Lyceum & Book Club - Week 39 - Women in Space
- autumnbending
- Aug 22, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 3, 2022
Book Discussion: Packing for Mars
Read Articles:
Nasa - Eileen Collins
Eileen Collins - wiki
Air Force Times: Air Force Considers Expanding Pilot Height Requirements As It Seeks More Female Aviators
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/11/15/air-force-considers-expanding-pilot-height-requirements-as-it-seeks-more-female-aviators/ - 2019 - good info on why restrictions r in place
Air Force Times: To Get More Female Pilots, The Air Force is Changing the Way It Designs Weapons
military.com - Privacy Please- Air Force Wants to Add Toilet Curtain to B52 Bomber
Daily Mail - Air Force Plans to Add Privacy Curtains to B52 Bombers
Lecture: Intro Before Reading Riding Rockets
"Riding Rockets" can be considered as a diary of how one man experienced an age of transition along two pathways - one is the tale of the Space Program as it opens up its highly competitive ranks to women and two, the personal journey of Mr. Mullane as he wrestles with his core understanding of how relationships between men and women operate within the confines of our society and its institutions.
Mr. Mullane grew up in a time when relationships and gender hierarchy was still accepted that men were the superior gender and the world was set up to benefit them and women were expected to be grateful for being included on the periphery. And while the institutions stated that the safe guard for women lay in her supposed protected position as "wife" or "girlfriend" once a commitment was made with a male, the reality as we see in the book is that the men in the space program protected each other when they casually betrayed that supposed oath of loyalty to their committed partner - a space outside the institutional bounds that women were not allowed to have. When Mullane's eyes are gradually opened that the women in his life are also fully human with a full range of emotions and needs that correspond to his and might not be content with that truncated life, we see his struggle to find a space where he feels comfortable with his sense of self who still views himself as conservative, traditional male identity and yet recognize that his wife, mother and co-worker, Judy Resnik, as fully human.
The other struggle is with an agency that is set up as so highly competitive that it demands you give up your whole life to the one goal of maybe being assigned one mission in space, if you are lucky. It becomes like an addiction. You have a huge number of prospective candidates for only a very, very limited positions that occur at very few points in time. Everything you do is geared to winning one of those few coveted positions - your whole life is dedicated to that single pursuit - family - spouse, children, parents, other interests, friends - you have to be ready to drop all of it at a moment's notice if it means you might get a chance to move up a slot. And in the end, if you have devoted your whole life, all of your youth and best years to that one endeavor - and are not selected for any random reason beyond your control or just because someone else has pull - it can be an invitation to an emptiness of purpose and a life wasted.
And into this environment, you insert more players (anyone from the dominant population) that lessens the little opportunity you might have at those rare spots and you can find a lot of natural resentment. Who are you going to take that resentment out on? The players from the non-dominant sector of the population who have been given even less of an opportunity or the institutions that have created this situation?
Here is another tangle we see in the story. All of the reasons why women, in particular, were excluded from the space program (and the military route to the space program) turn out to be chimeric when faced with the politics of an agency and those who stand to lose their own positions (with all of the power and influence and money that goes with those positions) if they can not compete against other nations in the US public mind and ensure funding. NASA didn't suddenly realize that women were physically, mentally and emotionally equal to men if given the same training as men when it comes to operating in a space program. That was always the case. It was only when the heads of the program realized that by the early 80s, the world around them had changed to such an extent that they had better adjust real fast and include women in space.
It was not that the NASA powers that be were innovative in their actions, but rather the opposite - they were forced to change to survive. The positive side to that equation is that the military (and space program which was born from the waters in that same well) at the top of the decision making level will often come to a more pragmatic acceptance and pursuit of new dynamics than will the political sphere. And the lower rank and file (just as the rank and file white Southern population was in the process of accepting the new dynamics they were faced with after the Civil War before those who held power enabled the wealthy white Southern plantation owners to reestablish themselves with the same racist rules and hierarchy as before) adjust (even while they may grumble) to whatever new situation the leaders place them in. And you can see that acceptance in this story. It is not the high ranks, nor the lower ranks that are often the most resistant to change in relationship dynamics - it is that middle level who stand to lose the most by those societal changes. The changes don't affect the higher ups, their position is secure and the rank and file are starting out at the bottom where they don't have any coins dedicated to the old system, so they lose nothing by the new system.
Book To Read:
Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane - 2006 - 385 pgs - 3 weeks to read
Addition:
Carrying the Fire - Mike Collins
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