Perspective: A woman on the moon: How has one small step taken so long?
Here’s an anecdote I always assumed was apocryphal: Sally Ride was going to space, the first American woman to do so. Down on Earth, the NASA engineers in charge of equipment wondered about a possible scenario — what if Ride got her period while on the Challenger?she told them. It would not be the right number.
“America will demonstrate a new level of global space leadership,” read the official Artemis plans. On the program’s website, you can click through the bios of the nine women who have a shot at becoming the first: biologists, physicists, nuclear engineers, search-and-rescue firefighters who winter in Antarctica and other women who generally make you wonder what you’re doing with your own life.
None of those women were allowed in NASA’s official program. In a 1962 House hearing on gender discrimination in the space program, John Glenn told a panel of congressmen, “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” The fact that they dared to ask to upend this social order was seen as an impediment to the speed of the program as a whole, which wanted to be beating Soviets, not blazing trails for gender equality.
But that is the nature of progress. It’s not that women have become more deserving — they always had the right stuff. It’s that their country has become more willing. More willing to see patriotism as the purview of Americans, not the purview of men, and more willing to acknowledge that John Glenn’s “social order” was something as invented as space travel itself: a concept that can be constantly improved upon, frequently due for an upgrade.
The program is also pioneering a new space toilet, one more usable for those who prefer sitting down when they pee. And NASA has partnered with German and Israeli space agencies to study the effects of radiation — which impacts every human leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and has implications for long-term crewed missions — on women’s bodies. Two anatomically correct “radiotherapy phantoms,” named Helga and Zohar, are equipped to ride in the passenger seats of the Orion spacecraft.
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