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 | 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.
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
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