North America | United States | Adventure

The women of NASA are looking to the lunar horizon

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Growing up, Holly Ridings, Anne McClain and Nujoud Merancy dreamed of space. But they didn't let those dreams rest to become flights of childhood fancy. Now, all three women work at NASA. McClain is an astronaut who just returned from a six-month stint on the International Space Station. Merancy is the Exploration Mission Planning and Analysis lead for the Orion spacecraft that will be part of the Artemis mission in 2024. And Ridings is the first female chief flight director. And they're all working toward the goal of landing the first woman on the moon by 2024.
Asia | Kyrgyzstan | Career

Kyrgyzstan’s space women blast off from male dominance

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Having grown up in one of the poorest and most conservative regions in Kyrgyzstan, 17-year-old Begaiym Isaakova never imagined she would work in tech, let alone be part of a team of young women building the country's first spacecraft. By age 15, Isaakova was shocked to see her peers in Jalal-Abad being married off, but not too surprised. The message that girls should prioritise knowing how to serve men started early and was everywhere, including in schools and homes. Instead of being sent down the aisle in a country where early and forced marriage - including by bride kidnap - is common
North America | United States | History

The black women who did NASA’s math used to be hidden. Now the street in front of its headquarters is named for them

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For decades, the contributions of the black, female mathematicians who helped get NASA astronauts into space stayed essentially hidden. Not anymore. Now, you'll be reminded of what the women did even before you pull into NASA headquarters. That's because the street on which the building sits has been renamed Hidden Figures Way. The new name honors the work of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the so-called "human computers" who did the complex calculations that made space travel possible.
North America | United States | Science

The First All-Female Spacewalk Has Just Been Scheduled by NASA

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It is a big step for women. If all goes according to plan, on March 29, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to conduct the first all-female spacewalk. Anne McClain and Christina Koch will venture out together about 240 miles (400 kilometres) above Earth and make history. Adding to the significance of their mission, the spacewalk will take place during Women's History Month.
North America | United States | History

Meet The ‘Rocket Girls,’ The Women Who Charted The Course To Space

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In the 1940s, an elite team of mathematicians and scientists started working on a project that would carry the U.S. into space, then on to the moon and Mars. They would eventually become NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or JPL), but here's what made them so unusual: Many of the people who charted the course to space exploration were women. Nathalia Holt tells their story in her new book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Holt tells NPR's Ari Shapiro that the women worked as "computers."
North America | United States | Space

Boldly Going Where Few Have Gone Before: Meet Space Gynecologist Dr. Varsha Jain

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Once upon a time, not so long ago, people feared that if a woman went into space while on her period, the blood would reverse its flow into her body -- also known as retrograde menstruation -- causing pain and possible death. This was one of many false notions that kept women from being included on space missions because back in those dark ages even the world's brightest operated under socio-cultural misperceptions surrounding the still-taboo subject of a woman's "time of the month." It's been more than three decades since the first American woman went where none had gone before, and times hav
North America | United States | Science

Former NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

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Physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson, a former NASA “computer” who calculated by hand the flight trajectories for Alan Shepard’s historic first American flight to space, John Glenn’s first American orbit around the Earth, and the Apollo 11 moon shot, is one of 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom this year. President Obama awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor to her in person in a ceremony held at the White House on Nov. 24. “Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson's computations have influenced eve
Europe | Russia | Space

Russian women together for eight days emerge from space test, missed family more than showering

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An eight-day experiment imitating a space trip to the Moon, dubbed Luna-2015, has finished for the all-female Russian crew. The six women, who were locked inside simulated spacecraft. This marks the first time that the crew is all-female, and at least one of the experiment’s participants hopes to become a real cosmonaut in the future. "Of course I want to go into space. This has been a priceless experience in the isolation that comes with space flight," Inna Novinova told journalists. The crew were banned from taking their cell phones with them, and stayed in touch only with the med
Europe | Russia | Science

All-female Russian crew starts Moon mission test

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Six Russian women on Wednesday clambered into a mock spaceship to begin a unique experiment testing how an all-female crew would interact on a trip to the Moon and back. For eight days, the female volunteers will live inside a wood-panelled suite of rooms at Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems, renowned for its wacky research into the psychological and physical effects of space travel. The institute in 2010 locked six male international volunteers in an isolation experiment lasting 520 days, to simulate a flight to Mars and back. "Such a crew is taking part for the first time in
North America | United States | Science

Meet the first woman of color to go to space

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Exactly 23 years ago, on Sept. 12, 1992, Mae C. Jemison boarded the Endeavor shuttle and shot into space, becoming the first woman of color to make the trip. But NASA astronaut is only one of the many titles Jemison has held in her long and impressive career. She’s also been, in no particular order, a physician, a Peace Corps medical officer, an entrepreneur and an environmental studies professor. These days, her main gig is leading 100 Year Starship—a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA-seeded initiative to enable humans to travel to another star by 2112.
Europe | Russia | Science

World’s first female cosmonaut to tell London audiences about future of space flights

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World’s first woman cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova is expected to tell the visitors to Science Museum in London on Thursday about the future of space flights in Russia. As of September 18, the museum hosts an exhibition ‘Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age’. "The space exhibition will serve, I hope, further development of good relations between our countries and will enable the spectators to see what the age of space flights began with in Russia," Tereshkova who has the rank of the Major-General, told reporters.
North America | United States | Science

Putting women at the controls at NASA

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For many women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, being the only person of their gender in a room full of colleagues is not a rare experience. But for Dan Hammer, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at NASA, the tables were turned when a visit to a meeting “to discuss the value of the Agency’s data holdings” provided his first-ever chance to see what it feels like to be “the only man in the room of powerful technologists,” he reports at open.NASA. “[T]he self-awareness associated with being the only man in the room changed the way I interacted with
North America | United States | Science

Women in Space: Dr. Anna Fisher, one of the ‘Original Six’

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SpaceFlight Insider and USA in Space recently had a chance to interview U.S. astronaut Dr. Anna Lee Tingle Fisher. In 1978, Dr. Fisher was in the first group of six women ever selected to be American astronauts. Prior to 1978, women were not allowed into NASA’s Astronaut Training Program. In fact, the only woman to have gone into space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who went into space in 1963. Dr. Fisher was selected for NASA’s Space Shuttle program. She was one of six women in a group of 35, known as NASA’s Astronaut Group 8. It had been almost 10 years since the Apollo