40 | New Scientist | 27 July 2019their immune systems are regulated,” says
Donoviel. “On a long duration deep-space
mission, where an infection could become
life threatening, we need to enable the crew
to treat themselves effectively.”
We also don’t know enough about the
consequences of space flight on any children
conceived once astronauts have returned to
Earth. While women returning to Earth have
a higher rate of miscarriage than the average
population, this effect disappears when age
is taken into account. “No data from theExplore the cosmos
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SA
literature suggests the rate of miscarriage
is higher in astronauts compared to women of
the same age,” says Jain. Both male and female
astronauts have become parents to healthy
children after going into space.
Although there is a lack of data, we are lucky
to have any at all, says Jain. “These women are
just going to do their jobs,” she says. “They are
not participants in a study.” Whether women
decide to menstruate in space or have children
afterwards is a personal choice. Perhaps more
data will be gathered when commercial space
flight takes off and more women go into space.
Until then, women find themselves
penalised in more everyday ways. Take the
spacesuits on the ISS, for example, which
were built in 1978, and originally came in
small, medium, large and extra large. An
attempt to cut back on costs in the 1990s led
NASA to stop repairing the small and extra-
large sizes. This may have seemed financially
sensible, but the loss of small sizes has had
serious consequences for women’s ability
to function in space.
At 5 foot 4, Catherine Coleman is the
shortest person to have qualified to perform
a spacewalk on the ISS. In order to prepare
herself for the task, she had to teach herself
to work inside a medium suit that was much
too large for her. Coleman compares the
experience to swimming underwater while
attached to an inflated exercise ball. As soon
as you start to dive down, the buoyancy of the
ball forces itself towards the surface, flipping
you upside down and dragging you up with it.
This makes it much more difficult to
perform tasks, with rogue air bubbles moving
every time you adjust your position. For those
unaware of the difference a badly fitting suit
makes, says Coleman, it could seem like you
aren’t up to the task. “People could assume
that you’re just kind of clumsy,” she says.
Luckily, when Coleman joined NASA she
met Kathryn Thornton, whose experience
spacewalking included time on the Hubble
Space Telescope. “She told me, ‘When they put
you in that medium, call me’,” says Coleman.
Together, the pair worked out how to create
padding to fill out the empty space in the
suit so that the air was distributed evenly.
Without Thornton’s expertise, says Coleman,
“I wouldn’t have known what to ask for”.
Almost 25 years after Coleman’s first
mission, women like Anne McClain are still
encountering problems with the spacesuits.
“They didn’t plan to do a spacewalk with two
women,” says Coleman. If the small spacesuits
hadn’t been eliminated, she says, there would
probably be a longer history of women
successfully completing spacewalks.Mae Jemison inspires a
new generation (above);
Anne McClain and Christina
Koch were due to perform
the first all-women
spacewalk (below)space. There are many reasons why astronauts
make the choice to control their periods, says
Jain. One is that NASA forbids pregnancy
during some astronaut training activities,
like diving, as well as in space. Another is that
spacesuits are designed to absorb bodily
fluids such as sweat, but not period blood.
The toilets on board the ISS don’t help either.
Water from urine is recycled into drinking
water. If any foreign material, like menstrual
blood, is detected in the toilet, the entire
contents are expelled instead of being recycled.
When the toilets were designed, period blood
wasn’t considered. “The engineering was not
built for women,” says Jain.
So far, most of the astronauts studied
have only spent months at a time in space.
On longer missions, such as those headed
for bases on another planet, questions of
pregnancy and childbirth are likely to arise.
A central concern is the risk of giving birth in
space, not only because of the risks it involves
on Earth, but the increased chance of infection.
On Earth, says Donoviel, we know that women
mount a stronger immune response than men,
but we don’t know what happens in space.
There, microgravity makes it difficult to
sterilise anything, meaning a routine
intervention during childbirth could quickly
lead to infection. In addition, there is a chance
that microgravity could lead to new pathogens
being created. On top of this, the distances
involved on deep space missions mean help
is far away, often with a significant time delay
in communications. “We know there are
differences between men and women in howPHILIPHINDS/HOFS
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