1st all female spacewalk cancelled due to spacesuit size issue

padd b1975 wrote: »

Nearly fifty years behind the men is hardly something to be excited by.

Is it all women who developed the technology to get them there and will be making the big calls back at mission control??

Of course it isn't.

Actually a huge amount of the coding for the computers that put men on the moon was done by women. There were also a bunch of women selected for the early mercury and gemini missions and one in particular outshone pretty much all the male astronauts in testing and pilot ability. They nearly got the chance to go too as the Soviets got a woman up in orbit first and the Americans wanted to do the same.

The main reason they weren't sent? A couple of the high ups considered the idea of a woman going along on a mission with men to be "troublesome" and the both would be uncomfortable(the male astronauts themselves had no issue) and adapting suits and the rest for women would be extra complication. Which is mostly bollocks too. Slightly smaller pressure suits. Job done. Indeed a couple of the blokes weren't exactly tall either. Pete Conrad who commanded the second lunar landing, his first words as he stepped out onto the surface were; "it might have been a small step for Neill, but it's a big step for me", cos he was a shorter lad.

Being shorter and smaller of frame is actually an advantage for spaceflight as space as far as human flight is concerned is badly named, it would be better called "cramped as fcuk". Being shorter also tends to make someone better at resisting high positive G forces. Women on average also use less O2 and kilo for kilo consume less resources too. Their main disadvantage is bone loss. It happens to everyone in low gravity environments, but men naturally have more biological insurance against bone loss.

In this current case the wrong sized pressure suit is a major issue on a couple of levels. Pressurised EVA suits are already a bloody cumbersome deal. EG if the sleeves are too long your fingers won't reach the end of the gloves. Too short and it's incredibly uncomfortable. On one lunar mission one lad's sleeves were a little short and he tore a few fingernails off and the lunar EVA suits were tailored to the individual(these days they're more "off the peg" in different sizes.. It's a bloody dangerous thing to do and you want the fit of your suit to be as close as possible. Never mind having confidence, or lack thereof in an agency that didn't allow for this when they knew your measurements.