**Update** I read the article about NASA’s appalling move hours before I posted the story below. SINCE I’ve posted it I’m seeing a bunch of articles in my newsfeed/front page about women pioneers in our space program. (Russia’s too)Â Let’s hope the sudden attention causes NASA, well TRUMP to backtrack!
We really shouldn’t be surprised, but NASA has been ORDERED to purge mention of women in leadership from it’s websites. No doubt to be followed by a purge of actual women except for a token or two and one in particular. I’ll get to that. It seems the butt-hurt amongst those white males in league with Trumpty-Dumpty runs even deeper than we imagined and I say that as a white male senior citizen. However, women have been an integral part of NASA going back to it’s post WWII days as the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics. We just didn’t know it because when NASA was formed to advance manned space flight (“manned” being the operative word then) the focus was mostly on the Astronauts themselves. THAT pissed off the engineers to no end by the way. Anyway until physicist Sally Ride, PhD flew as a mission specialist on the shuttle in 1983 American Astronauts was a ‘boyz only” club.
In fact, at the time Ride was only the third woman to fly in space at all. Two Russian women got sent up before her. Now we don’t think much about it because we have regularly seen women on crewed space missions. In time we have seen more women in those control rooms that monitor the flights. Again, going back to the days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo when you saw the big room in Houston with all those guys at computer screens it was GUYS. (White I should add, but at the time for blacks to climb into the upper class and wealth their ticket was the business world – the board room rather than the science lab)
Well, it looks like Trump intends for NASA to revert to a version of The Little Rascals, complete with signs of ‘No Gurls Allowed’ on their clubhouses:
In a directive sent out just days after Trump’s inauguration, NASA personnel were commanded to excise all mentions of anything “specifically targeting” women on the space agency’s public websites, 404 Media reports.
“Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today,” the directive reads. “This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request.”
The list of verboten terms includes “DEIA,” “accessibility,” “indigenous people,” “environmental justice,” and finally: “anything specifically targeting women,” such as “women in leadership, etc.”
There’s an added layer of Trumpian Nastiness to all this of course. The person who has to carry out this order happens to be… a woman! Yes, people were surprised when Janet Petro was named as acting head of the agency and the surprise included folks at NASA. So what does she do first thing as the first woman to head NASA? Follow Trump’s orders (instead of telling him to go f**k himself and resigning) and issue her startling directive:
“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” Petro wrote in a memo about the agency’s termination of diversity programs.
That’s funny, because when Petro was the director of the Kennedy Space Center, she said this in a 2021 interview: “At NASA and Kennedy Space Center, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility has been paramount to mission success. The entire NASA leadership team stands behind this commitment,” Petro said.  “KSC has embraced the link between diverse teams and innovation,” she added.
Personally I don’t think for one second Petro had any input. Nope. This was crafted in the West Wing and given to her to publish. The lack of self-respect to follow Trump’s order on this is astounding. I wrote yesterday about former RNC Chair Michael Steele saying Trump picked Marco Rubio to PUNK him. That piece included the mention of Trump picking people specifically to force them to do things they’d never on their own do. Because it was contrary to what they’d advocated for prior to agreeing to serve in this second Trump administration. Trump wants to literally take people who’d built solid reputations and not just tear them down but rub their noses in his sh*t like they were a puppy that crapped on the carpet. What’s next, calling in Kristi Noem to finish them off?
This is appalling on so many levels but it will be interesting to see what ELON does with HIS space folks. Lots of women in those control rooms, and women on space mission crews. If Trumpty wants this to go back to the “Space Race” golden days of NASA then having all these women simply won’t do. Even though without women, and worse as far as Trump is concerned large numbers of BLACK women NASA would never have been able to fly all those missions that enthralled me and damned near every American while I was growing up!
Born in the latter 1950s as a tail end baby boomer I, like damned near every little boy quickly did away with notions of being a cowboy and instead dreamed of being an Astronaut. Given my genes that was never in the cards and by the time I reached Jr. High school it was apparent I’d be way too tall to qualify. What I want to note is that I was part of a then new thing, an “advanced placement” class in our town. I recall the testing in first grade and my parents sitting me down to explain why I’d be switching schools but that some of my friends would be coming with me. I’d later learn some parents of kids who were chosen elected to leave them out of the program. But we had a smaller than normal class with quite a few girls in it. I don’t recall a single one of them talking about becoming an Astronaut! Or working for NASA for that matter.
Again, what none of us knew was how integral women WERE at NASA and how crucial their work was. As Hollywood is wont to do the movie Hidden Figures took some license with history and some quite important people but they got a fair amount right. I included the picture of Katherine Johnson as the title picture for good reason. Her history is astounding and worth every bit of the time it takes to read it here. There is not just one, but TWO NASA facilities named after her! It didn’t happen like it was shown in the movie but John Glenn (and the others) knew about “the women in the back room” and Johnson in particular. He really did refuse to go through with his flight (the first attempt by American at putting one of our own into orbit) until Johnson had personally done the calculations to verify what the newfangled computer said!
It took too long but Johnson and others finally began getting their due. And women began flying into space just like men. Engineers as I said hated that Astronauts got all the attention. So much so that they literally threw out crystal clear videos of Neil Armstrong taking that first step onto the moon and other video of that mission. It was clear as a bell in the control room in Houston AND the technology existed to broadcast it that way but the engineers couldn’t be bothered. Then they literally threw the tapes that showed it all clearly into the f**king dumpster. On the other hand, over time while they still resented Astronauts they actually preferred the idea of women on the missions. Shorter/smaller, and requiring of less consumables like food and water. Every pound of weight lifted up to space has always carried enormous costs and women Astronauts would save a bundle! Go figure.
But we are back into ‘Wimmin gotta be put back in their place’ territory. So with a prestigious agency like NASA the first order of business is to scrub important ones from their websites and history. We know what’s coming next. Get women OFF space flight crews. Hell, could that be why the administration is suddenly pushing so hard to move up the mission to bring that Boeing crew that’s been stuck in space for eight months home? So the public doesn’t see Sunni Williams doing Astronaut stuff? What else might Trumpty do? I go back to Katherine Johnson who continued playing a vital role through Project Apollo and then the Space Shuttle. She by god EARNED having buildings at NASA installations named after her. Will Trump order the name on those buildings to be changed to that of some LOSER, TRAITOR Civil War General? Don’t be surprised if he does just that!
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Me wonders if another driver to lose sight of women is that Kamala Harris gave him a run for Musk’s money?
Maybe some racist Confederate general but more likely, methinks: The Donald J Trump Space Emporium & Snack Bar, selling a wide array of Trump-themed space collectibles along with the unhealthiest food and drinks imaginable.
Beat me to it. I was gonna point out that when they did the original tests for personnel on manned space flights, women did better and required less food, space, and fuel. But they decided astronauts had to be jet jockeys and women weren’t allowed to fly jets. But this was the 60s and women were denied a chance at most jobs with prestige and good salaries.
Most folks don’t know the engineers didn’t want to use “jet jocks” at all. They were rather horrified at the thought in fact. The original specs for being an astronaut included pilots but also a wide variety of people with experience in dangerous activities from submarine crew people to skydivers! Eisenhower (probably correctly) assumed that once the call went out all manner of crazy shit would ensue and every Congress Critter (or other powerful person) would be touting someone for the job. On the other hand he had a cadre of military test pilots that already had security clearances and could be secretly ordered to DC for briefings and they were in a hurry so it was HE who made the decision to go with test pilots. They were grossly overqualified (so it seemed) for the role they would fulfill, and many (including and especially the engineers at the top management of NASA) were worried they didn’t have a big enough pool to select from. Once they explained how passive the astronaut’s role would be – basically a passenger in a capsule and not actual doing any FLYING of it not enough people would volunteer! And that of those who did and got selected most would drop out after training began once it set in that only in some extreme cases would the astronaut actually play an active role in steering the damned spacecraft.
The engineers were supremely confident their spacecraft would function PERFECTLY, and all they really wanted from astronauts was a human test subject with enough guts to sit on top of a rocket in a tiny pod and take the physical stresses of the flight. Test pilots of course were quite used to not only pulling high “Gs” but controlling a high performance aircraft while doing so – and THAT was what worried the engineers! That the pilot would on their own decide their “perfect” machine was about to go out of control and try to take over. DO something that would ‘ruin the experiment.’
If you know the history of spaceflight then you know things did sometimes go wrong, and dangerously so while people were up there strapped into those tiny capsules. It wasn’t until the last Mercury flight that it turned out Eisenhower had made the right call after all. Gordon Cooper’s capsule went all to hell after a day in orbit. The electrical systems were shorting out (that’s a long story) and it got to the point where NONE of the automated flight controls were functional. He’d have to “by eyeball” using the horizon and sun line up the capsule on all three axes AND fire the two sets of retro rockets (to slow it down to re-entry velocity) by hand. Cooper would have to literally land the thing the old fashioned way and get it right (something few people had the training, much less actual experience in an aircaft headed for disaster as test pilots all experience) or die. All the engineers on the ground were freaking out but not Cooper, his “CAPCOM” (always a fellow astronaut) or the other astronaughts. It was what they’d always wanted – to prove they COULD actually fly the damned thing! Ole “Gordo” was cool as a cucumber, cracking “Well, things have stacked up a little” from orbit but he lined the capsule up, hit the retro rockets and splashed down closer to the recovery aircraft carrier than on any other flight! It’s unlikely anyone but an experienced test pilot could have done it. And it was the first (but not the last) those skills saved the lives of astronauts and the space program – at least the crewed missions part.
But you’re correct in that while during WWII women proved they could fly complicated aircraft (it was women pilots who ferried our newly manufactured bombers and even some other aircraft overseas for the men to fly into battle) they weren’t allowed to fly jets, much less get accepted into flight-test for a very long time. Even Dr. Sally Ride, our first woman into space qualified for the astronaut corps as a mission specialist. Eventually we’d have women in command of spaceflights – the ‘pilot” and now it’s no big deal.
But when you think back to what the engineers actually wanted at the start of Project Mercury and why it can be startling to realize the LAST thing they wanted was military test pilots. Gender had nothing to do with it. They wanted test subjects, people who were small in stature, physically tough and able to handle stress. They’d have been just fine with using say women who’d ferried bombers overseas during WWII. People used to dealing with being cramped up in a small space under stress for long hours. But these women weren’t “fighter jocks” with that type of aggressive personality. Or it could have been sumbmariners, also often small in size than many sailors. And so on.