I heard the news that the first all-female space mission will launch this spring – and I was delighted. But digging down, it’s a case of hype over substance.
For decades, space exploration has been dominated by men. While women have made remarkable contributions – like the Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space in 1963, or Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, who completed NASA’s first all-female spacewalk in 2023 – the first ever all-female space voyage is due to happen this spring.
It certainly sounds like an important moment, historically, as a symbolic milestone well beyond the glass ceiling that would send a powerful message to women all over the world, ‘gender is no barrier to humanity’s most ambitious endeavours’.
The line-up of the space voyager women certainly looks impressive. It includes the multi-award-winning American popstar Katy Perry. She, having moved on from her Teenage Dream phase (2010; she was 25), released the single Woman’s World nine months ago its lyrics declaring:
Sexy, confident
So intelligent
She is heaven-sent
So soft, so strong
She’s a winner, champion
Superhuman, number one
She’s a sister, she’s a mother
Open your eyes, just look around and you’ll discover
You know
And who is set to accompany this sassy singer-songwriter? The other members of the crew include former Nasa scientist, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe; movie producer Kerianne Flynn Social entrepreneur and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen; US television personality, author and broadcast journalist Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez. The latter is a 55-year-old American Emmy Award-winning journalist, a licensed pilot and founder of a female-owned and operated aerial filming company, and – more recently – fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
These women are household names, entrepreneurs and astrophysicists, and they are now going to add ‘space traveller’ to their bulging list of achievements. Yes, they’re great role models for future generations. Their actions, fêted widely, will surely encourage more young women to feel comfortable in careers in STEM fields and more young girls to embrace the idea of science, astrophysics and space travel as something to strive towards.
Although all the branding for small children puts planets and rocket-ships squarely on blue plates, pencil cases and backpacks for boys, disappointingly, whilst unicorns and fairies frolic in flower gardens beneath magical castles on the pink shelves, there are already space-themed Barbies out there for the celestially-inclined.
Barbie has even been into space herself – firstly in an unpublicised five-day US Department of Defence mission with space shuttle engineer Steve Denison, for which she wore a ‘bespoke’ orange jumpsuit home-sewn by the wife of one of Denison’s fellow crew instructors. And just last year, there was an astronaut among Barbie‘s 65th anniversary collection, hot on the heels of the Barbie Space Discovery Space Station playset (2021) to which she showed up with a puppy.
Presumably the puppy wasn’t named Laika after the sacrificial Moscow stray (female) who was sent into space on the Sputnik2 in 1957, a mission from which the men on the ground knew she’d never return.
Laika may have perished, but she certainly stayed in space for longer than our all-female crew.
And that’s the rub. Our all-female celebrity crew are simply rich paying passengers on Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission this spring. Blue Origin is a tourist spaceship with a single ticket reportedly selling for at least $200,000, according to Forbes. The space experience, in which a rocket with no pilot launches from a launch site in the West Texas desert, takes the six people into space for a few minutes of weightlessness before they parachute down together 15 minutes later.
In the past, to head into space, you needed to be extremely fit and an enthusiastic scientist with years of research and technical expertise. That’s what I’d love to see in an all-female mission: women at the physical peak of Olympians boasting the brain power of Einstein rather than celebrity ambition and a glittery handbag bursting with dollars.
Beyond balancing decades of imbalance, there are also practical reasons why an all-female mission makes sense. Scientific studies suggest that women are probably better suited (and I don’t mean sartorially) for long-duration space travel. They generally have lower body mass, consume fewer resources like food and oxygen, and are more resistant to radiation exposure than men – key factors for deep space missions. A study by NASA even found that women are more efficient in confined environments, which could be critical for missions to Mars or beyond.
And so, while I am happy to see this all-female mission widely publicised and hope it will encourage young girls (and boys) to be curious about the universe, I’d actually prefer to celebrate when a genuinely exploratory journey into space is manned entirely by women, and when such a mission isn’t a cause for celebration, because it’s simply a matter of course.
