s first.
17 responses to “Trump Calls Astronauts During First All-Female Spacewalk”
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“Can you girls give the windows a wash while you out there?…and prune the space roses.”…
If he was not regarded as such a sexist guy, that would have been funny.
In fact, it would be funny no matter who is out there.
Aaaand instantly inserts foot in mouth, only to get instant fact checked by the women spacewalking
And then he casually moves his middle finger across his forehead like a high school kid trying to “send a message” to his teacher while still having the “plausible deniability” of having an itch.
Trump didn’t do that. He did scratch an ear with an index finger several minutes after the brief conversation with the spacewalking astronettes was over and he had moved on to talking about Turkey, Syria, the Kurds and a new Louis Vuitton factory that just opened in Texas.
For an actual example of a quasi-covert Presidential Bird Flip, I refer you to one Barack H. Obama and his slow burn at the temerity of that impertinent little guttersnipe, then-Congressman Paul Ryan, daring to throw shade on his masterpiece legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The nerve of that guy!
Bullshit. In the first video you posted, it’s at 2:30. That’s clearly his middle finger which he displays right after he’s corrected by a woman.
As for the whataboutism, Obama wasn’t the POTUS who flipped off a female NASA Astronaut who corrected him. This is a space website, so stick to the topic at hand.
I found it interesting that, despite the fact that Ms. Koch has been on ISS longer and had previous spacewalk experience, it was newbie spacewalker Ms. Meir who did all the talking. But then she is a doctor. To doctors, there is no one who is not eligible to be talked down to. Meir managed to simultaneously upbraid the President about a point she also managed to say was both a very big deal and no big deal.
The actual significance of this “historic occasion” was pretty much nil except to the paladins of identity politics, all of whom are Donald J. Trump’s sworn enemies. President Trump’s main mistake here was going along with the pretense that a routine personnel assignment was some sort of world-historical milestone of the first water.
I remember one of the reasons for not funding Space Station Freedom back in the late 80’s was the fear due to the projected excessive need for EVA. The argument was that a large space station should await a heavy lift launch vehicle so the modules could be larger and require less EVA for assembly and maintenance operations. I believe at that point the net total EVA log book for all of humanity was less than a single 40 hour work week. ISS has done a great job of proving out and making mundane the basics. Granted at great expense, and we’re about to see if it could have been done cheaper, but there have been real gains in human space flight over the past 30 years and ISS has been the proving ground for making a lot of the basics a non-problem.
and it would be better still had some of the spare change going to things like SLS gone to “bottle space suits” or even better robotics.
I am still amazed that we have not designed robots or simple automation that can go outside and we can then do the work remotely.
It would seem like a smart thing to do NOW, so that it can be sent to the moon before man shows up and do some work there. It does not have to be full automation. It can be a slow remote controlled item.
on oil rigs there is still some “eva” (ie deepwater diving) but almost all of it is by “bots” controlled by people
good point.
I”ll bet that’s a subject avoided in the future planning groups. At this point I’ll bet the worlds space programs are focusing on what people can do as a policy focusing on people. …. I see your point. There’s real merit in your ideas. But I also would like to see the techniques perfected with people first before we start down the line of automation. The path of development of real capabilities has been less than ideal, and I expect that process to go on in a less than well thought out trajectory for some time. I’m just happy that time and effort was put into making EVA an every day activity.
Actually, some of the maintenance work is done robotically on ISS via the SSRMS and the SPDM (Dextre). But much of the “heavy lifting” is still done by astronauts in suits.
A tribute to how careless and slothful Trump is, is to say something in the call that is designed to herald it which is wrong. either the advance people did not do their job OR Trump didnt bother reading the card he had in front of him …idiot
Trump is not a space wonk. Given all the hoo-rah ginned up for this resolutely garden-variety space walk, he may well have thought it was a first for any woman, not just a first by only women. He spent much of his prior political life as a Democrat, but he’s never been an identity politics true believer so the basis for all the aforementioned hoo-rah might easily have escaped him. I’d be willing to bet that a sizable majority of the general population – registered Democrats included – probably also thought that this was the first female spacewalk rather than the first all-female spacewalk.
Bridenstine correctly described the spacewalk right before Trump screwed up. So, Trump was not even listening to his own NASA administrator, much less reading his briefing notes.
The entire event summed up the administration perfectly. An attempt to demonstrate its support for women and the space program sabotaged by an unprepared and inattentive president who has been repeatedly accused of abusing women.
Trump is leading us back to the moon but has little idea of what’s going on. It’s a branding exercise, like slapping his name on steaks and suits and dozens of other products Trump was no expert in. Artemis will put the Trump brand on the moon for all time. Like Richard Nixon’s signature. If it lands during Trump’s planned second term.
Like branding steaks, it’s not necessary for Trump to understand what’s going on. Or work up a sweat. Other people like Bridenstine and Pence do the hard work while Trump takes the credit.
And then there’s Ivanka. She was there because she’s always there. Any number of past or present female astronauts could have been in her seat. But… nepotism.