One of the assumptions that you hear during some debates is that “If women ran the world, there would be no wars, no starvation, schools would be better and the environment would be cleaner”. The argument being that women are more collaborative and less driven by the need to prove that they are better than each other like men often do.
That came to mind when I read about the Netflix documentary about the “Mercury 13”. If you are not familiar, the “Mercury 13” was a privately-funded project that sought to train 13-women to fly into space in the late 1950’s–should NASA decide that it wanted to have female astronauts as part of the Mercury program. Of course, the “mean men” at NASA put the kibosh on the idea–even after the Soviets put a women into space in 1963. But the documentary got me thinking “What if the gender roles had been reversed–and it was women running government at the time of the Space Race?”
Make no mistake, as much as we Americans like to talk about our “spirit of adventure” and “man’s innate sense of exploration”, the reason the US put such a high priority on space travel in the 1950’s and the 1960’s is because the guys in the Soviet Union were beating us–and we couldn’t handle being “number two”. You know why we haven’t gone to Mars–even though it was in NASA’s long-range plans in the 1960’s? Because no other guys are trying to do it–so we don’t have to worry about not being first.
But imagine if women were running the show in the 50’s and 60’s and someone from the military or science fields had said “I think we should spend the modern equivalent of 200-billion dollars over the next decade to send 12-people to the moon. And we should do it using giant machines made up of parts that are going to fall into the ocean, drift around in space forever, and get left on the moon itself so that none of it can ever be used again. Oh, and on some of the missions we are going to send a car along so we can drive on the moon–and then leave the car up there. What do you think?”
What woman that you know would sign off on that plan? Instead, they would likely give you the laundry list of things that need to get done around your own place before you think about going off to some other world to “explore” or “colonize”. “If you get the oceans cleaned up and there is still some time and money left over, then you can think about going to the moon.”
Instead, you had Eisenhower and Kennedy with their testosterone-filled plans for “winning the race to space” that got everybody gung-ho about putting men into orbit and eventually driving around on the moon–no matter how little “sense” that makes.
