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why did it take over 20 years to put the 1st usa women in space?

Most if not all early astronauts were straight from the Air Force (test pilots) which was rather light on women.
 
They had to wait for her to finish doing her hair.

Bastard. :p

I saw the thread title, and hoped & prayed no-one else had got to this exact joke yet. The title is THE perfect set-up line for it. Damn my not being online in time! You have beaten me and are no longer a padawan but a true Jedi Master. :lol:
 
I always hate these kind of questions. It sounds as if someones picked a random woman on the street and given her the keys.
 
They had to wait for her to finish doing her hair.

Bastard. :p

I saw the thread title, and hoped & prayed no-one else had got to this exact joke yet. The title is THE perfect set-up line for it. Damn my not being online in time! You have beaten me and are no longer a padawan but a true Jedi Master. :lol:

What can I say, I learned from the best. ;)

Alternate replies included "They had to wait for her to finish doing her makeup" and "All possible missions coincided with that time and nobody wanted to be stuck in a metal tube for months at a time with that."
 
Since the spacecraft were considered experimental the astronauts were recruited from military test pilots, which were all male. Apparently space flight was considered an advanced application of flight testing.

There were also crew waste considerations (don't want to get to graphic). Because of launch delays one early astronaut had to make his suborbital flight in a wet spacesuit. That flight was intended to be so brief NASA planed on him waiting until he was aboard the recovery ship. Through Apollo crew waste collection equipment was pretty primitive and in some aspects dependent on male anatomy.

I'm not sure what provisions the early Soviet spacecraft had that got around such issues. The Soyuz spacecraft in use by the Soviets and subsequently Russian agencies for about 40 years have crew waste collection facilities in the forward orbital/docking compartment that is jettisoned before reentry.

Shuttle crews wear adult incontinence products within their orange pressure suits as a contingency against launch and deorbit delays. Those products are also in place within the EVA suits used for telescope maintenance and space station construction (EVAs are often six to eight hours long).
 
could have been much earlier..
http://www.astronautix.com/astrogrp/mer31961.htm

http://www.astronautix.com/astrogrp/femp1962.htm

NASA's reasoning was the fact that the Mercury's suit waste disposal systems were very primitive and male orientated..to change the systems to accept female anatomy was seen as unacceptable in cost..(actually to me it seemed like a rationalization to exclude female astronauts due to possible adverse publicity should a female astronaut be lost)..
 
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