"empowering women by sending katy perry to space for 2 minutes" shut the fuck up. samantha cristoforetti was the first female commander of the international space station and she became an astronaut because of star trek. and there is a real chance she is a kirk/spock shipper
Let's try Christa McAuliffe.
McAuliffe did not survive to leave the atmosphere. She died in the Challenger explosion.
But she was a schoolteacher. An average, everyday woman who didn't buy her way aboard the space shuttle, but earned it. She planned to teach the first two school lessons from space. Millions of schoolchildren watched the launch live. My sister was one of them. If "where were you when Kennedy was shot" is the question for Boomers, and "where were you when you got the news on 9/11" is the question for Millennials, "where were you when Challenger exploded" is the question for Gen X.
McAuliffe was so beloved that her death basically ended the space craze in media at the time. I did a backward media trace of her death to see if it lined up with entertainment media reactions to 9/11, and the answer was: yes. Within two years of Challenger--I gave that much lead time for movies already in production when Challenger launched--space was gone from cartoons and movies. Basically nothing space went into production after her death, several space-themed shows were canceled, and the whole industry took a hard swerve into the buddy-cop genre.
Christa McAuliffe inspired a generation, and a nation grieved her when she was gone. For 73 seconds, she almost touched the stars, and America loved her for it.
FUCK miss yellowface rich girl.
Her name was Christa McAuliffe, and she empowered girls and women everywhere to dream that the ordinary could become extraordinary, too.
Don't forget Sally Ride, the first US American woman in space.
NASA Astronaut / First American Woman in Space
In a space agency filled with trailblazers, Sally Ride was a pioneer of a different sort. The soft-spoken California physicist broke the gender barrier on June 18, 1983, when she became the first American woman in space.
Sally Rideβs place in history was assured on June 18, 1983, when she rocketed into space on Challengerβs STS-7 mission with four male crewmates. Her contribution to Americaβs space program continued right up until her death.
Ride joined NASA as part of the 1978 astronaut class, the first to include women. She and five other women, along with 29 men, were selected out of 8,000 applicants. The class became known as the βThirty-Five New Guysβ and reported to the Johnson Space Center the next summer to begin training.
Ride trained for five years before she and three of her classmates were assigned to STS-7. The six-day mission deployed two communications satellites and performed a number of science experiments.
Amen v'amen.
And for that matter, how about real-life Barbie: Mae Jemison? Medical doctor, teacher, ballerina, astronaut, and author....
And also she was the first Black woman in space and one of the first Black students at Stanford University, entering it in 1973 at the age of 16.
Meanwhile Katy Perry *checks notes* wrote a song comparing Black men to aliens and suggesting they were rapists.
Hm.
Also, bringing this full-kirkle, Doctor Jemison was on Star Trek!
Thanks to Levar Burton, she was the firstβever (but not the last) astronaut to appear in it. Nichelle Nichols (her inspiration!) visited her on-set.
Adding Barbara Morgan to this thread:
Barbara Morgan β a schoolteacher and Christa McCauliffeβs backup on the Challenger mission β went through the same training as Christa and became very close with the other crew members. Iβm going to name them: Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair, El Onizuka, Greg Jarvis. When the Challenger went up, Babara watched from the roof of a NASA building and cheered her friends on, famously shouting βBye Christa! Bye Crew!β
After the disaster, Barbara had to grapple with the grief of losing seven friends and supporting the spouses of the crew members. NASA shut down the civilian in space program and Barbara went back to teaching.
But Barbaraβs dreams of being an astronaut werenβt dashed. 12 years after the Challenger Disaster, Barbara was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA and trained full time for the next two years. After more delays because of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, Barbara went to space on STS 118 with Endeavor, honoring the Christa McCauliffe and the Challenger crew, and completing Christaβs original mission of teaching from space via video feed.
After completing her mission and honoring her friends, Barbara left the space program went back to teaching.
Barbaraβs determination is the βgirl powerβ I want to see more of.
The first six women chosen for human spaceflight in the United States were: Sally Ride, discussed above who was also our first queer person in space, even if she was closeted and we didn't find out until we read the obituary her partner Tam wrote for us all. They were together for 27 years until Sally died. Rhea Seddon, who was a general surgeon and joined the astronaut corps specifically because she had skillsets that would lead to life-sciences missions being flown on the space shuttle (she traveled on STS-40 with thousands of baby jellyfish whose descendants still live on today) Judith Reznik, who was the first Jewish person ever to fly in space. She was a crew member of Christa McAuliffe and died in the loss of STS-51-L (the loss of the Challenger). Kathryn Sullivan, who was the first American woman to do an extravehicular activity and was so talented at that that when they put the best of the best crew together to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, she was on it. Anna Fisher, a chemist and surgeon, who was the first mom who flew to space, showing that female astronauts CAN and DO have the capability to have a spaceflight career and a family. Shannon Lucid, a biochemist and doctor who stayed in the space program so long that she was one of the first Americans to do long-term spaceflight studies on the space station Mir in the late 90s.
Other notable woman astronauts that have not yet been mentioned include women like Roberta Bondar, Kalpana Chawla, Kathryn Thornton, Eileen Collins, Pam Melroy, Laurel Clark, Cady Coleman and all the others who are in the space program RIGHT NOW.
These are the trailblazing women. Katy Perry can suck a fucking egg.
