Over the past few weeks, NASA has been celebrating a pending milestone: the first-ever all-female spacewalk (just in time for Women’s History Month, even!). It wasn’t until Monday, just a few days before this week’s planned mission to have two women step into space to install powerful batteries on the International Space Station’s solar panels, that the crew realized the highly publicized plan had a major problem.

There weren’t enough spacesuits that fit the female astronauts. We will not be celebrating an all-female spacewalk this week, after all.

The news brought back a vivid memory from when I served aboard an aircraft carrier about a decade ago, flying jets for the Navy. It was the time when a maintenance chief casually asked me to sign a seemingly innocuous paper, which, upon closer inspection, was in fact a form saying that I understood that the ejection seat on my jet was not designed for someone of my height and weight. I wasn’t close to the size of an average man, so there was an increased risk of major injury if I used the safety equipment for its stated emergency purpose. By signing, I agreed to waive the Navy’s liability were something to happen to me if it malfunctioned.

After two years of my flying jets for the military, it was as if someone suddenly noticed that my 5-foot-2-inch female frame wasn’t what the men who built the plane, designed the safety gear and tested the emergency procedures had in mind. Ironically, the biggest systemic barriers to my pursuing a naval career — including the Navy’s policy regarding women flying in combat — had been lifted years before. But the physical legacies of an era when men made decisions with other men in mind persisted.