Women deal better with being lost in Space
I was a science fiction reading young teenager in a small northern British town when the first Space programmes were launched. I remember pictures of a debonair Yuri Gagarin and a serious Valentina Tereshkova looking like innocent twins in their cosmonaut space helmets.
Tereshkova
And sitting up later into the night to watch the first US astronauts land on the moon. But by the time the US sent its first woman: Sally Ride into Space – looking like a Charlie’s angel in her publicity shots- it was 1983. By then Gagarin was dead and Tereshkova was a Soviet bureaucrat. I was tired of watching space launches and had stopped believing that we were en route to the next frontier of human endeavor. Instead ‘Space’ was a place in my imagination peopled by Mr. Spock and Uhura: who rarely wore a helmet but had a great line in ear rings.
Lui Yang
Then, on Saturday, with as much publicity as it could muster China sent Lui Yang on a space mission. She is the first Chinese female astronaut, and she sets off to do something still quite remarkable – but some how also mundane – nearly 50 years later than Tereshkova’s first trip. The Guardian quotes the Chinese Space programme spokeswoman as saying: “Generally speaking, female astronauts have better durability, psychological stability and ability to deal with loneliness.”
Is that why have only 40 of the 460+ people who have gone into Space been women?
About Gill Kirkup
I have worked most of my life as an academic engaged in a combination of teaching, research and scholarship. A strong theme over the years has been a critical engagement with the gendering of technologies and the technologies of gender and identity.
This blog is a place where I can reflect on all of these - sometimes in a scholarly way -but not always.
