Only 566 people have ever travelled to space.
Sixty-five of them, or about 11.5%, were women.
NASA recently proclaimed it will put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024.
Despite nearly 60 years of human spaceflight, women are still in the territory of firsts.
Her flight became Cold War propaganda to demonstrate the superiority of communism.
Women across the world took heart and dreamed they too might travel to space.
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I am eighty years old.
The Mercury 13 outperformed the men on many tests, particularly in how they handled isolation.
But NASA wasnt convinced.
A congressional hearing was held to investigate whether women should qualify to be astronauts.
I think it would be at least as important to let the women undergo this training for space flight.
Their names were Cynthia Myers, Angela Dorian, Reagan Wilson, and Leslie Bianchini.
The womens bodies werelikened to the lunar landscape: both the object of male conquest.
NASA was an advisor for the series, which mirrored real space events.
Jeannie representedseductive oriental femininityin opposition to the strait-laced, masculine, all-American astronauts.
Still image from the opening sequence of I Dream of Jeannie.
The message was clear in popular culture: women needed to stay in the kitchen or the boudoir.
These sitcoms are still aired around the world.
The first women were admitted to astronaut training in 1978.
Not to be outdone, the USSR rushed more women into its own program.
The first American woman to spacewalk was Kathryn Sullivan in 1995.
Here she looks toward Earth from the flight deck.
NASA
In the 21st century, there are still barriers to womens equal participation in space.
In March 2019 the first all-woman spacewalk was cancelled because there were not enough medium-sized spacesuits.
Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir subsequently accomplished the feat inOctober 2019.
Discussing the cancellation, NASA administrator Ken Bowersox made flush the ideal astronaut body is still male.
What would space technology designed by and for women look like?
There is a massive gender data gap in space.
However, women in many ways areideal astronauts.
Physical strength and height are not advantages in microgravity.
Women use less food and oxygen, maintain their weight better on restricted diets, and create less waste.
In the words of Sally Ride, weightlessness is a great equalizer.
But there are signs of progress.
UNOOSA
NASAs plan to land a woman on the Moon is another positive sign.
To see a woman set foot on the lunar surface within her lifetime would truly be a ground-breaking moment.
