When The Spacesuit Didn’t Fit, She Wore It Anyway

The following is an excerpt from Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change by Cady Coleman.

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I began my spacewalking training in 1993, about a year after my selection. For many astronauts, spacewalking (known as EVA, or Extra-Vehicular Activity) is the ultimate aspiration, but we don’t all qualify to do it. Even if we do qualify, that doesn’t guarantee we’ll ever get assigned as an EVA crew member on a mission. I was determined to qualify from the outset, but once plans got under way for the International Space Station (ISS), it became even more critical to me, because NASA decided that every ISS astronaut must be EVA qualified. In other words, if I didn’t succeed as a spacewalker, I could not be selected for a long-duration ISS mission.

We train for spacewalking in a giant swimming pool, the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL): two hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide—about half the size of a football field—and forty feet deep. Submerged in its 6.2 million gallons of water is a full-size mock-up of the ISS (in pieces). Neutral buoyancy means that in the pool, our 300-pound suits are carefully weighted so that they don’t float or sink, simulating the weightless environment. For all the intricate procedures that we perform during a spacewalk, the practice that we get in the NBL is incredibly valuable. It’s the closest you can get on Earth to replicating what it is like to perform spacewalking tasks when we are weightless.

EVA training was the most physically difficult thing I did as an astronaut. The suits are unwieldy; the tools are heavy and don’t work all that well in the water (not a problem we’d have in space, but simulations can only go so far). The sheer amount of work, practice, and training involved is daunting. I spent hundreds of hours in the pool, learning how to replace critical equipment and perform rescues. I also learned lessons I never expected, like how to adapt to circumstances and equipment that didn’t fit me, making already difficult tasks even harder. Why? Because spacewalking tools and gear really weren’t designed for people my size.

When I first started EVA training, there were four different EVA spacesuit sizes: small, medium, large, and extra- large. It’s more accurate to think of EVA suits not as clothing but as the world’s smallest spacecraft— in the shape of a human!— with eleven highly engineered layers that create a barrier between you and the vacuum of space. The small suit was a reasonably good fit for me, though it was clearly designed for a guy, without much thought given to female anatomical realities like boobs. The basic design of these suits had been around since the Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo guys had worn them in the sixties and seventies, and they were incredibly expensive to make or to change. And most important, from NASA’s point of view, they worked. They’d been tested and proven to be safe and effective in space.

One day, just before my first mission, in 1995, I was approached by Tom Akers, an astronaut with extensive spacewalk experience. “Cady,” he said, “I’ve been watching you in the pool, and I can see that you have a real aptitude for spacewalking and also a head that thinks like a spacewalker.”

I was flattered and encouraged that someone was paying attention to my performance and the way I thought rather than my physical stature. I did think like a spacewalker. I had what’s known as good “situational awareness”; it came naturally to me to see not only my own part but the entire complex choreography of each task or assignment. Plus, I had an intuitive sense
of where the suit and I were located in a three-dimensional space, and I understood how the tools worked.

But then Tom continued, “There’s something you need to know. There’s been a programmatic decision that the small suit won’t be used on the space station. NASA is eliminating the sizes small and extra-large to cut costs. You need to be ready for that day. People are going to look at you and think you’re too small, but I think someone like you could learn to function inside a medium suit. So my advice is this: if you are interested in flying on the space station, then when someone asks you what size suit you wear, you tell them a medium will be no problem.”

My happiness at his compliment evaporated. I may have had a head that thinks like a spacewalker, but the NASA higher-ups had just categorically decided that people like me did not have the body of a spacewalker. Anyone on the smaller side— which certainly meant a lot of the women— who wanted to be assigned to the ISS had no choice but to figure out how to function inside a medium suit. Otherwise, the implication was that those of us who didn’t fit were not a priority to contribute as crew members on the ISS. Once again, someone was underestimating me (and a bunch of other smart‑as‑shit, tough‑as‑nails astronauts, many of them women). Could I prove them— and my own self- doubts— wrong?

Throughout my career, navigating around my smaller size in the EVA suit required imagination, supreme negotiating skills, a sense of humor, and showing up cheerfully, even to meetings where I wasn’t invited. A steady supply of baked goods never hurt either. It might have been an unfair situation, but I knew that complaining was not going to get me anything but a higher profile on the “not cut out for spacewalking” list. Most of the time, I took the approach that if the suit didn’t fit, I would simply wear it anyway— and wear it well. Wear it better than anyone expected.

To be clear, at five four, I’m not dramatically small, and my arms are short only in comparison to those of male astronauts. But I had little choice other than to adapt to the equipment that was available—and like so many things, even in that day and age, the equipment was basically designed to accommodate men. This kind of bias isn’t necessarily malicious, but it is unthinking. And it does have consequences—like keeping women on the ground and excluding them from taking on mission critical tasks that could in turn be stepping stones to leadership positions.

Eliminating the small suit was a hugely significant decision in this regard. As a result, eight women— almost one third of the women astronauts at the time—were eliminated from EVA and therefore from eligibility for station missions. Several of them were as tough and skilled as they come, but just too petite to safely operate in a medium suit. The most galling part of the story is that when it became apparent that some men couldn’t wear the large suit, the same NASA decision-makers reversed the decision to eliminate the extra-large. But they saw no reason to bring back size small.

I’m extremely proud to have qualified in the medium suit and in 2010, I had the amazing opportunity to live and work up on the space station for almost 6 months. Without that qualification, I would not have been eligible to fly on the ISS until 2021, when NASA finally lifted the EVA constraint. From where I stand now, I can say without hesitation that it was unacceptable that NASA would deny astronauts the opportunity to fulfill the missions they’d trained for—simply because something about their physical appearance didn’t fit an institutional template that hadn’t been redesigned, or reimagined, in half a century.

But if I’d tried to speak that truth from day one, I’d never have made it to the day when I was taken seriously enough to start those conversations from a place of strength— a place where I could be heard and make a difference not just for myself but for astronauts who came after me. Systemic inequality is tough to change. Sometimes you have to master the ill- fitting equipment before you get a chance to redesign it. Sometimes you have to play by the unfair rules in order to get to a point where you can change those rules. But it’s up to you to determine when to try to change things, and when to let them go.

And thankfully, things are changing. My friend and fellow astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, after her role in a real- life emergency spacewalk to replace the cooling pump, led an effort at NASA to revamp the EVA training program, redesigning it to help new astronauts develop their skills, as opposed to eliminating them from consideration based on assumptions. It was a novel, brilliant approach to teaching and objective grading, and when combined with the latest astronaut class’s stated motto not to leave anyone behind, it led to all five women in that class of twelve becoming qualified for EVA.

The suits themselves may have been hard to change, but changing the cultural environment in which people were using them made a big difference. Tracy told me someone hung a picture of me in the hallway outside the women’s locker room inside the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. It meant a lot to me to hear that, and I’m proud to be one of the people who helped make it possible for a wider range of people to excel as spacewalkers. Over the past few years, we’ve seen multiple women perform spacewalks and witnessed Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performing the first all- female spacewalk. I’m not a big souvenir person, but I loved seeing a T‑shirt at a shop in the Houston airport celebrating that awesome event. And finally, efforts are under way to redesign the spacesuits to better fit the diversity of astronauts. When NASA’s Artemis takes the first woman to walk on the moon, she will do so in a redesigned spacesuit. I hope it fits her like a glove.

Excerpted from Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change by Cady Coleman. Published by Penguin Life. Copyright © 2024.