International Women’s Day: Women astronauts continue to make progress
Nicole Mann, the first Native American woman in space, recently reflected on her long road to orbit.
Mann, a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian tribes in northern California, told the US Senate Committee on Indian Affairs last month about the obstacles she faced before reaching orbit on SpaceXof the Crew-5 mission. It’s a common conversation that women, non-binaries, and others in space are still having as the United Nations marks International Women’s Day today (March 8).
“Inequality stifles success”, Mann said on February 7 (opens in a new tab)against the backdrop of flags, colored balls and research materials on the international space station. “To continue to break down these barriers, we need to communicate. We need to inspire young people. We must give them the means to dream in order to help them achieve their goals.
More … than 60 years after the start of manned spaceflight in 1961, genders other than male made up only about 10% of astronauts and space tourists. But the diversity is starting to pick up speed, with notable recent spaceflights of women including an octogenarian, a cancer survivor with a prosthesis and a black pilot. NASA also promises that a woman will be on her Artemis 3 mission, which aims to land on moon from 2025.
Related: Pioneering Women in Space: A Gallery of Astronaut Firsts
Women were excluded from the first decades of spaceflight, with the exception of a single excursion from the Soviet Union. Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. NASA and the Soviet Union, the two major space powers at the time, were both recruited from pools of military pilots who were almost exclusively white males at that time.
Civilian women pilots were not taken into account, including Wally Funk, member of the Mercury 13 group of individuals. Funk and a dozen other women passed at least one set of independently administered medical tests in the 1960s, similar to those NASA required its astronauts to pass. The women’s program (privately funded by aviation pioneer Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran) was canceled after a third round of testing required US military facilities that completely excluded female participants. finally funk arrived in space aboard a blue origin suborbital flight in 2021 at age 82.
NASA’s first class with female astronauts was selected in 1978. Of this group, Sally’s Tower was the first American woman to fly in 1983; Ride was also posthumously identified in 2012 as the first person LGBTQ+ in the space. Mae Jemison was the first black woman in space in 1992; International women flying into space from countries other than the Soviet Union, Russia and the United States began in 1991 with Helen Sharman of the United Kingdom, the first woman to visit Soviet-Russian territory . Mir space station. The first international flier aboard a NASA spacecraft was Canadian Roberta Bondar, who flew aboard the spaceship in 1992.
Women’s achievements in space have nonetheless lagged behind men; that said, NASA and international agencies have done more to include other genders and ethnicities over the past decade.
Related: 20 women pioneers in astronomy and astrophysics
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Female milestones are accelerating. The first and only all-female spacewalk took place in 2019, 54 years after the first male. NASA’s current generation of spacesuits are sized for larger bodies, making women’s excursions more difficult, participating NASA space walkers Jessica Meir and Christina Koch said This year. Koch was also the first woman to spend nearly a year in space in 2019-20, decades after several men accomplished the feat on Mir in the 1990s.
Commercial spaceflight and society’s increased emphasis on diversity also play a role in boosting women’s participation. The funded billionaire inspiration4 spaceflight in 2021 included Sian Proctor, the first black pilot in space, with the first astronaut with a prosthesis (Haley Arceneaux). The first black woman to spend six months in space was NASA astronaut Jessica Watkinswho, with the first European female space station commander Samantha Cristoforetti completed her work on the ISS in 2022.
Funk became the oldest woman in space in 2021, while Beth Moses became the first commercial astronaut in 2019 during a Galactic Virgo suborbital test flight. The launch of Crew-5 on October 5, 2022 marked the first time that five women were simultaneously in space, according to NASA (opens in a new tab)including Liu Yang aboard the China’s Tiangong Space Station. (Incidentally, the agency doesn’t count suborbital flights in its records; NASA figures suggest 72 women flew into space in March 2023, but the number is higher when considering shorter excursions. .)
Women who support spaceflight are also making great strides on the ground lately: NASA renamed its headquarters After “hidden characterand pioneering black engineer Mary Jackson in 2020, named her first female human spaceflight leader (Kathryn Lueders) in 2020, and named Charlie Blackwell-Thompson as her first female launch director (opens in a new tab) in 2016.
There are women’s records that are still broken, according to NASA (opens in a new tab). When Mann and cosmonaut Anna Kikina return from space aboard Crew-5 as early as Friday (March 10), they will end a streak of approximately two years and five months in which at least one woman was in the space. space – the longest to date. Mann will also complete her mission as the first woman to command SpaceX’s crew. Dragonwhile Kikina was the first Russian (male or female) to fly any American commercial crew vehicle.
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Axe-2, one Axiom space commercial mission due to reach the ISS in 2023, will include the first commercial space commander – Peggy Whitson, herself a multiple NASA record astronaut and the first-ever female commander of the ISS in 2007. Joining Whitson will be the first female astronaut from Saudi Arabia, Rayyanah Barnawi. (Barnawi’s milestone is particularly significant given that women in Saudi Arabia enjoyed far fewer rights than men until 2019, such as driving cars or leaving home alone, though critics say we need more progress.)
Two females (Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis) will also fly polar dawn, a billionaire-funded mission set to launch this summer and will include the first-ever commercial spacewalk. And around April, the first female actress in space Yulia Peresild will star in a Russian-language film, “The Challenge,” which uses ISS footage of her. three days september 2021 flight.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
