This was during the 1960s, when space agency’s such as NASA refused to accept recruits who weren’t military test pilots, a profession which was not open to women. But with the recent emphasis on gender equality, has this perception changed
Valentina Tereshkova shattered the cosmic glass ceiling in 1963 when she became the first woman in space. By someAccounts, however,Tereskhova remains a contradictory hero givenher selection was met with opposition. And even though many speculate that she only became the first woman in space as part of the space race ,Tereskhovaonce explained that Soviet women have had the same prerogatives and rights as men”.
“They share the same tasks. They are workers, navigators, chemists, aviators, engineers, and now cosmonauts,” she said.
But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean that women haven’t endured hardships on their way to the stars .
Behind the propaganda surrounding her mission, Tereskhova’s failings during the flight were criticised by the male-dominated Soviet space leadership. As a result, the door to space was closed to women for the next two decades. It wasn’t until NASA prepared to let women fly and conduct spacewalks in the 1980s that Russia rushed to beat the US with a spacewalk by Svetlana Savitskaya. Known to theBritish press under the nickname “Miss Sensation”,Savitskaya was the first woman to fly on a space station and make two spaceflights as well.
Despite being far less known thanTereskhova, Savistskaya outperformed not only Thereskhova, but also many men. But it was suggested that Savitskaya had to pass certain selections, overcome hardships and men’s prejudice .
When she arrived at Mir in 1982, she was greeted with a floral apron as a welcome present, and mocking words implied that her place on the station would be in the kitchen.
Even among our space colleagues there were men wondering why we needed to weld and said that we might burn each others space suits or the spaceships exterior,”Savitskaya said. “It is a great responsibility. If I listen to their concerns, then people could have said that surely it was not something women should do. But after my spaceflight, everyone had to shut up.
She stressed: The sky is the limit. There aren’t jobs specifically for men or for women, nor are there people who are capable or incapable of performing certain tasks. Working in space depends on a person’s training, psychological and physical status, self-command, personal aims, and so on. If a person is a professional, the gender makes no difference.
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So the argument goes, but what does it say when Russian Elena Serova’s pre-launch interview in September 2013 was filled with make-up queries and questions about how she would wear her hair during the six months in space.
She responded by pointing to her fellow male crew mate: I have a question for you why don’t you ask the question about Alexander’s hair
It’s concerning that nothing has changed since 1983, when the first American astronaut, Sally Ride, received similar questions. She was asked whether the flight would affect her reproductive organs and whether she intended to weep when things go wrong on the job
Known for keeping her cool, Ride told reporters at a press conference: Its too bad this is such as big deal. Its too bad our society isnt further along.
NASA reportedly made adjustments to accommodate Ride. Rather than force astronauts to use urine-catching devices, NASA added commodes to space vessels. Tampons were also packed with their strings connecting them. Engineers asked Ride, Is 100 the right number She would be in space for a week.
That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her.
Within Russia’scurrent social climate, Serovas road to space may have been rockier than any of her female predecessors.
“We can now say without any doubt that compared to previous years, fewer women are even applying for the cosmonauts group,” Serova said. In our country, it is considered to be not a womans profession.
She has emphasised that she applied to become a cosmonaut only after fulfilling the main purpose of a woman , which was to bear a child. And she has sometimes had to defend herself against those asking whether she could remain a good mother and wife.
South Korea’s first and only astronaut, biomechanical engineer Yi So-yeon explained: “In pursuing this field, girls should sometimes forget that they are women in their field and other times rejoice because we are. Understanding that there is time and place for both is especially important. When is it time to be primarily the professional and when should we be the woman We can be confident and clear and be able to manage both sides.
“As a cosmonaut once told me, the toughest thing about this job is the waiting. Not just that, but to wait with making a huge effort to achieve something not necessarily well defined, and to get there. Women must be wiser rather than just more intelligent. It’s about knowing when we must wait, when we should speak out and when we need to listen. This is whats so important for women to manage well in these fields dominated by guys.”
Though dozens of women have now flown on a space shuttle, only two have commanded a spaceship. Those two are NASA astronauts Eileen Collins and Pamela Melroy.
Collins explained that becoming a shuttle commander required 1,000 hours experience piloting a jet aircarft, including previous spaceflight experience. Due to this fact, few women achieve this position.
Although Collins admitted that she “never really thought that much about” being the first woman to fly as a pilot, yet alone commander, at the time. “The biggest hindrance was the law preventing women from serving on combat aircraft and on combat ships,” she said.
“When I first graduated from pilot training, I wanted to fly fighters,” she said. “That was in 1979. Because of the law against women in combat, however, the Air Force obviously wasnt going to spend a lot of money training me to fly an airplane that Id never be able to fly in combat. But, I knew that if I just did my job, and did it well, some day the law would change. It did, in April of 1993. I remember how happy I was because, although it was too late for me, maybe I was part of getting this law lifted.”
How times have changed since Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and Captain Kirk went where no man has gone before. Collins suggested that in NASA’s early days, women in the space program were relegated to support roles mainly as technicians, engineers or mathematicians.
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As the first woman shuttle pilot and first commander, Collins was aware of her status. However, she didn’t forget the woman who laid the foundation to her success. She explained that in 1995, during her first shuttle flight, she took along a scarf belonging to Amelia Earhart, as well as keepsakes from female astronauts who never made it to space.
Collins also credits Ride and Shannon Lucid, who broke the American record for the longest time spent in space, for breaking the mould. “These women set an excellent precedent and made it easy for me and the gals to follow me,” Collins said.
Read on to find out about the one and only British woman to make it into space.
No British woman other than Helen Sharman in 1991 has ever gone into space. Since then, only five other British-born astronauts have travelled into outer space, and all of them have had to switch their nationality to become American citizens. Sharman claimed that this is not acceptable .
In 1945 a radar instructor called flight-lieutenant Arthur Clarke pointed out that a rocket travelling at 8km a second would continue parallel to the Earth’s surface in a closed loop and could become an artificial satellite. However, the British only launched four rockets between 1969 and 1971. The ministry of defence then cancelled the programme because it was too expensive. The government also declined an offer by the Russians to bring a UK citizen onboard Mir.
This may be the reasoning behind the UK’s late entry into the stratosphere. From writer HG Wells to Clarke, who both pioneered the vision of human space flight, the UK chose to stay rooted to the ground.
Kate Arkless Gray is trying to become the second via a sexist Lynx competition its tagline being: Lynx is scouring the world to recruit a few brave men for the opportunity of a lifetime. Leave a man, return a hero.
It was reported that since Gray went live with her story, Unilever have had to revise the rules.
It wasn’t just this blatant attempt to keep women from entering the competition that bothered me,” Gray said. In the adverts a helpless female beauty needs to be rescued by a strong male fireman, she looks longingly into his eyes, before ditching him for a male astronaut that shows up. I don’t like this, especially since Lynx is mixing this image with science.
“There are studies that show ‘enduring cultural stereotypes about women’s lack of science competence’ have an effect on women’s chance of promotion in the lab. That’s if they even get as far as working in science, how many young women are put off by the old-fashioned notion that science is for boys and English/humanities is for girls
Let’s face the fact that demand for engineers in the UK has never been stronger, with Engineering UK predicting a requirement of 87,000 new engineers per annum for the next decade. Andpart of the space industries appeal is the breadth of opportunities, from building and operating spacecraft and ground-stations to using satellites for navigation. So why does the UKs engineering workforce still only contain seven per cent of female staff
In an article published in Wired, it is explained that many of the earliest and most pioneering programmers were women, learning hands-on to do things that had never been done before. “We all know about Amazing Grace Hopper, who wrote the first compiler and coined the term ‘debug’,” it said.
But let’s not forget aboutMargaret Hamilton. The lunar landing was one of the first times that software was ever entrusted with such a mission-critical, real-time task. And the application development work for that feat was placed in the hands of Margaret Hamilton who had taught herself to program and had risen to become director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the computer under contract to NASA.
According to Hamilton, women, if they were in the computer science field at that time, were more often than not relegated to lower positions. “In the case of the Apollo project my colleagues (mostly male) and I were friends and we worked side by side to solve challenging problems and meet critical deadlines,” she explained. “We concentrated on our work more than whether one was male or female. We were more likely to refer to someone as a ‘second floor person’, ‘a hardware guy’, ‘an operating system guru’ or a ‘rope mother (where the rope mother could be a male or a female)’.”
She suggested that there have been women involved in aviation since the very beginning of the invention of the airplane. The Wright Brothers took their sister up with them, after all. And in terms of spaceflight, women have been an active part behind the scenes.
Astronauts become the public face of spaceflight that people tend to focus on. Actually there’s a rich story of the women who were engineers, mission controllers and who are part of the other scientific research and the support team of thousands that supports the shuttle. But is there truly any hope that females will be on par with men in space
Peggy Whitson, the former chief of NASA’s astronaut corps, explained that part of the reason why few female astronauts have the opportunity to fly into space is because of strict lifetime radiation exposure restrictions. Male and female astronauts alike are not allowed to accumulate a radiation dose that would increase their lifetime risk of developing fatal cancer by more than three per cent.
Unfortunately, women seem to have a lower threshold for space radiation exposure than men.
“Depending on when you fly a space mission, a female will fly only 45 to 50 per cent of the missions that a male can fly,” Whitson said. “That’s a pretty confining limit in terms of opportunity. I know that they are scaling the risk to be the same, but the opportunities end up causing gender discrimination based on just the total number of options available for females to fly.
“I think that the current standards are too confining for exposure limits based on my personal experience and because I think it limits careers more than it is necessary. In my case, if I had a Y chromosome, I would be qualified,” Whitson added. “Because I have two X’s, I’m not.”
In his 2007 biography, astronaut Mike Mullane admitted that he, and other unnamed male shuttle astronauts, did not think women should be astronauts. But Mullanes attitude changed. Perhaps the rest will too.
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