If you are going to accuse the federal agency responsible for humanity’s greatest achievement of being problematic, at least get your facts straight.
That this needs to be said is perhaps worse than the collection of stories the New York Times published last week amid the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
To wit, the paper thought it would be a good idea to publish an opinion article arguing that NASA suffers from a culture of deeply ingrained gender biases and that its approach to space exploration is ultimately sexist. Unfortunately for the newspaper, some of the “facts” that author Mary Robinette Kowal highlights to make her case are flat-out falsehoods.
“To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias,” read the article’s headline. Its subhead added, “The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond.”
“If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it,” the article adds.
It concludes, “As we look back at the Apollo mission … it is important to examine the gender biases of the early space program for lessons learned. If we want to land the first woman on the moon, let’s make sure she has tools designed with her in mind. Eliminating the legacy of gender bias is just one small step.”
This is where the story runs into some serious problems.
In the original version of the article, Kowal wrote that, “Without conscious thought, the design of the ship and the lunar platform for the Artemis missions is likely to reproduce design choices made in the Apollo era when astronauts were all men.”
She adds [emphasis added], “Ladder rungs are set at the optimum distance for the average man. The pistol-grip tool, or cordless drill, is sized for a man’s hand. The distance from the seats to the control panels in SpaceX’s Dragon Crew capsule is being tested and optimized for an all-male crew.”
This is not true. The testing includes both men and women.
Kowal also writes that astronaut Cady Coleman is the “smallest person to ever do a spacewalk.” Coleman has never done a spacewalk, though she has qualified for it.
The article now carries an editor’s note that reads: “An earlier version of this essay misstated the genders of people involved in testing of the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. The testing included both men and women, not only men. It also incorrectly stated that an astronaut had completed a spacewalk. Cady Coleman qualified for a spacewalk, she did not perform one.”
Also, while we are at it, it is probably worth mentioning that the Times published an article this weekend wherein a photo caption mistook the Earth for the moon. That error has also been corrected and noted by the paper’s editors.
But other than all of that, some great points all around!
