Editorial: Celebrating - with perspective - a milestone for women in space

On Friday, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir made a little history. They became the world's first all-female spacewalking team. Of course, that wasn't what was really important about their mission. That would be the sensitive installation of a 428-pound, refrigerator-sized battery that's part of the system that controls power to the International Space Station.

But, while women have made numerous spacewalks over the years, this was the first time that a team was made up entirely of females.

Christina Koch and Jessica Meir acknowledged the hoopla surrounding their excursion outside the space station but they also provided some valuable perspective. After all, they have trained for years to do such work, and Koch has done four previous spacewalks herself.

"We don't want to take too much credit because there have been many others - female spacewalkers - before us ..." Meir said during a congratulatory call from President Donald Trump. "For us, this is really just us doing our job."

Perhaps so, but the experience does provide an opportunity to acknowledge that advances remain to be made between the genders - in the space program and throughout the whole spectrum of human activities - that go beyond the familiar concern about the pay gap.

In the space program, thankfully, the advances are becoming less profound - not that being tethered to the ISS in outer space is, as they say, a walk in the park. But it is very different from the experiences Katherine Coleman endured in the 1950s when she broke both the color and gender barriers in the American space program. Those challenges are chronicled in the 2016 motion picture "Hidden Figures. Coleman - now 101-year-old Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson - would go on to become so critical to NASA that her calculations would be used to verify numbers produced by early computers.

Now, as Michigan congresswoman Brenda Lawrence reflected, a spacewalk can feel like just another "box to be checked" on the way to gender parity. But it's important to keep the notion of what qualifies as "routine" in perspective. Of the 129 Americans who have made spacewalks, Muir became just the 15th woman. Only 64 of the 566 people who have been to space have been women. No woman is among the dozen people who have walked on the moon, though that milestone is expected to be crossed on the next U.S. lunar mission, possibly in 2024.

Clearly, there are still advances to be made, and it is fitting to acknowledge this one by Koch and Meir. But we concur with three-time spacewalker Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who watched their mission from Mission Control in Houston.

"Hopefully," she said " this will now be considered normal."