Up next in Baffling Errors Easily Avoided By Reading Any Of His Briefings, this week saw Donald Trump mansplain the first all-female spacewalk to its astronauts – in a live call. The president was joined by a group of Girl Scouts (America!) and NASA officials when he wrongly congratulated Jessica Meir and Christina Koch on ‘conducting the first ever female spacewalk.’
While Meir and Koch certainly made history this week as the first all-women team to walk outside the International Space Station, repairing a faulty power controller, neither is the first woman to complete a space-walk. Since Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya in 1984, 15 female astronauts have followed in her footsteps – a fact that seems to have eluded Trump, who probably looked at his briefing for 20 seconds and saw ‘female’, ‘space’, ‘first’ and ran with it. Meir gently corrected the president, explaining that the occasion marked ‘the first time that there's been two women outside at the same time’ and stressing that ‘We don't want to take too much credit because there have been many other female spacewalkers before.’
Before having the history of female space exploration explained to him by women in space, Trump did a little ad-libbing (space: high up!): ‘They're doing some work, and they're doing it in a very high altitude — an altitude that very few people will ever see.’ Yes, Donald. You’d think he might have learnt a lesson from his embarrassing run in with another female astronaut in 2017, who had to tell him his own government’s timeline for space exploration. ‘Tell me: Mars. What do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars?’ asked Trump at the time, seemingly oblivious to the bill he’d signed the previous month which outlined precisely that. Peggy Whitson, one of the astronauts on the call, replied ‘Well I think as your bill directed, it’ll be approximately in the 2030s.’ Beautiful.
Congratulations, Jessica and Christina, on an incredible milestone. And to Trump – congratulations, I suppose, on not being afraid to make the same mistake twice.
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