NASA and JSC, you’re disappointing me

I spent yesterday wandering around the Space Centre Museum at Johnson Space Centre. There were lots of things to do and see… but at the same time, it was sorely lacking.

There is one small area wherein they detailed the various incarnations of spacesuits/constant wear suits/etc. There were bios of a lot of astronauts as well. There were probably 15 displays, and there were two that mentioned women – one that talked about women in space, in a general way, and listed the first 6 American women who went into space. There was one display devoted to the outfit of the first American woman. Everything else was about male astronauts, with a couple of displays only on the suits themselves (with no mention of gender of the wearer).

I did appreciate the film “To Be An Astronaut” was narrated about 50% by a woman.

But… looking in from the outside, it still looks like a man’s world. When the staff spoke about the generic “astronaut” they used male pronouns. As I mentioned before, most displays about astronauts spoke specifically about men. NASA, what happened to the women? In your one display on women in space, you noted that you finally “broke the gender barrier” when you let Sally Ride up in 1983… but there was no obvious attempt in the rest of the museum to continue to break that gender barrier down (because it’s certainly not gone – the crew of STS-123 is composed of 6 old white guys, and a Japanese man).

The other big thing I noticed, which grates on me, was a sort of continuation on the vibe I got from Mike Griffin’s talk to the LPSC on Monday.

I can count on one hand the number of places or times a country other than the USA was mentioned.

On the tour of the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, we saw mockups of the different modules of the ISS. Mostly, they pointed out the US modules, though there was mention of the Japanese modules because those are a “current event” so to speak.

There was a robotic arm that the astronauts use to train with – practice moving things and learning to operate the arm. The robotic arms in use on the space shuttle and the ISS are all made by Canada. As far as I knew, they also all had the logo of the Canadian government on them. Not so much with this one – this one had several NASA logos on it, but no mention of Canada. The only way to know it wasn’t made and designed here was if you listened to the recording played for the tour – the astronauts spend 2-3 weeks in Canada training with the arm there. If you didn’t know the arms were made there, you might be confused as to why they have to train there as well as here in Houston.

NASA, space is not an American frontier. Space is about international collaboration. The Apollo missions might have been American, but space as we experience it today is very international. The US is not the big kid on the block anymore – you need to start acknowledging the contributions made by JAXA, ESA and the CSA. We, your international partners, should not be an after-thought, a “oh, and this is a bit that we let them do.”

NASA and JSC, you’re failing to inspire this young, non-American woman.

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