This text was initially revealed at The Dialog. The publication contributed the article to House.com’s Skilled Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Jasleen Chana is a PhD candidate at UCL within the division of Science and Know-how Research.
For the primary time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963, a spacecraft will fly with solely ladies aboard. Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight crew, which incorporates pop star Katy Perry, is ready to take off this spring.
Jeff Bezos’ crew is assembled from profitable and well-known ladies, additionally together with tv presenter Gayle King, producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and journalist Lauren Sanchez. Promotional materials for the flight claims that Perry “hopes her journey encourages her daughter and others to succeed in for the stars, actually and figuratively.”
The glamorous optics of this spaceflight are supposedly designed to encourage ladies to attempt for his or her goals. The shiny narrative tells others that they are often similar to these extraordinary ladies. But, behind this aspirational preferrred, there’s a extra problematic story concerning profitable ladies in science and their roles in public.
My PhD analysis examines memoirs written by ladies astronauts. They assemble interesting depictions of ladies who’re profitable and distinctive. However in follow, their success tales are nigh on unimaginable for bizarre ladies to emulate.
Associated: Meet the crew for Blue Origin’s upcoming all-female spaceflight with Katy Perry
That is epitomized in astronaut Catherine Coleman’s response to sporting a spacesuit designed for males. In her 2024 memoir, she wrote: “More often than not, I took the method that if the swimsuit didn’t match, I might merely put on it anyway — and put on it effectively. Put on it higher than anybody anticipated.”
As this quote reveals, ladies who’ve travelled to area are inclined to assemble themselves as having labored exceptionally arduous to disclaim the norms of what’s anticipated of them and to offset systemic biases.
From the outset of her memoir, Coleman emphasizes that she’s all the time needed to be an “exception” from the remainder of humanity, which feels alienating. However she additionally persistently means that her life was destined to be this fashion. “House felt like dwelling to me,” she says, tacitly acknowledging that she was all the time meant to be there.
Mae Jemison, who was the primary African American girl in area, additionally expresses this sense of future in her 2001 memoir. “I perched quietly, looking of the home windows on the flight deck,” she writes. “Unusual, however I all the time knew I’d be right here. Trying down and throughout me, seeing the Earth, the moon, and the celebs, I simply felt like I belonged.”
The crew set to board the Blue Origin flight wish to be storytellers in the identical method that girls astronauts are of their memoirs. However the well-known members of its crew are a reminder that tough work is barely a part of this explicit story — fortune and privilege additionally play a component.
Eileen Collins was the primary girl to pilot and command a area shuttle. In her 2021 memoir, she particulars the pressures and expectations of working in a male-dominated area. She discovered that it exacerbated already tough decision-making and the necessity to carry out vital actions accurately.
When she says “present and future ladies pilots are relying on me to do an ideal job up right here,” she exemplifies the tough scrutiny that girls astronauts are sometimes topic to when they’re the primary of their gender.
Behind the duvet
The problem with well-liked scientific memoirs is that they’re persistently marketed as sincere and truthful works. These books promise to disclose who the astronaut really is, however they’re, the truth is, rigorously curated photographs of the ladies they painting.
So, whereas they intend to inspire and encourage others, the memoirs don’t all the time accomplish that in a very sincere method. This attracts a parallel with the Blue Origin flight.
Many of those narratives search to rewrite previous stereotypes of scientists whereas additionally functioning as a response to the up to date urge for food for memoirs that reveal the inside emotional world of their topics. For instance, Kathryn Sullivan discusses “wrestling” with visceral “pangs” of ache at being unable to launch her mission as a result of technical points.
This idea displays why there’s a fevered public expectation that the Blue Origin flight crew will embark on a perspective-shifting journey and expertise “deep feelings from area”.
Whereas present protection surrounding the launch frames it as a celebration of collective development, the folks comprising this spaceflight crew don’t mirror most girls.
If the Blue Origin mission is to be a lodestar for a common feminist narrative, utilizing ladies’s spaceflight as a measure of progress, then it must also be thought-about in tandem with the incongruities and uniqueness of ladies’s experiences. In the end, it is very important transfer away from narratives that inform us that science, spaceflight and success are solely synonymous with fame and exceptionalism.
