No, They Are NOT Astronauts

Well, this isn't the post I thought I would be writing this week, but Gayle and friends keep bringing it back into my newsfeed by insisting they are inspirations, heroes, and "the first all female crew" in space.  Worse, they are claiming gender discrimination by the people who refuse to call them astronauts.  As a child who dreamed of space travel myself and a science teacher who taught kids about space exploration for 25 years, this makes me want to gag.  Since this is the closest thing I have to a "platform," let me address why this matters.

A Little History on Blue Origin

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, has been sending civilians to the edge of space since 2021.  The ride lasts about 11 minutes, following the approximate pattern of Alan Shepard's flight as the first American in space in 1961, so he calls the flights "New Shepard."  Because he knows how to get attention, each flight has had at least one passenger that would make it interesting to the media and the general public, including Michael Strahan and William Shatner.  The flight this week was meant to be notable as it was the first that included only females and included Katy Perry and Gayle King.  While some have criticized the timing of the expensive flight while the economy is in free fall and the environmental impact of burning that much fuel, most of the backlash seems to be from their insistence on being called astronauts and Gayle's tone deaf statement that "everyone should do this" as though everyone has millions of dollars.

A Little History on Women in Space Exploration

During the days of the space race, there were 13 women who did all of the training and psychological testing that the Mercury 7 did. They performed well, even performing better on most of the mental endurance tests than their male counterparts. Yet, they did not fly.  This was partly due to sexism (and racism - LBJ said, "If we let the women fly, we'd have to let the coloreds fly" which I can't help but think about every time he is credited as a hero for signing the Civil Rights Act).  It was also partly due to the logistics of space flight.  They would be living together and sleeping in very tight spaces.  Without gravity, waste elimination is a different kind of challenge, and it requires different equipment for male and female bodies.  And, with limited space, it would require them using this equipment in plain view of each other (which isn't something a woman would want now, much less in the 60s).  

So, it is a little more complicated that simple discrimination, but at the end of the day, these 13 women did not fly.  What they did accomplish was proving that women could complete the training and testing as well as men, laying the groundwork for American women to fly in space, even though it took two more decades for that to happen.  The first Blue Origin flight included one of these thirteen women, Wally Funk, and amid my mixed feelings about the flight, I was happy for her specifically to be part of it.  If you would like to know more about their story, allow me to recommend the book Almost Astronauts by Tanya Lee Stone.

Since the Russians were doing solo missions longer than we were, they didn't have to concern themselves with the mixed-gender mission issue.  (I don't know know enough about Soviet culture to know if there were sexism issues there.) They sent Valentina Tereshkova on a 71 hour, 48 orbit mission in 1963.  She was chosen, not because of her skills as a pilot but as a parachutist.  Since Vostok mission cosmonauts didn't land in water, they ejected from the spacecraft before landing and parachuted to the ground.  So, when we talk about the first all female crew, let's recognize that she flew the rocket on her own and rendezvoused with another mission before reentering the earth's atmosphere to eject and land.  In other words, she had a job.  She accomplished something that few men and no women had previously accomplished.  (Note: My admiration for Ms. Tereshkova is mixed with disdain for her more recent work as she is also the person who created the conditions for Valdimir Putin's dictatorship by introducing the bill in 2020 that removed his term limits.) 

The United States didn't have a female astronaut until 1983 when Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle Challenger. She had a BS, MS, and doctorate degree in Physics.  In addition to being the first American woman to go into space, she was also the youngest at that time.  Returning to space for a second mission in 1984, she spent a total of 353 hours in orbit. She trained extensively, worked at mission control as the Cap Com, and she helped design and build the space shuttle's robotic arm, without which we would not have been able to deploy the Hubble or build the International Space Station.  She accomplished mission objectives as a scientist and paved the way for more women to become astronauts as mission specialists, pilots, and commanders.

The Difference Between Astronauts and Tourists

From the earliest days of science fiction writing, space tourism was predicted.  What doesn't appear, in any novel I've read, anyway, is confusion about the difference between tourists and crew members.  Perhaps it seemed so obvious to the likes of Isaac Asimov that the difference between astronaut (a job) and tourist (a consumer) didn't need to be defined.

NASA, on the other hand, has defined it.  They have outlined the requirements for astronauts on their website.  It reads, in part, "Possess a master’s degree* in a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, from an accredited institution" and "Have at least two years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion or at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time on jet aircraft." It's a career to be taken seriously. So the difference between a crew member and a tourist is that a crew member has job responsibilities for which they have been trained and a tourist has paid or had someone else pay for their voyage.  Gayle and Katy did not have to do so much as push a button, so they were passengers.  They were passengers on a very interesting trip, but they were not astronauts, and it is not sexist to say so.  Neither William Shatner nor Michael Strahan fulfilled the requirements of astronaut, so they were passengers too. 

Gayle King has adopted the term mission for her Blue Origin trip and is offended by people referring to it as "a ride."  If she were the professional journalist she claims to be, she might be more precise with her language. NASA has clearly defined the term mission.  It is "a specific well-defined endeavor or project, aimed at achieving a particular goal in space exploration, scientific research, or aeronautics."  Sally Ride, Mae Jemison, and Christina Koch didn't go into space to look out the window and take selfies (although they certainly did that too); they fulfilled mission objectives that advanced our understanding of the universe and the laws that govern it. Katy Perry's statement shows how little she understands about the purpose of missions.  She said, "Space is going to finally be glam. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."  And Gayle making a comparison between their flight and Alan Shepard's mission is particularly revealing. The only thing the two have in common is that they both followed a parabolic trajectory known as a spaceshot, although the Mercury mission was twice as high (so he qualified as being in space while Blue Origin missions go to the edge of space).  Shepard had to show that humans could function both physically and mentally in microgravity, describing every part of what was happening during the entirety of the journey from pre-launch to splash down. He had to respond in real time when an indicator light failed to illuminate after the retro boosters were jettisoned from the capsule. If he had been wrong, the heat shield would have failed during re-entry, likely killing him. There's a reason they sent test pilots and not singers, movie stars, and journalists - the mission mattered more than the publicity.  So, no, Gayle didn't follow in the footsteps of Alan Shepard, and she didn't pave the way for women.  People who fulfill actual missions do those things.  

It's not disrespectful to Gayle, as she has claimed, to call her a passenger on a ride; it is an accurate description of her role and her trip.  She is the one being disrespectful.  She and the rest of the Blue Origin ladies could have used their platforms to draw attention to the women who did the real work before them, but they were two busy drawing attention themselves.  That's disrespectful. 

  

I have no issue with them taking the trip; people with money will spend it differently than those who don't.  Just as I have no problem with people taking a cruise around the world.  I have a problem with them diminishing the accomplishments of the men and women who made their trip possible.  If you take a cruise, don't come back pretending to be Magellan.  I have a problem with them being painted as heroic or inspirational; I have a problem with them being called astronauts.  

And it isn't disrespectful or sexist to say so.

The Humanity of Heroes

When you teach, you get asked strange questions.  From how I pronounce caramel (because he wants you to agree with him in the argument he is having with a friend) to my favorite element (which I don't know how to have an answer for) to my favorite meme (do people have favorite memes), students ask a lot of opinion questions.  Occasionally, I even get asked who is my favorite President.  The answer is Thomas Jefferson, but I know that can be a difficult answer for some people to take.  After all, he was a very flawed and self-contradictory individual, both wanting to free his slaves and writing that "all men are created equal" while fathering children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.  Similar contradictions are true of many of the founding fathers, so we feel we are left with the choice of ignoring their faults or ignoring their contributions. 

When the movie The Greatest Showman was released, I heard a lot of students speak very lovingly of PT Barnum because the movie had portrayed only his heroic side.  I guess his ownership of an old woman (yes, he purchased her) doesn't make for good content in a musical.  He is the person known for lines like, "A fool and his money are soon parted" and "There's a sucker born every minute."  While it is hard to know if all of the saying attributed to him are true, we can all agree that his character is more complicated than the movie portrays.

There are so many examples of this.  This summer, I decided to read Buzz Aldrin's book Magnificent Desolation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  He describes the affair he had with a woman he met while on the world tour, flying back and forth to New York to "keep up his flight certification."  We all know the controversies over monuments to confederate leaders.  Henry Ford was antisemitic as was Charles Lindbergh.  Both Charlie Chaplin and Elvis seemed to be interested in girls we would call younger than appropriate.  If you want to keep admiring singers that you grew up listening to, I don't recommend seeing Ray or Walk the Line.  Since I'm writing this post on Martin Luther King Day, it might be worth noting that he regularly cheated on his wife.  Recently, A few weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking a prominent Baptist leader why he didn't call out George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards for their apparently racist views.  Of course, Twitter's character limit means it is hardly the place for a deeply meaningful discussion, so the answers to this question left much to be desired.  John Piper does a pretty good job of addressing the issue here, even referencing Peter's denials of Christ and God's forgiveness.

Speaking of Twitter, it seems that every day, someone is being "canceled."  It takes one statement or action for the mob response on Twitter to call for us to boycott various celebrities or companies.  In the past year, I have seen cancelation calls for Kanye West,  JK Rowling, the Hallmark Channel, and even YouTube.  I'm not saying some of them aren't deserved, but it is an almost daily event.  Can there really be that many?  (It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to work.  Kevin Hart may have removed himself from hosting the Oscars after being canceled, but his shows are still as popular as they were before.  And, I don't think the use of YouTube dropped even one percent after being called out as "over" on Twitter.)

If you haven't seen the PBS documentary Hamilton's America, let me recommend that you do.  Even if you aren't into the musical, the presentation of history is compelling.  There are two scenes in it that stuck with me.  One is the scene in which Christopher Jackson, the play's original George Washington, visits Mount Vernon.  While standing in the slave quarters, this African American states that he is trying to reconcile the heroic aspects of George Washington with the fact that he owns slaves.  In the end, he decides that he has to make peace with the fact that he can't make peace with it.  He is a deeply flawed and yet heroic figure.  The other scene that returns to my mind frequently involves a conversation with Leslie Odom, Jr., the actor who portrayed Aaron Burr.  He discusses how, before the show, most of us only knew that Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.  The benefit of the show, in his estimation, is showing the events that led to that moment because we see the complexity of the man, not just his actions on his worst day.  In fact, one of the things I most appreciate about Lin Manuel Miranda is that Hamilton treats each person in our complicated history as a three-dimensional human being, not a marble statue of their best moments or a painting of their worst. 

How do we deal with this, especially when having conversations with our students (who have been immersed in cancel culture for their entire lives)?  The answer is certainly not to ignore faults in order to maintain our hero worship.  The answer is not to ignore the accomplishments of those we look up to because their flaws make them worthless.  The answer to acknowledge the complexity of human beings.  We are made in the image of God, but we are also corrupted by sin.  Even young students are capable of recognizing complexity.  In fact, these types of discussions are the perfect time for Christian school teachers to talk about sin and our need for redemption.  We can be glad that God uses people with flaws since those are the only kind of people there are.  If we want our heroes to be perfect our only option is to make Christ the hero of the story.