In 1996, a 14-year-old girl in France sat in front of a television watching Claudie Haigneré become the first French woman ever launched into space. “At that moment, I told myself: one day, that will be me,” she later said. Today, August 18, 2026, that girl, now 44-year-old astronaut Sophie Adenot, is stepping outside the International Space Station to become the first French woman ever to walk in space.
Rejected the First Time, Selected the Second
Adenot’s path here wasn’t a straight line. She first applied to become a European Space Agency astronaut in 2008, at just 25 years old, and was turned down. Rather than give up, she spent the next 14 years building an entirely different kind of resume, becoming France’s first female helicopter test pilot in 2018, logging roughly 3,000 flight hours and 120 combat missions across two tours in Afghanistan flying search-and-rescue operations. In 2022, ESA opened applications again, drawing more than 22,500 candidates. This time, Adenot made the cut, joining a class nicknamed “The Hoppers.”
She credits her grandfather, a mechanic in the French air force, with giving her an early love of “taking things apart and fixing them,” a skill that turned out to matter more than she might have guessed.
Today’s Job: Fixing the Station’s Phone Line
Adenot launched to the ISS in February 2026 aboard SpaceX Crew-12, becoming just the second French woman ever to reach space. Today, alongside NASA astronaut Anil Menon, she’s spending roughly six and a half hours outside the station’s Quest airlock replacing a Space-to-Ground antenna, the critical high-speed communications link connecting the crew to Mission Control in Houston. It’s the 282nd spacewalk in the ISS’s history, and Adenot will be designated Extravehicular Crew Member 2, working in a spacesuit weighing roughly 250 kilograms.
She’s spent more than 150 hours training underwater at ESA’s facility in Cologne and NASA’s Johnson Space Center to prepare for exactly this moment, describing a spacewalk as “an adventure within the adventure.” Inside the station, commander Jessica Meir and flight engineer Jack Hathaway are helping suit up the pair and operating the Canadarm2 robotic arm to support the work outside.
A Small Step in a Longer Line
Adenot won’t be the first French person to ever spacewalk, that honor belongs to Jean-Loup Chrétien, who did so aboard the Soviet Mir station back in 1988, followed by fellow Frenchmen Philippe Perrin and Thomas Pesquet over the following decades. She will be the first French woman, and only the second European woman overall, following Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti, who spacewalked in 2022. If you’re curious about another recent milestone captured from this same orbiting outpost, our piece on Perseverance watching Earth vanish behind the Martian moon Phobos covers a different kind of “first” achieved just weeks ago.
What Comes Full Circle
There’s something worth sitting with in the shape of this story. A teenager watches a hero on a screen and quietly promises herself a future nobody else has any reason to believe in yet. Fourteen years pass before she even gets a real shot, and she’s rejected on the first try anyway. Nearly two more decades after that, she’s floating 250 miles above Earth, fixing the very antenna that will beam images of her own spacewalk back down to the next generation of 14-year-olds watching on their own screens tonight.
For live coverage and more on today’s spacewalk, check out ESA’s livestream coverage and the full mission details from NASA.