July 28, 2005
What would I do if the shuttle program was permanently over tomorrow and we were facing a long hiatus before flying into space again?
In no particular order...
(1) Try (along with probably thousands of others) to get a job with someone else in the manned spaceflight game - Scaled Composites, the Russians, Blue Origin, etc. (No, I wouldn't go be a space station person, its just SO not me.)
(2) Join the Peace Corps.
(3) Go back to school for Public Policy / Public Administration and continue a career in some other part of the government (State Department, the Department of Defense, Congressional Staff...)
(4) Apply to the Foreign Service and hope I'm good enough despite my dismal lack of foreign language skills.
(5) Take out a large loan and rapidly go through all my flying certifications and open a flight school. Somewhere beautiful.
(6) Get a random job working in Antarctica. I've always wanted to go there.
To my other manned spaceflight friends, what would you do?
For that matter, for everyone, if your job suddenly ceased to exist in its current form, what would you do?
Posted by becca at July 28, 2005 02:47 PM
Comments
Hey Becca,
why not human spaceflight? "manned" drives me nuts.
Posted by: Jennifer at July 29, 2005 10:05 AM
What's wrong with "manned"? That's what it is.
manned: to supply with people (as for service) b : to station members of a ship's crew at c : to serve in the force or complement of
Posted by: Sarah at July 29, 2005 10:47 AM
I think feminism has bigger fights than de-gendering commonly used nouns.
Posted by: Becca at July 29, 2005 10:53 AM
Well, it bugs me. And we actually don't usually use it at Blue.
Posted by: Jennifer at July 29, 2005 12:36 PM
Gotta go with Jennifer on this one. It is often the small, seemingly inconsequential structuring of relationships that can be the most insidious barriers to equality. One has to break out of the mindset of the classic second wave of feminism - a critically important movement without a doubt, and realize that legal equality does not translate into social equality. Using male terms to explain the "whole" makes female terminology the "other."
I push hard in my classes to lecture using both gendered pronouns and insist my students vary their use of pronouns in their writing.
Posted by: Aunt Nancy at July 29, 2005 11:17 PM
To be honest, before fighting the battle to eliminate the term "manned spaceflight", I'd like to fight the battle to have more more women pilots (lady pilots, chick pilots)
The population of licensed women pilots has stayed steady at 6% of the total since the 1950s. Pilot is a gender neutral term, but there's still clearly a barrier that trancends language.
There are more women astronauts each year in a program completely described as the "manned spaceflight program" (though, arguably still not enough). The most important astronaut in the manned spaceflight program is currently a woman (Eileen Collins), chosen not out of tokenism, but because she is one of the most experienced in the core and it was her turn next.
I find it hard to believe the barrier to getting women in the astronaut corps is because it is referred to as "manned spaceflight."
Girls are avoiding math and science and engineering in school despite the lack of the use of the word "man" in any of those fields of study. I'm still about picking my battles on this one, and I choose to be sensitive when someone suggests "there's a biological reason why girls don't excel at math" and save the battle for whether its the huMAN spaceflight program or the MANned spaceflight program until later.
Posted by: ME at July 30, 2005 01:08 AM
We clearly need a new word. I propose "wmx". Example usages:
"The wmxed space flight was productive."
"Wmx, it's a hot day today!"
"Hey, wmx, what's up?"
"That's the heat wmxifold next to the engine."
"I dewmxd you give me back my skateboard."
"Why yes, that is indeed a wmxdarin orange."
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