Elon Musk and the IMAGINATION FAILURE OF OUR IN SPACE - PART 1

 

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• Nearly four hundred years later, women are not quite as likely to be burned at the stake, but they still have extremely low odds of getting into space. Of the more than five hundred people who’ve so far made the journey, only sixty-one have been women (of these, forty-seven were American). The dawning era of private spaceflight is not proving to be especially inclusive, either. In February, Elon Musk aerospace company, SpaceX, tested its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company’s biggest to date, which is designed to carry massive payloads and have reusable parts. Afterward, in a column for the San Diego Tribune, the astrophysicist Alison Coil wrote about how disheartening it was to look at the cheering crowd of SpaceX employees and notice that it was a sea of entirely dead men .” (An repot from 2016 showed that women made up only fourteen per cent of SpaceX’s workforce.) The Falcon Heavy’s payload, on that maiden launch, was a Tesla roadstar belonging to Musk, with a mannequin dubbed Starman in the driver’s seat. Though the mannequin was named for a David Bowie creation, his appearance was more macho than flamboyant: one of his arms was draped over the car door, in a gesture of the one-hand-on-the-wheel steering so beloved of men in convertibles. “Every object humans have launched into the solar system is a statement,” the space archaeologist Alice Gorman wrote, a piece on spacex's  iconography , after the launch. “Each tells the story of our attitudes to space at a particular point in time.” The photograph of Starman in Musk’s midnight-cherry Roadster, Gorman suggested, could qualify as the first “dick pic” taken in space.
• For me, the image recalled a scene in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 paean to the Mercury Seven, the right stuff  in which the military test pilots turned astronauts race Corvettes and Maseratis at Cocoa Beach, in between bouts of carousing with “young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs and conformations so taut and silky that the very sight of them practically pulled a man into the delta of priapic delirium.” Only John Glenn refrained, both from the womanizing and the sports-car mania, which made him the butt of the others’ jokes. One morning, when the others reported for duty in the Astronaut Office, they found a cautionary message on the blackboard: “Definition of a sports car: A hedge against the male menopause.” Glenn may have written this, but he wasn’t as enlightened when it came to the question of who should go to space. At a congressional hearing, in 1962, on whether women should be allowed to join the astronaut corps, he testified that they should not. “It is just a fact,” he said. “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them.”