Is There a Radiation Gender Barrier at NASA?
Female Astronauts Said To Face Discrimination Over NASA’s Space Radiation Concerns, Huffington Post
“Depending on when you fly a space mission, a female will fly only 45 to 50 percent of the missions that a male can fly,” Peggy Whitson, the former chief of NASA’s Astronaut Corps, said. “That’s a pretty confining limit in terms of opportunity. I know that they are scaling the risk to be the same, but the opportunities end up causing gender discrimination based on just the total number of options available for females to fly. [That’s] my perspective.”
All workers in the US are subject to radiation exposure standards, but NASA’s standards are unique in several respects.
The goal of NASA radiation exposure limits is to limit the calculated lifetime risk of radiation-induced cancer to a specified maximum. Thus NASA imposes limits on total lifetime exposure based on total allowable career risk of radiation-induced cancer. As a result exposure limits are higher for personnel who are older (less time for cancer to develop before you die of something else) and for males (an assumed risk for breast cancer is included). Medical radiation exposure, which can easily exceed flight radiation exposure, is also included in the career limit. It seems like a logical approach.
But the _goal_ of occupational safety standards in all other industries is NOT to limit total lifetime risk to a specified level, but rather to maintain a safe workplace. There is no threshold dose which is completely safe, so the emphasis of NRC regulations is to keep occupational radiation exposure as low as reasonably achievable (the “ALARA” principle). Consequently there is no difference between standards based on gender or age, and medical exposure is ignored as it doesn’t affect workplace safety and presumably provides medical benefits to the individual’s health that exceed the risk.
This fundamental divide between NASA and all other employers has been the case since the dawn of spaceflight. NASA may not be using an appropriate strategy. Since the risk of mortality due to occupational accidents in astronauts is much higher than the risk of mortality due to radiation induced cancer, astronauts are clearly willing to accept high personal risk. The question is, should they have the right to voluntarily accept comparable occupational risk from other sources as well?
The problem with NASA is that NASA hides technologies. NASA already has ways to prevent radiation. I do not know if a political issue, strategic, but NASA does not disclose many of the technologies.
Excuse me – how can you say “NASA does not disclose many of the technologies” with regard to radiation health safety and protection? You need to do a little research before you make such silly claims. There is over half a century of NASA research in this field and it has always been publicly available.
Indeed, NASA announced 11 new space radiobiology proposals to be funded today: http://spaceref.com/news/vi…
NASA has a gender barrier period….not just in space!
It still can is the old boys club….the code word for executive selections
is “she does not have the technical skills”…..That’s code word for she is not a geeky guy who spent his whole childhood playing with erector sets!
Check out most NASA managers who rise extremely quickly through the ranks…..it is always a guy! Women make it but it is a slow an almost never without a male sponsor…and you can take that comment anyway you choose to.
NASA is still an organization run by guys for the guys…..
The weakness of the agency still lies in their approach to human resources. Headquarters delegates all executive selections to the
Centers which ensures that selections must be bred and born at that
Center and that usually is males rather than female managers.
I agree with Turkman. This is an agency wide problem for NASA. Glad to see Peggy had the guts to call them on it!
“a geeky guy who spent his whole childhood playing with erector sets!” A geeky guy or girl that played with erector sets is more likely to have technical skills than one that did not.
Yes: we need those people with those “technical skills” working at NASA: the ones who spent their childhoods building model rockets, flying model airplanes, putting together LEGO robotics, soldering electronic circuits, building cubesats and balloonsats, participating in the NSS space-colony design competition and the FIRST robotic league, and so forth. We need more of that hands-on experience!
–HOWEVER, welcome to the 21st century: those kids are now just as likely to be females as males!
Agreed. My 12 year old daughter draws a lot, builds with Lego, and likes to write programs in Scratch. She has very similar skills compared to what I had at that same age (except I programmed in Basic, not Scratch), and I now have a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and write engineering software for a living.
What’s an “erector set”?
(Seriously, I do know, but I doubt if many under the age of 40 do.)
Hmm….I dont get to see too many people of color either….It’s gotten a bit (and I do mean bit) better since the 60’s…but not much.
Given a much higher risk of death by blunt force trauma (being blown up, disintegrated during re-entry, etc), wouldn’t it make more sense to inform female astronauts of the cancer risk and let them decide? To quote “Trip” Tucker, “Do you think they said ‘ Gee, I’d like to go to the moon today, but it seems a little risky’?” (Enterprise reference!).