It’s 2012, and Jill and I are living in Nashville. She’s finishing her second year in Vanderbilt’s MFA program for fiction, and I’m writing stories for magazines as a freelancer. Our basement apartment is spacious—two bedrooms, a dining room, ceramic tile floors, brown wood paneling—and furnished with mismatched thrift-store finds, like a wicker love seat, a square, squat, wooden coffee table, and accented with stacks upon stacks of books. I sit at my desk in our shared office as I await the HI-SEAS video interview, positioned at an odd angle so the surface behind me looks, rather than cluttered, interesting and eclectic, maybe even purposefully arranged.
Sleeping in adjacent rooms are 1) Tungsten, the talkative orange tabby I adore and 2) our sensitive yet endearing dachshund, Grace, who tends to bark at minor provocations. And for the past few days a robin has been cracking its beak into the glass of our back door. I hope none of them will be joining me on the call.
The Skype app chimes and I tap the keyboard. Accompanying Kim Binsted are a couple other people involved with HI-SEAS, and, I find out later, a NASA employee whose actual job was to help select actual NASA astronauts. There are bandwidth issues, Binsted says, so they can see me, but I can’t see them. Just relax, I tell myself. Just be yourself.
Questions they ask include: Why do you want to do this? What do your friends and family think of you wanting to do this? Tell us which foods you’ll miss. Tell us about a time you were in a harrowing situation or in physical danger and how you dealt with it.
I tell them I want to do this because I presume NASA wouldn’t choose me as an actual astronaut at this point since I might be too old or too long out of science, but I’d like to help the cause anyway, to donate my data.
I say my friends and family, including Jill, think pretending to be an astronaut for four months is strange, but no one’s surprised I want to do it. And as for the food I’d miss? I’d anticipated this question and decided to answer in a way that I hoped would make me seem fun. But it also could be a little risky. I say, “I’d miss beer.”
And then like a nerd I add: “I learned in my research on Mars analogs that during Kim Binsted’s own simulated mission in the Arctic, her crew brewed beer, and I’m interested in giving that a try, so if things go well I might not actually miss beer.”
Silence.
Then Binsted responds: “Unfortunately, alcohol won’t be allowed as part of the food study and besides, we’ll have CO2 sensors installed so we’ll know about your home brew.”
More silence.
“Well okay,” I say, “then I guess I’ll miss beer.”
They laugh and I laugh and I feel like I just won the lottery.
The question about a harrowing situation is difficult because I had none. Never even broken a bone. Later I learn of Oleg’s rafting near-disaster in the Alaskan outback. And about Crystal Haney, another finalist and later part of the backup crew, who lived with her family on a sailboat, weathering storms in seas of towering waves.
I think about how I like to swim outdoors. But nothing even close to dangerous or life-threatening had happened unless you count that one time in San Diego when a sea lion revealed itself, prompting me to churn faster back to shore. It all makes me realize how diligently I avoid true danger. After a couple of false starts, I bumble through some thoughts on having played volleyball in high school and college. I was the setter, I say, the position that calls the plays like a quarterback, and when things got tough, I had to decide who to set, who might be able to get us out of our rut. As if a rut-in-the-volleyball-match is in any way a “harrowing situation.” So unexciting, so boring is this answer, I feel like I lose all the lottery money I had just, minutes ago, won over beer.
I learn from Binsted later that NASA had an unofficial list of astronaut soft skills it looks for, and it’s possible that the volleyball answer and my lack of adventure wasn’t as bad as I thought. While the traditional view of astronauts is that they are thrill seekers, this is mostly a holdover from the days when the only astronauts were test pilots. Those astronauts needed to be good at flying fast and risking death, able to handle the controls of untested craft as well as enduring, or ignoring, the existential threat of being among the first humans to hitch a ride on an explosion and float, tin-canned, through the void.
As a group, though, test pilots also tend to come with bravado, egotism, and hot tempers—none of which would be advantageous on a long, likely tedious, space trek, especially since personality matters and social and psychological issues compound the longer a journey lasts. A three-year mission to Mars would call for something different, perhaps even some danger aversion. “If you think about a mission to Mars as being a system of systems,” Binsted said in an interview once, “the human part of that system, if that breaks, can be just as disastrous as a rocket blowing up.”
On February 2, 1960, Look magazine ran a cover story that asked “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And, as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other American spacemen over the next two decades. Only in 1983 did Sally Ride become America’s first woman to launch.
A certain kind of person might be compelled to ask, why would anyone think a woman should be the first to space, anyway? And to this person I would say, expert medical opinion, for starters.
Women have fewer heart attacks than men, and in the 1950s and ’60s, scientists speculated that their reproductive systems were more protected from radiation from space than men’s because they are on the inside. What’s more, psychological studies suggested that women cope better than men in isolation and when deprived of sensory inputs. But there was another, possibly more compelling reason that women might outshine men as potential astronauts: basic economics. Thanks to their size, women are, on average, cheaper to launch and fly than men for the simple fact that they need less food.
I verified this firsthand. During the mission, part of my job was to collect and manage the crew’s sleep data. One device used to track sleep was a sensor armband, which, in addition to sleep data and activity logging, also estimated daily and weekly calorie expenditure.
Every week, sitting at the table where we ate our meals, I’d dump the sensor data into my computer. While I didn’t know which numbers belonged to which subject, due to anonymity requirements, I could see each subject’s F or M. Over time I noticed a trend. Sian, Yajaira, and I consistently used fewer than half the calories of Angelo, Simon, and Oleg. Fewer than half!
Consider the numbers. During one week in particular, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day while the least metabolically active female went through 1,475. Overall, it was rare for a woman on the crew to use 2,000 calories and common for male crewmembers to exceed 3,000.
We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least forty-five minutes a day for five consecutive days as per our exercise protocol, most of us ardent followers of Tony Horton’s P90X workouts—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways.
Another observation: at mealtime, Sian, Yajaira, and I took smaller portions than Angelo, Simon, and Oleg, all three of whom often went back for seconds. I also remember that one of the guys complained how hard it was to maintain his weight, despite the piles of food he was eating. It all got me thinking about economics and gravity.
Astronauts’ calorie requirements matter when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain their weight on a long space journey, the more food should be launched with them. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. Further, the more fuel required, the heavier the whole rocket becomes which, in turn, requires more fuel to launch.
This means every pound counts on the way to space. A conundrum, but a predictable one, thanks to math. The “rocket equation” was first derived by a British mathematician in 1813, and later independently discovered again—and applied to hypothetical space travel—by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903. It’s the equation that guides all decisions around how heavy payloads, and even rockets themselves, can be.
A mission to Mars crewed only with women would, on average, require less than half the food mass of a mission crewed only with men. But in any scenario, the more women you fly, the less food you need. You save mass, fuel, and money.
When I mentioned my proposal at dinner one night, one of my male crewmates grumpily dismissed it. I figured I was onto something.
Our selection for HI-SEAS and the supplies we brought into that dome, including food, had nothing to do with the rocket equation. And of course the question of female astronaut suitability had long been answered. This meant that we were chosen, more or less, in the same way all NASA astronauts are chosen. Fundamentally, they must have the same baseline: be a documented U.S. citizen with at least a bachelor’s degree in science, math, or engineering and have worked at least three years in their field or have flown at least one thousand hours as a jet pilot.
These requirements might make sense to you. It’s a technical job. Potential astronauts should have proven their rationality and ability to handle the rigors of a machine-dominated environment. This kind of educational prerequisite is a shorthand that says yes they can. But I’ve often wondered about all the people who might have made very fine astronauts—car mechanics, inventors, oil-rig workers, sculptors, clergy, EMTs, truck drivers, novelists, designers, plumbers, philosophers—who never got a chance. What would the history of spaceflight have looked like if it wasn’t just formally educated scientists, engineers, and pilots invited to the party?
In any case, I was qualified, but barely. My undergraduate degree is in chemistry, and I have a master’s degree in physics. And though I never worked as a physicist after graduate school—I went straight to science journalism—I did take three years to complete my master’s rather than the usual two because, as a chemistry major, I needed to make up some undergraduate physics courses. I don’t know if the HI-SEAS selection committee considered journalism as relevant experience in addition to my three years in graduate school.
In 2015, NASA put out a call for astronauts, and I thought I might as well give it one last shot. I didn’t make it past the first round. It made me wonder if the agency or, more specifically, the algorithm programmed by those at the agency to sort through the 18,300 applications, a flood three times the size of the previous hiring round in 2011, operates with a fairly narrow definition of professional astronaut experience so that a journalist—even one with a background in science and time on “Mars”—would always be a no-go.
The group that came out the other end of NASA’s hiring process two years later was made up of five women and seven men. Most had flight time, many in some branch of the military. Some were scientists, some were doctors, all seemed to be firing on all cylinders and had been for much of their young lives. Reading through their bios, what I read was ambition, and a lot of it. And it wasn’t the usual American kind, either, that ambition for money. After all, the most financially hungry among us rarely go into science. Fewer still join the military. It’s a different kind of ambition that propels people to NASA, something to do with glory, maybe, or perhaps a sense of something to prove, though I’m sure it’s different for everyone. And while NASA pulls from the military, and the military often pulls from particular segments of the country’s population, I couldn’t help but think, looking at those bios, of James Baldwin’s observation that ambition isn’t equally distributed in America. In addressing his nephew in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes, “You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” This was what it was to be black and born in Harlem, Baldwin writes in 1962. This sentiment, and the rightful anger behind it, also may apply to many other nonwhite Americans in other cities and rural towns today, to those born in poverty, to those who lack documentation. There are so many excellent people in this country, living now and throughout history, who have had their ambitions blunted before they could even get started, who have been told that they are not what America is looking for. What of the almost-astronauts or those who never even thought to give it a try? What might they have contributed to humanity’s grand space endeavor? How might they have shaped it differently, for everyone?
It’s not just education and temperament that gets you picked. You also must pass a flight physical, which is like a regular physical, but slightly more involved. This was a HI-SEAS requirement as well. It confirms that you have an untroubled heart and nervous system, no substance dependence, and no diagnosed personality or mental health disorders.
But at NASA, the flight physical is just the start of the bodily assessments. The vetting, which includes a colonoscopy, bone scans, and an EKG among other scopings and probings, is thorough. Sian, who wasn’t medically disqualified but doesn’t know exactly why she didn’t make the final selection, learned through this process, among other unbeknownst personal details, that she had “freakishly” small ear canals, the smallest NASA doctors had ever seen.
Again, here, I think of the disqualified, all those whose bodies rendered them ineligible for spaceflight, NASA-style. What has been missed by not including them? My oldest brother, Mark, was pretty fit when he was younger, competing in 10Ks and playing basketball. Professionally, he was also a union stagehand. Part of his job was to help load big-name bands like U2, the Rolling Stones, and Metallica in and out of their stadium venues. This union position was a point of pride for him and our family because Mark was born with spina bifida and his main form of mobility was a wheelchair. He had to fight for that union card, as he had to fight for many things in his life—access to driver’s ed in high school, access to front doors and various second floors of buildings, access to health care and doctors who believed his body could continue to function despite its initial conditions. Of course, serious health issues that could lead to illness or death could be a liability on a long mission. My brother, with spina bifida and poorly functioning kidneys, would certainly not have been a good candidate for Mars because his overall health was not stable.
In 2011, NASA launched a humanoid robot called Robonaut 2 to the ISS, notable because its body came with only a torso, arms, and a head. On its maiden voyage, it was to remain stationary and demonstrate the usefulness of a humanoid robot for flipping switches, cleaning handrails, and removing dustcovers. For these kinds of tasks and more, engineers deemed anything more than a torso superfluous. Legs in microgravity mostly get in the way. They knock into walls and doorways in tight, overcrowded space-station modules. And they demand time and attention to keep in shape. Most exercise—squats, running on treadmills, and riding a stationary bike—and the accompanying equipment, which can be bulky, is geared around them. To legs’ credit, astronauts on the ISS use their feet to steady themselves on toeholds, bars bolted to the walls, floors, and ceilings, though there could be other ways to fix a floating self.
It makes me think about the veterans who have lost limbs, the kinds of guys my brother played basketball with growing up, the kinds of people who are still coming home from any number of current wars. What would a Mars mission look like with at least a couple of astronauts who could swap out prosthetics depending on need? What about wheels instead of legs? Put the legs back on, maybe with special attachments, and the astronaut could rappel into a Martian cave or climb a steep cliff. This kind of modularity is an approach many engineers take to designing mechanical systems, why not augmenting the human body? What kinds of innovations could be discovered if engineers were encouraged to design space systems for differently bodied people?
Robonaut 2 did eventually get legs in 2014, used mainly for mobility and stability on the space station. But engineers didn’t use the standard human leg as their model. They look more like bendy tubes thanks to numerous multidirectional joints. “The legs are very flexible,” said Ron Diftler, Robonaut Project leader at the NASA Johnson Space Center in an agency press release. “They can orient themselves in non-humanoid ways … it’s not the kind of symmetry that you have in a human,” he said, “but we were not trying to run a beauty contest.”
Historically, NASA has selected traditionally normative bodies for space adventures. But in truth, there is nothing normative about a human body in space. It is, in some ways, deviant to put such a delicate construction into such an extreme environment where a body doesn’t normally occur and can’t function without great help. In the future, though, it’s possible that human bodies in space could be a more common occurrence, but only with the aid of a great many carefully considered technologies—technologies that augment, amplify, and assist the human form for the space environment. In this way, human spaceflight highlights how context-dependent even the most well-vetted healthy or normal body is.
It’s easy to forget that just the fact of having a non-male body disqualified a person as an astronaut until 1983. When cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963, she bolstered the appearance of communist egalitarianism during the Cold War. But some considered her flight, which was riddled with technical difficulties, more a political stunt than a concerted effort for gender parity, something Russia, judging by the numbers, has never committed to. The next woman on a rocket was Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Sally Ride was the third woman in space. And until Guion Bluford flew in 1983, the same year as Ride, no black American had ever been beyond the stratosphere. The Soviet Union also beat the U.S. in this regard. In 1980, it launched Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, a Cuban cosmonaut of African descent.
Sian told me that during her astronaut selection process, she could sense that others noticed her difference in the mostly white, predominantly male group, especially when she attended a meet-the-astronauts gathering. “I had my hair Afro’d out, and as I walked in, I definitely felt like I didn’t belong,” she said. “I clearly remembered I felt like I wasn’t the standard polished astronaut or what they might be looking for. It could have been more that people were like, ‘Wow, she’s got great hair,’ but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like, ‘she’s different.’ And different didn’t feel accepted.”
Sian, who follows NASA astronaut news like some people play fantasy football, mentioned, too, that the most recent group of astronaut selectees, for young people, have remarkably small digital footprints. No social media. Only one of them had a personal website, as far as she could tell. She says, it’s almost like NASA decided, your identity hasn’t been revealed yet, and we’re going to shape it.
When I was in my early twenties in graduate school for physics, I was keen on making myself as attractive as possible to NASA, but I worried about the gay thing. This was 2001 and I was keenly aware of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. I knew that NASA and the military weren’t so different, at least culture-wise, but I didn’t know the agency’s official stance. So I made a burner Hotmail account and emailed the question anonymously. The reply was short and to the point. NASA did not have a policy prohibiting gay astronauts.
It’s possible that America’s first woman in space was also the first lesbian in space, though at the time Sally Ride was married to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley. In Ride’s 2012 New York Times obituary, the paper named a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, as her surviving partner of twenty-seven years. It was the first the American public learned of Ride’s sexual orientation. O’Shaughnessy said in interviews that Ride had left it up to her to decide whether or not to say anything about it. The decision was difficult, but doing so, O’Shaughnessy said, “was amazing … it was just so freeing.”
After the Skype interviews, the HI-SEAS selection process continued at Cornell University. In Ithaca, nine of us participated in a kind of cooking class to familiarize us with the ingredients we’d be using but also, I suspect, to see who played well together. I felt out of my depth for many reasons, not least of which was my lack of facility in the kitchen. I was also standing amidst true, in my mind, astronaut-like people, near or actual heroes, every one of them.
In many ways, I was the odd person out. Good at answering interview questions over Skype maybe, but I had no real impressive, useful skills. At one point I found myself in a conversation with Oleg (pilot, first responder, skydiver), Sian (pilot, scuba diver, and, of course, astronaut finalist), Crystal Haney (helicopter pilot, graduate of the Citadel in the second class that included women), Yvonne Cagle (actual NASA astronaut and doctor), and Chris Lowe (aerospace engineer, avid outdoorsperson). They were talking about their most recent adventures in skydiving or scuba diving or as entrepreneurs in new medical technologies. I felt so ordinary and of Earth. And I remember now, cringingly, how I joked about having recently taken a very exciting walk on a paved path by my house. It was a conversational move that confused all of us. I felt like my chances of being selected were shrinking the longer I hung around these impressive people.
My despair mounted when we gathered at a counter in the test kitchen. Many of the ingredients we’d have on Mars were presented to us by our chef/instructor, Rupert Spies, who was excited to show us the possibilities. Spaetzle from scratch! Pizza from scratch! Sushi rolls with canned tuna, spam, or rehydrated carrots and cucumber! All from scratch!
At one point Spies, who wanted to sauté vegetables, tasked me with looking up, in an immense cookbook that seemed to contain all culinary knowledge, the smoke point of olive oil. Why were my research skills failing me, I wondered, as I checked the index and table of contents, flipped through hundreds of pages and, secretly panicking, tried to phone-google my way into being a useful member of the team. But there was no cell service in the kitchen.
A little while later, Spies asked me to scoop forty-eight scoops of egg powder into a bowl. This fake-astronaut candidate’s blood pressure rose as she lost count at around twenty-five and began to officially scoop-count/estimate what looked to be quite a lot of egg powder (or was it too little?), so unfamiliar was she with eyeballing the volume of dehydrated egg for a spaetzle recipe.
Every interaction was being watched or not, panopticon style, and I was certain that my blunders, which were growing larger in my mind, would keep me from making the final cut.
To my relief, both the smoke point and egg situations resolved themselves without, I believe, anyone noticing or needing much help from me. The hot pan with canola oil was ready to go before I could come back with the olive oil answer (374 degrees Fahrenheit, boldly discovered in the writing of this essay), and the egg powder proved itself to be gloriously forgiving, I suspect, because it was mixed with other powders, like dehydrated milk and flour, and because our chef, a German baker by training, was good at his job.
Within a couple weeks of this kitchen tryout I got a call, somewhat ambiguous in its news: no decisions had been made, but Binsted and Hunter wanted to know if I were selected for the mission, would I want to be commander? Preposterous, I thought. Though what I said was: I’m comfortable in leadership roles, generally, and though I don’t have a particularly strong desire to be the commander, if called upon, I would do it.
I hope you’re rolling your eyes, because I am rolling my eyes as I type this. In any case, I desperately did not want to be the commander, but I suspected it wouldn’t be wise to say that. There would likely be some big personalities on the crew who I sensed had the potential to be adversarial—I wasn’t wrong—and I simply didn’t want that challenge or responsibility. But I also suspected I wouldn’t be commander, anyway. I don’t really have a commanding presence. I tend to hang back and observe. Ultimately, I was told I would be second-in-command under Angelo. I didn’t ask the reasons for this decision and I still don’t know. I also learned that Crystal, Yvonne, and Chris would not be joining the mission as part of the main crew, they would be backups, though any of them would have been great. Chris, in particular, seemed like a wonderful person to be around—easygoing, good at telling stories, and he played the guitar. Someone who played guitar would have been nice.
Later, toward the end of our four months inside the dome, we talked as a crew about that fateful phone call. Turns out Binsted and Hunter had asked everyone if they wanted to be in charge. Only one of us, Angelo, had said yes. We had gotten to know each other pretty well at this point and this news surprised no one—we even laughed about it. As a working artist, Angelo’s professional life entailed leading community art projects around the world, so it made sense. I also recall him saying that when Binsted and Hunter told him that I was to be second-in-command, he said he’d rather have had his own pick. But they held firm. By the time I learned this background, Angelo and I had been working together well for months and were friends. We trusted each other and were comfortable in our respective roles. He was often the voice and the face of the mission to the outside world, whereas I had become something of an unofficial crew counselor, a go-between when frustrations rose. Angelo said he was glad I was his number two. And I was very happy to not be the commander.
As of July 2019, the number of people who have been to space is 563. Of those, only sixty-four have been women. In an alternate universe, a different timeline plays out for female astronauts, one that answers Look’s question about “girls” in space with a resounding yes, and sees men and women together prominently contributing to the U.S. space program. It really could have happened.
Here’s how close we were. In the early 1960s a physician named William Randolph Lovelace II and a pilot named Jacqueline Cochran developed and ran a research program in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to test women’s physiological and psychological suitability for spaceflight. Lovelace, who had designed the tests for the Mercury Seven, the first test pilots NASA sent into orbit, had a grand vision for the future of space. According to Margaret Weitekamp, author of Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program, Lovelace anticipated giant floating space stations for scientific research, run like military battleships or outposts, which would hold positions for women as well as men. In his vision, which seems to have been heavily influenced by gender norms at the time, at least some astronauts would need to be women, if for no other reason than to be space-station secretaries or space-station nurses.
This Women in Space program drew from a group of trained pilots who’d served as Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a World War II program, headed by Cochran but disbanded in 1944, that trained women to fly planes domestically as male pilots were sent to combat. Though the medical results were encouraging, the female pilots Lovelace worked with never even got near NASA.
Weitekamp suspects that President Kennedy’s push to go to the moon, along with the space agency’s initial decision to choose astronauts from a preexisting pool of military test pilots, a group made exclusively of men, precluded NASA from even considering women for the role.
“They had one goal and that didn’t include the social experimentation of flying a woman,” Weitekamp said in an interview. “And they were then legitimately concerned about the political ramifications of having any flights that seemed off the lunar focus. Certainly they worried a lot about if anything happened to a woman on a flight, whether that would end all human spaceflight programs.”
The reasoning to exclude women actually went counter to scientific evidence that they would be just as good if not better than men psychologically and physically in space and that they would be more economical with their small size and low calorie requirements. There is no natural law that says that men are better astronauts. The reason half the American population was kept from opportunities in spaceflight was the same reason Valentina Tereshkova flew in 1963. The people in charge determined what, politically speaking, would be the best look.
Within the first few days of the mission, I’d never felt my bodily obligations so acutely. The fact of eating, and all that it required, hit me hard during our food inventory. Four months’ worth for six people—it nearly completely covered the floor of the habitat’s common area. The fact of pissing and shitting and making sure the plumbing was running was another reminder multiple times a day and was compounded when the waste tank backed up and we as a crew had to use so-called field toilets made of trash bag–lined buckets.
Breathing, needing warmth, needing light with which to see, needing water to drink and bathe and launder clothes and wash dishes, electricity with which to communicate beyond the dome. All of it! It’s easy to forget about these things when you’re just living your life on Earth, the everyday, but when your living is engineered, when all your inputs, outputs, and behaviors are considered and an environment is created to cater to those requirements, it can feel almost repulsive to have a body, the truth of it, so greedy. And there are nearly eight billion of us.
There’s a picture that’s floated around NASA since the mid-’90s—Jean Hunter sent it to me—a line drawing of an astronaut’s body and its estimated “needs” and “effluents.” The astronaut appears to be female, zombie-armed as if she’d just fallen asleep in zero g. Her hair isn’t long, but it isn’t short—similar in style to that of a young Sally Ride. Her collared shirt has short sleeves; it’s tucked into above-the-knee cargo shorts. Her socks are pulled up mid-shin and her shoes are drawn as if an afterthought: no laces, so perhaps they are slippers. On one side of this woman is the list of inputs (“needs” like oxygen, food solids, hand/face wash water, urine flush) and on the other side, the outputs (“effluents” like carbon dioxide, sweat solids, feces solids, hygiene water) and their corresponding weights in pounds. This image, perhaps more than any other I’ve seen, captures the idea of the astronaut’s body as a system that must be accounted for when plugged into a spacecraft sent off into the solar system.
When I researched the article I wrote for Slate in 2014 about the astronaut body and the female economic advantage in spaceflight, I learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. In the early 2000s, Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA, had also been thinking about the problem of astronaut bodies. He consulted the NASA document on physiological metrics called STD-3000, Man-Systems Integration Standards, now revised to STD-3001, that detail the needs and effluents for a range of body types. Drysdale compared the numbers for women whose size was in the fifth percentile to men whose size was in the ninety-fifth percentile, a range from about 4 foot 11 and 90 pounds to 6 foot 3 and 215 pounds. He found that a fifth-percentile woman would use less than half the resources of a 95th-percentile man. While we didn’t have a woman on the HI-SEAS crew who was in the fifth percentile, our stats were similar to the predictions.
I spoke with Drysdale, who no longer works with NASA. He said his calculations suggest all things being equal, a crew of smaller astronauts would launch for half the payload cost. “Small women haven’t been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there’s no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it’s brain power you want,” said Drysdale. “The logical thing to do is to fly small women.”
Harry Jones, of NASA Ames Research Center, told me that he too, noticed the average female and male calorie requirement differed significantly and published on the topic in the early 2000s. “For a Mars mission, life support will be a major cost,” he said. “It is expected that oxygen and water can be recycled, but not food. Reducing the crew’s calorie requirement would cut costs.”
Indeed, a number of people I talked to for the article acknowledged the benefits of an all-female crew, or even just a crew made of smaller people in general. One proponent is Andrew Rader, a mission manager at SpaceX. “Anything to reduce weight and even in terms of making the spacecraft seem bigger, having smaller astronauts would be great,” he said, noting that he isn’t speaking on behalf of his company. “I think it’s a reasonable proposal.”
As reasonable as an all-female Mars mission is from an economic perspective, some might find the idea offensive. After all, it’d be an expedition that fails to represent half the world’s population; an all-female Mars crew would strike many as biased.
Crew cohesion was an important subject of study during HI-SEAS. Our crew members were a relatively diverse bunch: a white Belgian man, a white Canadian man, a white Russian-American man, a Puerto Rican Latina woman, a black woman who grew up in the Northeastern U.S., and me, a white, queer kid from Kansas. We had a range of engineering, science, and creative backgrounds. For half of us, English wasn’t our first language.
Because of our differences, we were often learning and relearning each other’s problem-solving approaches, personalities, language quirks, and food preferences. But soon we realized that our diversity helped us solve various problems that came up, like designing new scientific experiments or analyzing data or building furniture or testing out the 3-D printer or finding ingredient substitutions for dinner. Personally, I liked this diversity and the occasional confusion or friction that it produced. It kept things interesting.
But there are all kinds of ways to find diversity even within a single-gender group of people. “When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough women on the Supreme Court and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said. “But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.” What if, per Ginsburg’s suggestion, as on the U.S. Supreme Court so, too, in space.