Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut, will blast off this weekend to join the ISS crew, including Russian cosmonaut Elana Serova, in orbit. That will make this only the second time in the space station’s 16 years of operation that two women have been on its six-member crew at the same time. And nobody’s even asked Cristoforetti any dumb questions about hair or makeup yet!
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case when Serova became the first female cosmonaut to go to the International Space Station. Hopefully, that means at least some people have finally learned their lesson about asking weird gender-biased questions. “Space is what I do for work, and that’s what I think about it: It’s my work,” Serova said in a NASA interview in September, and hopefully that’s where the media will keep its focus, too.
We were already pretty excited about Christoforetti when she revealed ISS Expedition 42’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-themed poster to the world, and we couldn’t be happier that there will again be two women doing science aboard the ISS. Christoforetti blasts off from Kazakhstan this Sunday.
(via Phys.org, image via NASA)
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Published: Nov 21, 2014 06:00 pm