Space sexism

Have you ever noticed that there are not many women austraunafts? Actually they are quite fucking few of them. Sadly we are not speaking about 20th century. This malodorous situation is still present. 

Here is an example from 2019. In March there was an all-female spacewalk, but it failed  due to a lack of size medium spacesuits…Ever since it launched its low-orbit operations in November, 2000, the International Space Station has had over 200 spacewalks but never with an all-female team floating outside the spacecraft. Things were just about to change, when NASA announced that two female astronauts, Koch and Anne McClain, were going to climb out of the ISS hatch together to replace batteries on the station’s solar array. However, those plans quickly changed when the space agency realized that both astronauts would require a size medium spacesuit and only one was available for the upcoming quest.

As a result, McClain was replaced by her male colleague Nick Hague. Shortly after recovering from the backlash that followed, NASA promised that it now has two size medium spacesuits onboard the ISS that are ready for the zero-gravity handiwork.

This is a men’s world indeed, as throughout history, female astronauts have suffered from some pretty ridiculous, eye-roll inducing incidents in their male-dominated field. In order to commemorate where they are today, we look back at three of the most infamous misconceptions about women in space.

In the 1960s, William Randolph Lovelace II, who specialized in aerospace medicine, led the first study of the effects of space travel on women. While NASA prepared their male astronauts for America’s first trip to space, Lovelace ran tests on a group of women in his private clinic because he believed they could be better candidates for space travel since they are “smaller and lighter” than men and may require less oxygen. However, before you go celebrating Lovelace’s pioneering research, apparently he had other intentions. He was planning to add “space secretaries”. Because women, as many men from NASA thought, weren’t emotionally capable of executing important tasks. Not qualify as astronauts, according to NASA records.

It wasn’t until 1983 that astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space (Russia had sent the first woman into space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963). For her week-long mission in space, NASA engineers famously asked Ride whether she would need 100 tampons to carry with her onboard. Even if Ride were to have an exceptionally heavy flow, that’s still about 72 tampons too many.

However, thanks to women in space,innovations have emerged. The astronauts on the ISS are obliged to women for the  emergence of toilets. The first astronauts peed through tubes, which they had to put on their penis. 

To sum up, finally NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir have made history with the world’s first-ever all-female spacewalk. Koch and Meir stepped outside the International Space Station at 7:38am 18 October 2019, and NASA has been live-streaming the spacewalk on YouTube. 

It has attracted plenty of attention from those who are excited to see women in science crossing yet another barrier, and are also attuned to the significance of the moment for girls and young women. “There are a lot of people that derive motivation from inspiring stories from people that look like them and I think it’s an important aspect of the story to tell,” Koch said at a recent news conference.