In the finest display of extraterrestrial girl power to date, four women astronauts are preparing to rendezvous in space nearly 50 years after the Soviet Union put the first woman into orbit.
The $100 billion (£66 billion) International Space Station (ISS) is to host the biggest non-Earth gathering of women, with one arriving on board a Russian Soyuz capsule yesterday and three more due to join her this week.
Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, 34, Stephanie Wilson, 43, and Naoko Yamazaki, 39, are set to launch aboard the shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 6.21am local time today and dock at the ISS on Wednesday, linking up with Tracy Caldwell Dyson, 40.
While their arrival will set a record for the most women in space, the historic nature of the occasion appears to have slipped under the radar at Nasa. “Maybe that’s a credit to the system, right, that I don’t think of it as male or female?” said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa’s associate administrator for space operations, who was unaware of the pending milestone until it was pointed out to him at a press conference.
“I just think of it as a talented group of people going to do their job in space,” he said.
Although 13 American women passed the same Nasa training tests in 1963 as the Mercury 7 — America’s original all-male astronaut team — the space agency refused to admit women to its astronaut ranks until 1978. Valentina Tereshkova was the first women in space in 1963, but it was not until 20 years later that Nasa followed with an American, Sally Ride.
Before Discovery’s launch a total of 52 women have flown in space. Ms Metcalf-Lindenburger and Ms Yamazaki, both rookies, will become the 53rd and 54th women to fly in space — and the 516th and 517th spacefarers overall.
“I’d love to have those numbers be higher, but I think that we have made a great start and have paved the way, with women now being able to perform the same duties as men in space flight,” said Ms Wilson. Men will still outnumber the women by more than 2-to-1 on board the shuttle and the ISS.
Discovery, whose crew also includes four men, will deliver ten tonnes of supplies to the ISS during its 13-day mission, including scientific equipment and experiments, food and clothing for the crew — who remain on board for up to six months at a time — and ammonia tanks for the orbiting laboratory’s air conditioning system.
It will be one of the shuttle fleet’s last voyages. Only three more are scheduled after this, during which construction of the ISS must be completed and spares vital to its long-term operations stockpiled on board. Once the fleet retires there will be no spacecraft capable of making bulky deliveries to the station — only Russian, European and Japanese transporters with less than half the shuttle’s cargo capacity.
Nasa is looking to commercial rocket developers to come up with new vehicles to keep the ISS supplied. “We need those folks as soon as they’re ready to fly,” Mr Gerstenmaier said.
A replacement manned space programme known as Constellation has been cancelled by President Obama, leaving Nasa’s aspirations for human space flight uncertain. The President will elaborate on his vision for American space exploration during an address to Nasa workers in Florida next week.
