Friday, October 09, 2009

Why It Wasn’t a Small Step for Women

With the focus on the moon today, here is an interesting post explaining why men and not women were first on the moon:
Women are lighter and thus cost less than men to transport to space, they’re less prone to heart attacks, and they do better in isolation tests, reasoned Randy Lovelace when he founded the Women In Space Earliest program in 1959 to test women for their “qualifications as astronauts,” as this Wired article reports. Female astronaut candidates in the program outscored men in several areas, including sensory deprivation tests, where women beat what was once thought of as the six-hour limit of tolerance by four hours. So why were there no females on Apollo 11? NASA officials were concerned, among other things, about women’s inexperience flying experimental military aircraft (due to being barred from the Air Force) and also about menstruation.

1 comment:

thinking said...

The answer is simple: because of long seated sexism against women.

Society evolved with a bias against women; overcoming that is still one of our greatest challenges.

If we can truly allow equal opportunity for women the world over, that will so increase the realization of the potential of the human race.