Thread by @MsMelChen

This is blatantly superficial diversity point-scoring, which was the point of Soviet propaganda.

It's also not accurate to say that the Soviets/Russians did more for actual cosmonaut diversity than @NASA did.

Follow this thread; I'll even use the @nytimes to refute itself.

Beyond showy first feats that are cosmetic - first woman, first Asian man, etc. - the truth is that the Russians always had a much narrower range of crew sizes.

Take it from an article I found in the 1995 digitized archives of the Times itself:

nytimes.com/1995/11/10/us/…

For the Russian Space Program, astronauts had to be 5’5” - 6' tall, with seated height no more than 37 inches; weigh no more than 187 pounds; and, for Soyuz spacesuits, have chests no smaller than 38 inches and no larger than 44 inches.

Meanwhile, NASA seats (and suits) fit bodies between the 1st percentile female to 99th percentile male, a range of 4’9” to 6’6”.

17 other anatomical parameters including seated height, chest height, foot lengths, hip breadths, etc. also ranged from 1st to 99th percentile.

As a result, during the cooperation between the US and Russia, only half of NASA's 88 astronauts met Russian size requirements for Soyuz spacecraft.

In terms of diversity, which space program actually did more to accommodate a wider range of possibilities?

During the Apollo days (1963-1972), the range of astronaut crew sizes was much narrower at 5’5”-5’10”.

But where this author sees gender bias, I see trade-offs that had to be made for a specific mission to send humans to the moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Quickly.

Making seats adjustable involves trade-offs:

1. Time
2. Cost (taxpayer money)
3. Survivability (adjustable seats are weaker)
4. Cost efficiency (heavier seats increase payload weight)

Sure, otherwise qualified candidates were kept out of the program because of their stature.

But with the time-sensitive goal at hand, why assume that this was a conscious decision to discriminate against women, rather than an emergent outcome of pragmatic considerations that had to be made given the situation at hand?

What irks me is that the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is an event that should be lauded as one of those unifying moments in our species’ history, one which saw the culmination of a dream older than civilization itself.

Instead, these think pieces indict this milestone in order to paint our space program and by extension, America, as an enterprise shrouded in bigotry.

It just reinforces @sapinker's thesis that progressives can't seem to celebrate progress.

When Neil took those first steps on the moon, he represented humanity, not identitarian categories such as "white" or "male."

It baffles me that some see his words "that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as gendered language instead of a universalist stance.

If pushing the frontier of space can no longer be considered a grand, awe-inspiring achievement in which all humans can delight in its shared aspirations, what else is left to unite us? What else can inspire us?

Nothing, really. Don't let them take away our common humanity.