Ad Astra: The Space Explorers 🔭 🚀
FemWealth Issue #17
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
The stars don't look bigger, but they do look brighter. - Sally Ride
We are living in exciting times for space exploration. The ‘ultimate frontier’ for humanity is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. With both public and private organizations are financing space technologies, major breakthroughs are envisioned.
During the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, women astronauts were long excluded and they ramained a minority in space exploration. Since Valentina Tereshkova's, Svetlana Savitskaya's, and Sally Ride's first space flights, women astronauts had significant achievements. But stills, as of March 2021, only 65 women compared to more than 500 men flew to space.
The good news is that more recent astronaut classes and programs have a more balanced gender ratio. (NASA's classes had almost equal numbers of women and men since 2013). The United Arab Emirates has recently selected the first woman for astronaut training. The European Space Agency currently selects their next astronauts and para-astronauts (the number of female candidates has increased, but they still represent only 24% from the total number of candidates).
One of the most exciting space programs, NASA's Artemis (Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology), plans to send the first woman to the Moon and establish a lunar station. Nine women from a total of 18 astronauts are part of the team.
Commercial space flight programs (financed mostly by male billionaires) include women among the first crewed missions out of Earth's atmosphere:
Virgin Galactic's flight programmed for July 11 will have Sirisha Bandla and Beth Moses on board;
Blue Origin's flight on July 20 will include the legendary Wally Funk, one of the "Mercury 13" pilots who fought to open NASA's early astronaut program to women. Now aged 82, Funk was one of 13 women to graduate from the privately funded Women in Space Program but was never able to go to space;
SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission - the world's first all-civilian rocket ride to orbit Earth in September - will include Hayley Arceneaux (a 29-year-old childhood cancer survivor and physician assistant, who will be the youngest American to fly into space and the first with a prosthetic body part), and Dr. Sian Proctor (a geoscientist, science communication specialist, and analog astronaut).
In today's edition of FemWealth, get inspiration from some of the pioneers of space exploration:
Valentina Tereshkova, First Woman to go to space
Hey sky, take off your hat, I'm on my way! [prior to liftoff]
Of course, it’s a dream to go to Mars and find out whether there was life there or not. If there was, then why did it die out? What sort of catastrophe happened?
On 16 June 1963, Valentina Tereshokova became the first and youngest woman to have ever flown in space. Aged 26 at the time, she was aboard Vostok 6 on a solo mission, orbiting the Earth 48 times and spending almost three days in space. She remains the only woman to have been on a solo space mission.
During her time in orbit, she conducted biomedical and science experiments to learn about the effects of space on the human body, took photographs that helped identify aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere, and manually piloted the spaceship.
An experienced amateur parachutist, Tereshkova was one of four females selected for a women-in space program at the Soviet Cosmonaut Corps. She was the only one from her group to ever fly in space. After her flight on Vostok 6, Valentina Tereshkova retired from the program. She went on to study at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, graduating with distinction as a Cosmonaut engineer and earning a Doctorate in Engineering.
She is currently a Deputy of the Russian State Duma.
Peggy Whitson, Retired NASA astronaut, first female ISS Commander and the first female, nonmilitary Chief of the Astronaut Office
We want people to continue learning new things about what space does to the human body. It's important for us to understand that and make sure when we get ready to fly to Mars that we are ready for what we're going to be exposed to.
Whitson's impressive career as an astronaut and scientist includes many firsts. She served as the first science officer aboard the International Space Station, the first female commander of the space station, and the first woman to be station commander on two different missions.
Having spent 665 days in space aboard the ISS in three long-hauls between 2002 and 2008, Whitson holds the U.S. record, placing eighth on the all-time space endurance list. She holds the record for the most spacewalk time for female space travelers and has tied the record for the most spacewalks for any U.S. astronaut.
She also is the only woman to serve as chief of the astronaut office.
Before being selected as an astronaut candidate, she worked as a scientist at the NASA Johnson Center. It took her ten years of applications before starting her NASA astronaut training. With a bachelor of science in biology/chemistry from Iowa Wesleyan College and a doctorate in biochemistry from Rice University, Whitson completed the Genes in Space-3 experiment, the first-ever sample-to-sequence process entirely aboard the ISS, making it possible to identify microbes in real-time without having to send samples back to Earth, a revolutionary step for microbiology and space exploration. She contributed to hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science, and Earth science.
She retired from NASA in 2018, but she is not done with space exploration. She will return to space to command a commercial mission for Texas-based Axiom Space.
Katheleen ‘Kate’ Rubins, NASA Astronaut, Artemis team member, first person to sequence DNA in space
There's a world of insights to be gained into human health and disease by understanding how gravity and space radiation influence biology.
Selected by NASA in 2009, Dr. Rubins completed her first spaceflight on Expedition 48/49. She became the first person to successfully sequence DNA in microgravity as part of the Biomolecule Sequencer experiment in 2016. She also grew heart cells (cardiomyocytes) in cell culture, and performed quantitative, real-time PCR and microbiome experiments in orbit.
During Expeditions 63 and 64, from October 2020 to April 2021, Dr. Rubins spent hundreds of hours working on new space station experiments, building on investigations she conducted during her first mission. These include heart research, multiple microbiology studies, and advancing her work in DNA sequencing, which could allow astronauts to diagnose an illness in space or identify microbes growing at the space station. She worked on the Cardinal Heart experiment, studying how changes in gravity affect cardiovascular cells at the cellular and tissue levels. During her two spaceflight missions, she has logged in a total of 300 days in space and conducted four spacewalks.
Dr. Rubin holds a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California and a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University Medical School Biochemistry Department and Microbiology and Immunology Department. She conducted her undergraduate research on HIV-1 integration in the Infectious Diseases Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Before joining NASA, Dr. Rubins worked as a Fellow/Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, heading a team of researchers studying viral diseases that primarily affect Central and West Africa.
Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of Space X
People's minds are probably exploding hearing me talk about settling on Mars, but that is just the first step. The next step is to go further so that we can figure out how ‘in the universe’ did we actually get here.
At Space X, Gwynne Shotwell is a “people engineer” responsible for day-to-day operations (hiring, financing, government affairs) and managing all customer and strategic relations. She joined SpaceX in 2002 as employee number eleven, taking over the role of vice president of business development. She earned a reputation as the person who can translate Elon Musk's visions into reality.
Under her leadership, Space X has gained strategic contracts from NASA, the US Department of Defense, and other important clients. The company has also successfully shifted its focus towards the reusability of spacecraft, with Shotwell overseeing the first landing of an orbital rocket's first stage on land and an ocean platform, the first relaunch and landing of a used orbital rocket, the first controlled flyback, and recovery of a payload fairing, and the first re-flight of a commercial cargo spacecraft. In May 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight sending astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time as part of a contract with NASA.
Before joining SpaceX, Shotwell spent more than a decade in the aerospace industry. She received, with honors, her bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern University in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics.
She has been awarded the World Technology Award for Individual Achievement in Space, inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and elected Fellow with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Shotwell is 49th on Forbes' most powerful woman in the world and one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
🎥 Gwynne Shotwell — Launching Our Future
Space Explorers and Scientists to Follow:
Pam Melroy -NASA Deputy Administrator
Anna Lee Fisher - Chemist, medical doctor and NASA astronaut, the first mother to go to space
Nicole Mann - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member, training for the crew flight test of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft
Kayla Barron - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member
Jessica Meir - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member, participated in the first all-female spacewalk
Jessica Watkins - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member
Christina Koch - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member, participated in the first all-female spacewalk, spent 328 consecutive days in microgravity in 2019 and 2020, setting the record for the longest duration in space for a woman during a single mission
Stephanie Wilson - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member
Anne McClain - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member
Jasmin Moghbeli - NASA astronaut, Artemis team member,
Megan McArthur - NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-2 Pilot
Sunita Williams - NASA astronaut
Serena Auñón-Chancellor - NASA Astronaut
Samantha Cristoforetti - Italian ESA Astronaut
Jenni Sidey-Gibbons - Canadian Astronaut
Anna Kikina - Russia’s only current female cosmonaut
Nora Al Matrooshi - the first Female Arab Astronaut in training
Anousheh Ansari - CEO of XPrize, first female space tourist and irst Iranian in space.
Alyssa Carson - world’s youngest in training astronaut
Barbara Belvisi - Founder and CEO of Interstellar Lab
Amaya Moro-Martin - Assistant Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, MD, US
Dr. Eleni Antoniadou - multidisciplinary researcher in Regenerative Medicine, Bioastronautics, and Artificial Intelligence(AI) research.
Women Who Made History in Astronomy & Space Exploration
Hypatia (c. 355 CE— 415, Alexandria) - mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848) - the first paid female astronomer in history and the first woman to discover a comet
Katherine Johnson - mathematician who performed calculations that led to the Moon landing
Vera Rubin(1928–2016) - pioneering astronomer whose groundbreaking work confirmed the existence of dark matter and demonstrated that galaxies are embedded in dark-matter halos
Vera Rubin, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
Andrea Ghez - astophysiscist, 2020 Nobel Prize laureate in physics
Svetlana Savitskaya (1948 - ) - aviator and astronaut, the second woman in space and the first female to perform a spacewalk; she earned 23 world records for aircraft speed, 3 records for parachuting, and qualified to fly 20 types of aircraft
Sally Ride (1951 - 2012) - first American woman in space, the first person to use the robotic arm to retrieve a satellite, and the first woman to use the arm in space
First female astronaut candidates named by NASA in 1978: Rhea Seddon, Anna L. Fisher, Judith A. Resnik, Shannon W. Lucid, Sally K. Ride and Kathryn D. Sullivan
Mae Jemison - American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut; first African -American Woman to Travel to Space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour; she appeared as a guest on Star Trek: The Next Generation
Chiaki Mukai - first Japanese woman in space, the first Japanese citizen to have two spaceflights, and the first Asian woman in space
Ellen Ochoa - American engineer, former astronaut and former Director of the Johnson Space Center, first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery
Eileen Collins - First Female Space Shuttle Pilot and Commander
Kathryn D. Sullivan - geologist and a former NASA astronaut; crew member on three Space Shuttle missions, the first American woman to walk in space (1984), the first woman to dive to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (2020)
Barbara Morgan - first American Teacher in Space
Helen Sharman - the first European woman in space in 1991
Claudie Haigneré - first French woman in space in 1993 and ESA’s first female astronaut in 2001
Liu Yang - first Chinese woman astronaut to fly to space
Wang Yaping - China's first teacher in space
See a List of female spacefarers [Wikipedia]
FemWealth Curated Resources 🔭
🎥 Sally Ride: Breaking the Highest Glass Ceiling
🎥 History in Five: Sally Ride, America's First Woman in Space
🎥 6 Months in Space | Samantha Cristoforetti'
🎥 HOW IT WORKS: The International Space Station
📚 Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt
📖 She Couldn’t Go to Space Because She Was a Woman. But She Hasn’t Given Up On Her Dream
📚 The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Martha Ackmann
🎥 Mercury 13 Netflix documentary
📚 Wally Funk’s Race for Space by Sue Nelson
📖 A forgotten moment in physiology: the Lovelace Woman in Space Program
📖 New NASA radiation rules could open up space missions to more women
Who are the space explorers and innovators who inspire you? Do you know any young girls who dream of becoming astronauts, space scientists or engineers? Please send them this newsletter.
Thank you for reading FemWealth!
Until next week!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer @FemWealth