Who Is Sophie Adenot, France's First Woman to Spacewalk?

Nine days ago, a 44-year-old French Air and Space Force colonel named Sophie Adenot opened a hatch on the International Space Station, floated out into nothing, and spent six and a half hours outside fixing a broken antenna 250 miles above Earth. She's the first French woman ever to do that. When she climbed back in, she said, "Yeah, what a day," and then, "my deepest gratitude goes to everyone who made this possible, pioneers who came before us." That's the whole story in one breath: a woman did something hard, in public, and named the women who made it possible for her to even imagine trying.

Who is Sophie Adenot?

Adenot grew up in Burgundy, France, the daughter of a pharmacist and a notary, inspired by a grandfather who worked as an aircraft mechanic. She studied flight dynamics at ISAE-SUPAERO, then earned a master's in human factors engineering at MIT. In 2018 she became France's first female helicopter test pilot, logging over 3,000 hours across 22 aircraft types. She joined the European Space Agency's astronaut corps in 2022, launched to the ISS in February 2026, and on August 18 stepped outside with NASA astronaut Anil Menon to replace a communications antenna on the station's truss. A second spacewalk followed a week later, on August 25.

Here's the detail that stuck with me most. Adenot has said that as a 14-year-old, she watched fellow Frenchwoman Claudie Haigneré fly to the Mir space station in 1996 and thought, "If she can do it, maybe I can too!" Thirty years later, she's the one a new generation of French girls gets to say that about.

How many women have ever spacewalked?

Barely two dozen. Since Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space in 1984, only around 23 women had done it as of last year, across roughly 42 total spacewalks — out of more than 270 spacewalks conducted overall. Adenot is the second European woman on that list, after Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti in 2022. Inside the station monitoring her EVA was commander Jessica Meir, who in 2019 completed half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk. The math is blunt: in over 40 years of humans walking in space, women have made up a small fraction of the people who've gotten to do it. Every "first" like Adenot's is still closing a gap, not just adding to a tally.

Why this matters for you

You don't need to want to be an astronaut for this to land. What Adenot's story actually says is that the "if she can do it" moment works. A 14-year-old girl watched one woman on television and quietly recalculated what her own life could hold. That's the same mechanism behind what helps young girls build real confidence: it's rarely a pep talk that does it, it's proof. Seeing someone who looks like you, or grew up where you grew up, doing the thing you didn't think was available to you.

It's also worth noticing what Adenot did with her own moment. She didn't just say "I did it." She said the pioneers' names. That's not modesty, it's math again, the same instinct that made WNBA Changemaker Day resonate with 150 teen girls when players told them who'd made room for them first. Representation isn't a single spacewalk or a single game. It's a chain, and someone has to be willing to say the previous link's name out loud. The same gap shows up closer to home, too — it's part of why so few women end up leading AI research: the fields change only as fast as the visible examples do.

One thing to try today

Name your own Claudie Haigneré. Think of one woman, famous or not, whose "if she can do it" moment quietly gave you permission to try something. Then tell her, or tell someone else about her, out loud, today. That sentence is small. It's also exactly the sentence that put Sophie Adenot outside a space station.

Quote to sit with

"If she can do it, maybe I can too!" — Sophie Adenot, on watching astronaut Claudie Haigneré's 1996 mission to Mir at age 14

💌 Sarah