Space Inspiration
2021-04-06
Ian Kung (a youtuber) posted a video in 2019 as a response to the sentiment that "we shouldn’t care if an all-female spacewalk happened." Kung argued that we should care about it because it inspires young girls to be astronauts.
I’m here because I got this video recommended to me two years later and I have too much brainpower to sit in front of the TV, but not enough brainpower to do something useful with my time.
We’ve done that
This really isn’t that inspiring. American women have been astronauts all the time, doing pretty much every job for longer than most of the audience have been alive. Sunita Williams was crew on four different ISS missions, the last of which saw her as commander. If a commander isn’t inspiring, I’m not sure what is.
If the argument is that there were no prior role models for girls, that’s falling pretty flat. Women go to space routinely, it’s not an achievement or conspiracy theorist "glass ceiling".
Implications
The implication of focusing on this is that women are somehow special. That an all-female spacewalk is tangibly different than any other spacewalk. That’s an odd message to send to little girls.
There are significant differences between women and men, but none that really relate to being an astronaut. Implying that women are less capable of being astronauts, such that they need to be encourage from the sidelines for doing so, is pretty distasteful to me.
A usual backtrack is to say "it’s not that women are different than men, it’s that they’re treated differently, and have a harder time getting to space because of institutional bias." Which would be compelling if we didn’t have woman astronauts doing every job for generations. You’d have to get a tinfoil hat out to think that women are categorically passed over for astronaut jobs.
If Kung can argue that girls should be inspired by this, I’m ready to argue that cheering women for doing something that men routinely do is pretty demoralizing to little girls.
Lowering Expectations
Which leads to the real point behind all this. We used to aim for things that our species couldn’t do - orbits, landings, rovers, telescopes - challenging the limit of what our technology and understanding of the universe allowed.
Gagarin wasn’t remarkable because he was the first man in space, he was remarkable because he was the first human in space. Apollo 11 wasn’t a victory for men, it was one small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind. The ISS is not a celebration of manhood, it’s a triumph of scientific goodwill among very different (often opposing) nations. The Hubble telescope isn’t a victory because it’s named after a man, it’s a victory because of how much it contributes to our species’ understanding of the universe.
Celebrating that women managed to do a spacewalk all by themselves is not just patronizing and troubling for its implications, it’s a step down for the whole species. There are lots of significant and historic milestones waiting to be made; who wants to be the first human to orbit Mars? To stand on its surface? To raise a family there? How about the first asteroid to be captured and mined?
We’re not at a loss for goals. We aren’t less capable of making history than we used to be. We’ve got a lot of historic work to do, and none of it has anything to do with sex. Focusing on the sex of astronauts is demeaning to what our species can achieve.
So to anyone snorting along with Ian - stop holding us all back.
