Capturing the headlines on Monday night is the news that an all-female spaceflight undertaken on a Blue Origin rocket took six women just beyond the edge of what is deemed to be “space” and brought them safely back to Earth.
Blue Origin is a company led by Amazon founder and world’s second wealthiest man Jeff Bezos. Private spaceflight is still a niche, and massively expensive, enterprise but it is fairly routine enough for something special to be required to grab the public’s attention.
Having an all-women crew largely made up of celebrities is one such way to do it.
Musician Katy Perry, television personality Gayle King (famous for being Oprah Winfrey’s best friend), Lauren Sanchez (a journalist and Bezos’s fiancée), former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, research scientist Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn made up the team.
They were in space (roughly 100km up) for around 11 minutes and the real question is – was there any point to it? For the unforgettable experience and promotion of Blue Origin, yes. But do not pretend that this joyride is a giant step for the women of the world, as it is being presented by some.
One critic, actress Olivia Munn, was flabbergasted by the whole exercise. There are numerous female astronauts out there who have been training for years to get into space and these are the real role models for young girls, she opined. This short trip, derisively dismissed by her as a rollercoaster given its brevity, is not up to the mark.
Perhaps if it does inspire girls out there to take up STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), then at least some good would have come out of it.
But let us not forget the pioneers that came before. The first all-female space team was led by Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet cosmonaut, who took a solo trip in 1963 that made her the first woman to go into space. She was up there orbiting the Earth for nearly three days. It took another 20 years for the Americans to send up a woman of their own, NASA astronaut Sally Ride. Only the USA has been to the Moon and none of the astronauts it landed on the surface were women.
Overall, women make up a tiny minority of the people who have travelled to space. In a 2020 report, the figure cited was a mere 12 percent.
Prolonged spaceflights can have a negative effect on the human body thanks to the vast reduction in gravity and extra radiation absorbed. There is some debate and research is ongoing as to whether women suffer more or less from these factors than men. But, quite clearly, what is holding more women back from exploring the final frontier is neither lack of ability or desire but pure old-fashioned gender discrimination.
