Watch A Rare All-female Spacewalk During NASA Mission

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Two NASA astronauts have ventured outside the International Space Station to conduct a rare all-female spacewalk .

When astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers  emerged around 9 a.m. Thursday , May 1, they began just the fifth-ever spacewalk with just women. The spacefarers, both of whom are military officers and pilots, remained in the vacuum of space for  about five hours and 44 minutes  performing work on the outside of the orbital outpost.

McClain and Ayers are both part of a SpaceX mission known as Crew-10 that reached the space station in March. Their arrival with two other astronauts paved the way for the NASA astronauts who crewed the doomed Boeing Starliner to depart with the Crew-9 mission.

A spacewalk , often called extra-vehicular activity in the parlance of space agencies, refers to any activity an astronaut undertakes outside of a space station or spacecraft . Spacewalks require suiting up in specialized suits and exposing oneself to the vacuum of outer space.

Selected as an astronaut in 2013, McClain has spent a prior total of 13 hours and 8 minutes conducting two spacewalks – both occurring on her first 204-day spaceflight between 2018 and 2019. She was wearing a suit with red stripes.

The SpaceX crew missions contracted under NASA are fairly routine six-month trips to the space station for astronauts to conduct science experiments. But this particular mission had added significance because it allowed for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who flew to the station in June on the ill-fated Starliner spacecraft, to finally return home .