Lady Business: Space dreams deferred, and the tech CEOs who took them over

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 132nd issue, published August 1, 2021.
 
 

Winning the Race

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I share some space-related tastes with Jeff Bezos, he of the ridiculously phallic rocket and the billionaire space race to escape the planet. But my appreciation for his favorite TV show, The Expanse, is well-documented. As is my interest in the history of the 1960s astronauts who weren’t, the Mercury 13 women who passed the same qualifying tests as John Glenn and Gus Grissom et al but who NASA (with a gross assist from Glenn) refused to accept into the space program.

Most of those women, including de facto leader Jerrie Cobb, have now died. But last month, 82-year-old Wally Funk finally got to go into space, sort of, when Bezos invited her to take a seat on his Blue Origin rocket. This feel-good ending to her 60-year quest does have some complications, as the New York Times points out:
 

[Funk] purchased a ticket on Virgin Galactic in 2010 for $200,000, hoping that it would finally get her into space. It is hard not to look at the billionaire space-race and wonder if Mr. Bezos invited her as a way to one-up Richard Branson. He’s the one who gets Ms. Funk into space.

…For many women and nonbinary people involved in space and astronomy, the moment is more nuanced than just a lifelong dream realized.

“On the one hand, I am thrilled for her that she is getting to live this dream she has held for so long,” said Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. “On the other hand, her individually being granted this opportunity does nothing to address any of the reasons she was previously excluded from going to space, and in fact still poses a man of great privilege — this time specifically Jeff Bezos — as the gatekeeper for her access to space, access which she already earned and deserves.”

But maybe bittersweet victories are better than none. Funk’s fellow Mercury 13 astronauts, or FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Trainees), were on my mind and my TV screen this spring, as I caught up on For All Mankind. The AppleTV+ show imagines an alternate 1960s where the Soviets put the first man—and then the first woman—on the moon, spurring the United States to bring women into the astronaut ranks. It’s a PR stunt, but it also leads to some real progress.

The show’s best character is a fictional version of Jerrie Cobb, who gets the triumphs and the moon shot that the real Cobb (or any of her fellow FLATs) never got to have. I will admit to tearing up at the episode dedicated to Cobb, which gives her a standing ovation from NASA’s women, as her fictional avatar embarks on her first of many trips to outer space.
 

Oh, it’s completely unsubtle, and a little cheesy. (Series creator Ron Moore also reuses his Battlestar Galactica storyline of putting his hot male hero into a sudden fat suit, to show depression, and spends way too much time on grim domestic drama.) So I recommend For All Mankind with asterisks. But I do think it’s worth watching—especially now, as the men behind Amazon, Tesla, and Virgin vie for a privatized sliver of space exploration—as a wistful, if not idealized, version of what NASA could have become. As long as you don’t mind subscribing to yet another tech CEO’s TV service ... thus giving Apple, too, a cut of the modern space race narrative.
 

Lady Bits

—“Are you allowed to criticize Simone Biles? A decision tree.” Also, adding Kerri Strug and her career-ending, ultimately-unnecessary 1996 vault to the Britney Spears list of “yeah, in retrospect, the public narratives around the young female celebrities of my teenage years were incredibly messed up.”
 
—Not that some of the current narratives are better! "Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in?” Amanda Knox, sharp and thoughtful about the new movie Stillwater and the consent she hasn’t been asked to give.
 
—Sometimes I cover crypto.
 
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