Space is no longer a purely male domain. The fact that a woman is now involved in the first moon mission in more than 50 years, as the American space agency (NASA) announced on Monday, was therefore also expected.
Peter-Philipp Schmitt
Editor in the section "Germany and the World".
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Her name is not really a surprise either: Christina Hammock Koch is to be the first woman to fly to the moon, and in just over a year and a half will also be an African-American, Victor Glover, for the first time.
It has been more than half a century since humans last flew to the moon. There were twelve manned Apollo missions in the sixties and seventies. And the adjective fit perfectly at the time: Of the 32 astronauts involved in the space flights, 32 were men.
NASA took a long time to address the women's issue
Female astronauts were still unthinkable for NASA at the time, even though the Russians had already sent a woman into space three years before the official start of the Apollo missions. Valentina Tereshkova was the first cosmonaut to receive this honour in 1963 – and then until 1982 the only female cosmonaut. It was a PR coup due to the East-West conflict, but "Chaika" (seagull), as her radio call name was, impressively demonstrated 48 times during her solo flight around the world that women are at least as good space travelers as men.
It took NASA a long time to even address the question of women. In the seventies, she even hired an African-American astronaut, Nichelle Nichols, who had been flying successfully through the endless expanses since 1967, as Lieutenant Uhura in the television series "Star Trek". Nichols was used, among other things, in the recruitment of young talent. It wasn't until 1983 that Sally Ride became the first American woman to make it into space as an astronaut.
Christina Koch has already been in space, and with 328 days she even holds the record. However, again only among women. The 44-year-old joined NASA's astronaut program ten years ago, and six years later she finally flew to the International Space Station (ISS).
Working as a flight engineer
A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who studied physics and electrical engineering, Koch began her career as an engineer at NASA. She also worked as a flight engineer on the ISS and completed several spacewalks there, including the first all-female on 18 October 2019 together with Jessica Meir. For her, this was proof that NASA is serious about humanity's task of really letting everyone explore space, she said in an interview afterwards.
If the Artemis 2 mission continues according to plan, Koch and three men will orbit the moon and come as close to it as the Apollo 17 astronauts last did in 1972. The four astronauts will move further away from Earth than any human before. Also in the Orion spacecraft will be the commanders of the Americans Reid Wiseman and the Canadian Jeremy Hansen.
Two German astronauts, Alexander Gerst and Matthias Maurer, will then also be able to hope for a moon landing, which is planned for the next step and for 2025 at the earliest. Seven Europeans have been selected for one of the future Artemis missions, but only one of them is a woman: the Italian Samantha Cristoforetti. A German astronaut has not yet made it into space.