She Walked in Space First: What Jessica Meir and Christina Koch Teach Us About Breaking Defaults
On October 18, 2019, astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch floated outside the International Space Station to replace a failed power controller. Routine maintenance, really — except for one detail that made the whole world stop and look up. It was the first all-female spacewalk in history. Not a publicity stunt. Not a specially designed mission. Just two extraordinarily qualified people doing a job that needed doing.
That's the part that sticks with me. It took until 2019 to happen — not because women weren't capable, but because the default settings of who gets picked, who gets trained, who gets put in the room had never been seriously questioned. In tech, we run into default settings all the time. The default architecture everyone uses because "that's how we've always done it." The default candidate profile for a senior dev role. The default assumption about who leads a client meeting. Defaults are comfortable, but they're not always correct — and sometimes the cost of leaving them unchallenged is measured in decades.
Here's the business lesson worth carrying into your week: the best solutions often come from questioning what you stopped questioning a long time ago. Whether you're building a software system, assembling a project team, or rethinking how your company delivers value, ask yourself where the "default settings" are hiding. Meir and Koch didn't rewrite the rules of spacewalking — they just did the work brilliantly, and in doing so, showed everyone what had been possible all along. That's the kind of quiet revolution worth building toward.