NObody will give medals now that the eleventh crew space flight of Blue Origin is in books. The brief suborbital stay took off on April 14 at 8:30 am CDT and landed only 11 minutes later. There was certainly media coverage, but not the type of global audience that attended other crew space launches.
This is not like that on May 5, 1961, when the NASA astronaut, Alan Shepard, made a similar flight profile – a popgun trajectory above the atmosphere and an landing a few hundred kilometers – presenting himself the first American in space. Shepard obtained an instant celebrity, visiting President John Kennedy at the White House three days later to receive the distinguished NASA service medal. Since then, more than 700 people have stolen into space, crossing the altitude line of 50 miles which was originally considered to be the border between the land and the extraterrestrial. (In the 1960s, the bar was raised a little, 100 km or 62 miles, establishing the so-called Kármán line, after the Hungarian physicist and engineer and engineer of Theodore von Kármán.) Bleue origin has so far reached 58 people.
But this most recent flight, said the company, was special – thanks to the composition of the crew. Aboard the new Spatial Shepard spacecraft, six people, including Pop Star Katy Perry; Gayle King television personality; Journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is also engaged to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin; Kerianne Flynn filmmaker; Bioastronautical researcher and defender of survivors of sexual violence – and a woman of the year of the year – Amanda Nguyen; And the former scientist of NASA rockets and CEO of the Stemboard engineering firm Aisha Bowe.
Female astronauts have become common enough for the fact that the crew is entirely made up of women did not immediately cause sensation. But the fact was that it was the first time that the Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union flew away to orbit alone aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft in 1963 that no man was on board a crew ship.
“These women are so durable … They have incredible life stories, all they have accomplished,” said King on the morning of CBS. “It was never my dream. It was never my dream. And someone said,” Maybe you need to have new, gayle dreams. “”
“If you had told me that I would be part of the very first entirely female team in space, I would have believed you,” published Perry on Facebook. “Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. I can show all the youngest and most vulnerable among us to reach the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honored to be among this diversified group of celestial sisters. ”
In an e-mail explosion inviting journalists to cover the launch, Blue Origin referred to the “epic team” of the mission.
But was it really a news-or was there at least a puff of condescension to make stories that a group of women flies without a man to keep them in company? Tereshkova’s theft was 62 years ago. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space 42 years ago. Eileen Collins became the first woman commander of the shuttle 26 years ago. Peggy Whitson became the first female commander of the International Space Station (ISS) 18 years ago. As for the NASA current record holder for the most cumulative time in space? Whitson again, at 675 days.
In 2019, NASA did a lot of hay when astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch interpreted the first fully female Spacewalk and then the idea of marking these moments began to seem old.
“Oh, I could tell you stories of the revolted days of the original ideas of male engineers on clothing and hygiene products for women astronauts,” wrote the astronaut of shuttle Marsha Ivins five times for time in 2019. “[B]Ut we were talking at the end of the 1970s, in the early 1980s. When I stole in space in the 90s, these things had changed; They had evolved, emerged, progressed and was hosted. At that time, a crew member was just a crew member. The same goes for today … not a big problem. So why the insistence continues on manufacturing Is that a big problem?
Ivins felt about the same thing about the Blue Origin flight. “It was in the mid-1990s … that someone offered the media to pilot an All Women shuttle flight,” she wrote in an email in Time. “He was floated for the women from the office and we all said:” Oh hell no! ” Personally, I found the whole insulting concept.
It is not that career astronauts see no merit in Blue Origin flights. “Spatial tourist flights like Blue Origin’s new shepard are positive in many ways,” writes the retired astronaut and the former commander of the ISS Terry Virts in an email. “They support the booming commercial space industry, and they allow more humans to see our beautiful planet in space and feel an incredible feeling of weightlessness.”
Key names here are “tourists” and “humans”, not “men” or “women” or, significantly, “astronauts”. Passengers aboard a new Shepard ship pay for the privilege of flying, and although Blue Origin is not public with what a ticket costs, the company requires that a repayable deposit of $ 150,000 accompanies an initial request to go in the air.
All the same, it takes at least a little courage and a little grain to make a new SHEPARD flight. The rocket reaches a speed of more than 2200 MPH, or almost Mach 3, climbing, plunges into the atmosphere like a cannonball after a few minutes of weightlessness, and depends on a parachute to bring the passengers to the house safely – not the type of chance that each traveler would like to take. But this risk also applies to all – with the physics of the flight not giving a fig to which is in the seat.
“The fact that this is an entirely female team is fundamentally out of words,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and the former director of the School Space Policy Institute before the launch. “Women are just as capable as men, and in fact there is very little piloting. I see this as a way to attract future affairs towards what is essentially adventure trips. ”
If there is an example of spatial diversity which justifies the celebration, it is in the upcoming plans for the astronauts of Artemis de la Nasa to return to the moon. Artemis II, scheduled for a Translunar mission at the end of 2026, includes crew members Christina Koch and Victor Glover, who will become the first woman and the first black person to make a lunar trip. Apollo’s Moon missions were undoubtedly the greatest exercises to explore human history and women and people of color were entirely excluded. It is a real harm that the nation maintains on the right – well it should.
