Women and Space or the Enlightenment of the Planet

Writing a week ago about the Luna 2015 experiment with an all-female crew, I was unpleasantly struck by the abundance of silly jokes and misogynistic comments. Well, that's a great way to talk about women in space.

History

The first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, is world famous. Launched on June 16, 1963 on the Vostok-6, Valentina spent almost three days in space.



But the successful flight as a whole was not perfect - Tereshkova fuzzy kept in touch, experienced problems with building the landing orientation of the ship (repeated now the story about the wrong orientation in the program and “reprogramming”. "Vostok-6" is not true, accidentally scratched the window, broke a pencil. When landing, in violation of instructions, raised her head up and earned a bruise on her nose from a helmet impact when the catapult turned on. After the landing, again in violation of the instructions, distributed its space ration to kolkhozniks, perhaps hiding the fact that in flight almost nothing ate. Now it doesn't seem serious, we know that about half of astronauts suffer from vestibular disorders early in flight. But then this imperfect flight was superimposed on the political aspects of the choice of crews and the reaction “so that the spirit of the woman was not here!” Sergei Pavlovich Korolev – women in the USSR stopped flying into space for almost 20 years.



Far less well known is that around the same time in the U.S., women were making great efforts to break into space. It all started with scientific curiosity - Dr. William Lovelace, who conducted medical testing of male candidates for the first detachment of astronauts of the United States, offered to pass the same tests famous pilot Geraldine Cobb. Geraldine, who at 19 taught men to fly and by the late 50s had set several aviation records, successfully coped with heavy and very uncomfortable medical tests. She was also the only woman to undergo all three phases of medical testing (medical examination, isolation and mental evaluation, advanced examination on military equipment using jet aircraft). In addition to Cobb, twelve other women successfully completed the first phase of the test. The women in the squad, dubbed Mercury 13, would have been able to become astronauts had it not been for politics. The requirements of NASA were prescribed mandatory experience as a military pilot test, and there were no such women. The president of the United States, who explicitly set these requirements, did not change them for the sake of women. None of the Mercury 13 crew went into space.



The second woman in space was Svetlana Savitskaya. She went on a flight to the Salyut-7 orbital station in 1982. In 1984, she became the first woman to make two space flights and the first woman to go into space. Before the beginning of her space career, Svetlana flew jet aircraft, set several records on the MiG-25. After leaving the cosmonaut squad, she worked at the Moscow Aviation Institute, and then became a deputy.



Svetlana Savitskaya works in outer space

American female astronauts appeared only with the beginning of the Space Shuttle program. The eighth group of astronauts, recruited in 1978, had the first six women:



From left to right: Shannon Lucid, Margaret Seddon, Catherine Sullivan, Judith Reznick, Anna Fisher, Sally Ride

The lucky ticket to become the first female astronaut in the United States was Sally Ride – she flew in 1983. The five remaining women set their records. The first American woman to go into space was Catherine Sullivan. Margaret Seddon was the mother of three children at the time of the selection, but the first mother was Anna Fisher, who gave birth to a daughter already being in the astronaut squad. At the time of the flight, the daughter was only a year and a half. Shannon Lucid became the first woman to make five space flights, and also became the first American to visit the Mir station. Judith Reznick became the first American of Jewish descent in space.



The first female cosmonaut of Russia was Elena Kondakova. She was the first woman to fly two different types of spacecraft, the Soyuz (1994-1995) and the Space Shuttle (1997).



The first female pilot and commander of the Space Shuttle was Eileen Collins. She piloted the shuttle for the first time in 1995 in a docking mission with the Mir station, and became the first commander in the STS-93 mission, when the Chandra X-ray telescope, still in operation, was successfully put into orbit.



Women were also in charge of the ISS – Peggy Whitson commanded the ISS from October 2007 to April 2008.



From left to right: Judith Reznick, Krista McAuliffe, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chavla
Working alongside men in space, the women shared a saddest fate - of the 14 astronauts killed on the shuttles, four were women. Judith Reznick and Krista McAuliffe died on Challenger, and Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chavla died on Columbia.



Today, women continue to work in space. In 2014, the first Russian woman on the ISS was Elena Serova.





On June 11, 2015, Samantha Cristoforetti returned from the ISS, because of the Progress accident, which became the record holder among women for the duration of continuous space flight.



In 2016, Kathleen Rubens should go to the ISS

Astronaut Mike Mullane has very well described how he has changed working with women at NASA. I offer you excerpts from his memoir, “Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Stories of Space Shuttle Astronaut.”
On my first day as an astronaut candidate, I was confronted with two things I'd never faced in my life: choosing what to wear to work and working with women. <...> And if the question of what to wear caused me simple bewilderment, then female colleagues for me were like from another galaxy. I saw women only as sexual objects—an unintended consequence of twelve years of Catholic schooling. Priests and nuns hammered into me the idea that women are the same as sex, and sex meant eternal torment in hell. The girls were never discussed in any other context. They were never talked about as people who could dream. No mention was made of female doctors, female scientists, or female astronauts. Women were spoken of only as “causes of sin.” The only thing I knew about women as a teenager was that the straight road to hell lies between their legs. And their breasts will introduce you to Beelzebub. Even fantasies about their breasts and other parts of their bodies (the mortal sin of "impurity of thought") will send you straight to hell. Only in marriage did the rules change. There, sex became the norm for procreation. Married woman reached her highest life status - to conceive and give birth to children. “The main purpose of marriage is the birth of children” was the dogma in the 1963 textbook The Course in Marriage by my wife, who graduated from St. Mary’s School.
The same textbook contained a lesson in “male and female psychology” with a table of characteristics. “Men are more realistic, women are more idealistic. Men are more emotionally stable, women are emotionally weaker. A man loves his job, a woman loves her man.” And, my favorite, "Men are more right, women are more wrong."
I took these perverse sexist claims so fully that I wrote an essay in high school about women being banned from college. I got "excellent." I turned out to be a good student.
<. . . >>
The U.S. Air Force officer corps, which I entered in 1967, was an all-male organization. I haven't seen a single female pilot. On Friday nights at the club we were entertained by strippers. Military pilots treated women only as "reception nests." Anyone who said otherwise must have been going to run for Congress. Women may be from Venus, normal men from Mars, but military pilots come from the planet Delayed Development. At first, Mullane's choice of words in dealing with women was no different than what he would use in a male collective. But among the six women in the eighth astronaut squad were feminists. A careless joke mentioning the word "tits" in Sally Ride's presence led to her not speaking to him for more than a decade. Mullane was not alone in his backwardness - other astronauts, former military pilots, arranged idiotic pranks and made up jokes that you do not want to translate. But working with civilians and women was instructive — these people might not know how to drink a burning cocktail, but they were not weaker in spirit, and did a good job. At the end of the book, Mike writes bluntly:

Without a doubt, my experience at NASA has changed my attitude toward women the most. I realized that they are people with dreams and ambitions, and they only need the opportunity to prove what they are capable of. And the women of the eighth set of astronauts coped. Watching Margaret Seddon, who is nine months pregnant, pilot a shuttle simulator, performing one-by-one impeccable landings was a lesson in their competence. Watching a broadcast from space, where she performs an unplanned and dangerous operation by a shuttle manipulator to turn on a faulty satellite, was a lesson. Knowing that it was Judy who could turn Mike Smith's breathing apparatus on in the hell Challenger turned into was a lesson. Constantly showing their professionalism, skill and bravery, the female astronauts of the eighth set took Mike Mullane back to school and changed him.
There are people who can be astronauts. Their gender is important for specific physiological issues or specialists of the IMBP RAS level. There are people who cannot be astronauts, because of poor health, mentality or bad character. And gender doesn't matter.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/265066/