SPOKANE, Wash. — NASA astronaut and Spokane native Anne McClain participated in her first spacewalk on Friday.
McClain is a Gonzaga Prep alum and is in her third month aboard the International Space Station. She is researching the ways gravity affects tissues and organs.
McClain and fellow NASA Flight Engineer Nick Hague were the two astronauts to venture outside the ISS for NASA's 214th spacewalk.
The walk began around 5 a.m. PT and lasted for 6 hours and 39 minutes.
The team replaced old batteries with more powerful ones for the station's Port-4 truss structure. These batteries are what the station uses when the ISS gets too far from the sun to use its solar panels.
McClain and Hague carried adapters weighing hundreds of pounds and removed debris from around the station. They also took pictures of tools needed for repairs.
Thousands of people around the world tuned in to NASA's live stream of the walk, including Nick Hague's mother.
Like Anne McClain's mother, Hague's mother, Beverly, also lives in the Pacific Northwest, in Sandpoint.
She said she woke up at 4 a.m. to watch all of the events.
"I was just dumbfounded by the amount of training these individuals have had to have in order to do their job," she said. "It's so extensive, and it takes such an incredible amount of people to prepare them for this."
Leading up to the walk, Anne McClain tweeted, showing the team preparing for the day. They did maintenance on their space suits and reviewed procedures and their plan for going outside. They also charged up their GoPro cameras so they could attach them to their space suit helmets.
This was the first of three spacewalks NASA is doing this year. On March 29, McClain will join her fellow astronaut, Christina Koch, for the first all-female team to do a spacewalk.