NASA's all-female spacewalk will make history today. Watch it live here.
Oct. 18, 2019 at 7:16 a.m. EDT
NASA’s historic all-female spacewalk is scheduled to begin Friday morning when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir step outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty battery charger.
The spacewalk — the first of its kind “in human history,” according to the agency — will begin shortly before 8 a.m. Eastern time and will be streamed live by NASA.
The historic float outside the orbiting laboratory into the vacuum of space comes several months after another all-female spacewalk was canceled because NASA didn’t have enough spacesuits in the right size. And it’s being heralded as a huge step forward for the agency at a time when NASA continues to work to highlight the contributions of women.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/18/nasa-live-spacewalk-christina-koch-jessica-meir/
At 7:25 am ET, the ladies are in a depressurization chamber as it starts to reduce closer to space pressure and switch their suits from the station power to battery (self-contained) power.
Here is NASA's youtube feed -
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(I may be cynical, but I've had very good reason to be so in recent years)
to these impressive women!
(official "start time" was 6:38 am CDT)
on one of their helmet cameras. 
so they will be out there for awhile. There was also mention that their helmet cameras may capture the earth beneath their feet as they work too at some point...
(unless his daughters or wife makes a mention... if they even care)
(and apparently this was Ivanka's idea because she is sitting there)
And then he fucks up and says it's the first time a woman was outside the station.
OMG AND THEY CORRECTED HIM!!!!
Link to tweet
TEXT
Intl. Space Station
✔
@Space_Station
.@POTUS called up to the first two women, @Astro_Christina and @Astro_Jessica, who conducted a spacewalk together and congratulated them on their historic accomplishment today. https://www.nasa.gov/live
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12:45 PM - Oct 18, 2019
The facial expressions of Pence & Ivanka are priceless!
And in order to justify the cost, in a world where people are starving and otherwise suffering, there needs to be some huge payoff at the end (at least for private operators).
However much of the innovation getting to where they are at the moment, has actually helped to produce some amazing tech down here on the ground.
What is cool though is that part of what they are doing right now is basically prepping the station to eventually replace the old Nickel-Hydrogen batteries at the station, with Lithium-Ion ones (and the inventors of the Lithium-Ion batts just won a Nobel Prize last week)!
I watched to the very end (until they cut off the feed to the station once they returned to the station, got latched in, and got their helmets off).
Oddly enough, the war tech and the space tech have crossed over the decades. I remember that the first shuttle that had been built with the now "common" robotic arm, was Atlantis, and Atlantis was used quite a bit for top secret deployments of satellites when it was still operational. Eventually they included an arm when they built Discovery too, which was useful (and was a small version of what one of the astronauts was attached to today to get to her work area at the ISS).
My degree is in chemistry so am somewhat familiar with what is out there for potential mining (if anything hydrogen and helium). Some of the video footage that NASA included in between the live shots, mentioned the hazards that still need to be dealt with however, including the radiation out there, so there is still some work to be done to mitigate some of these risks. And unfortunately, the way this world works with capitalism, the ones with the money seem to only do things if they can make money off of it (you see that with the "green" technology and companies finally getting into the act once they were convinced of some pay off at the end).
"Necessity is the mother of invention".
You see what the first major "test" of atomic power ended up being used for - bombs. Eventually they figured out how to use the tech of splitting the atom, to create the heat to boil the water that would make steam to turn the turbines that can generate electricity! 
Sputnik scared the hell out of the military but of course now we use satellites for all sorts of things - communications, weather monitoring, global positioning, etc.