Yet the early days of American space exploration and NASA are a sorry reflection of a forward-looking institution mired in backward social attitudes and antiquated gender and race politics. It’s ironic that the men who were pioneers in a field so visionary and rooted in making the seemingly impossible possible, should have had such difficulty in wrapping their heads around the concept of women in space. It’s a worthy goal, and an important reminder of sp ace exploration’s checkered past.

One of the big pitches NASA has been making for its nascent lunar mission – the Artemis Project – has been the goal of landing the first woman on the moon. Nevertheless, the launch marked an important milestone, and hopefully presages a renewed era of space exploration.īlue Painting by Mondschwinge ( Pixabay License / Pixabay Trump’s daydreams of militarizing space with his Space Force are cause for further concern. The fickle prevarications of Trump – threatening NASA with defunding on the one hand waxing poetic about plans to return humans to the moon on the other – make it difficult for a coherent space program to move forward, secure in the long-term support that is a vital prerequisite for multi-year space missions. The heightened role of corporate private industry in spaceflight is to be viewed with suspicion, especially from a company headed by the increasingly erratic tycoon Elon Musk.

The Dragon spacecraft itself, a partnership between NASA and privately owned SpaceX, generates mixed feelings. Amid all the darkness, however, many of us turned at least some of our attention in a more hopeful direction in May: up to the skies, where for the first time in nine years a next generation spacecraft launched astronauts from American soil into space. Our attention is torn myriad ways: the Covid-19 pandemic the epidemic of police violence and racist murders of Black and Indigenous people the global chaos being sown by US President Donald Trump and his administration.

Astronauts by Jim Ottaviani