In 1959, when General Donald Flickinger and Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II were working for NASA, they came up with a rather controversial hypothesis: from an engineering point of view, it would be more practical to send women into space rather than men. However, at the time, this solution seemed completely unfeasible: the very idea that a woman could leave her home, family, and husband to go on a space flight was simply insane. Not only that: President Dwight D. Eisenhower implemented a policy whereby NASA could only recruit astronauts from military fighter test pilots. And at that time, women were deprived of this role. But what happened to the two scientists’ study?
When the Air Force decided not to proceed with the project, Lovelace took over the leadership of the Woman in Space program and began medical and physiological testing on a number of female airmen at the Lovelace Medical Clinic in Albuquerque. The tests were identical to those used to test NASA astronauts, with the addition of gynecological exams. 68 percent of the participants in the Women in Space program passed the astronaut tests, while only 56 percent of men normally passed them. And then, a portion of these female pilots were further tested with a series of psychological tests similar to, or in some cases more demanding than, those given to male candidates.. As a result, women, from some points of view, due to their physical physique, could better resist life in space: they are usually smaller and lighter, so they consume less fuel and supplies, from an immune point of view they respond better to weightlessness and radiation.
Thus, the results of Flickinger and Lovelace’s studies were promising, but despite this, they were interrupted, and the Woman in Space program was disbanded in 1962. This area of research is still underexplored, given that only 11% of the people who have been in space to date have been women.. In 2014, the space agency published an extensive report based on decades of data: “It’s only recently that we have more women on missions, so conclusions about gender differences are still preliminary,” says Virginia Watring of the Center for Space Medicine. Baylor College of Medicine. Men, for example, suffer less from motion sickness, but tend to suffer from hearing loss earlier. Women seem to have more urinary tract infections, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude life in space. Understanding how different bodies react in space will require further research related to gender medicine, but decades after Flickinger and Lovelace’s research, it’s no longer possible to ignore that equality, even in the aerospace sector, is a benefit that shouldn’t be more important. underrated.
Source: Elle