"There is still a lot of work to be done"

This 100% feminine outing is a first in history, continues Yael Naze: "There are only about 10% of astronauts who are women – astronauts, cosmonauts or taikonauts, you take the nationality you want, so it's actually not long since we have, but it's still a minority".

At the beginning of the space conquest, women were "Present at many levels, including in control rooms or doing orbit calculations or things like that, but we had doctors who tried to see, especially on the American side, whether women In the end, they could not be as skilled as men in this kind of outing, so they were given a series of tests and realized that women were finally as good, if not better, than men. In fact, they had a lot of advantages: they were more resistant to a lot of things – loneliness, heat, temperature, pain, all you want – they were smaller and consumed So less, and at the level of space for the first space capsules, it was not bad, so there were plenty of advantages, but despite everything, we said: 'no, no, stay on the ground'. had to wait a very long time, the Americans ns only sent their first wife to space in the early 80's".

Star Trek

Thea series Star Trek has made things happen: "It's true that on the American side it was pretty amazing to see that it did not come from NASA or the drivers at all, but that it came from the media, quite simply, Gene Roddenberry, when he imagined Star Trek, he put a woman in the cockpit, initially she had a very important role, it was the second after the commander, but the chain did not really appreciate it and they said, 'no, not still so visible. "But he held on and he finally kept a communication officer who was a woman, and in addition a black woman, so it still made things to see this woman who was in the cockpit all the time and who finally knew how to cope, and the actress who played this astronaut became a militant and she started in the 70s to shoot a lot in schools, in universities, everywhere to tell women that it was absolutely necessary that NASA was therefore forced to recognize that yes, perhaps, and finally ended up selecting, at the end of the 1970s, its first women. So Sally Ride flew in the early 80s ".

Despite this, according to Yael Naze, "There is still a lot of work to be done, for example, for diving suits, although we have smaller sizes, but they are not adapted to the morphology of women, it remains men's diving suits. things that are not necessarily planned for women, for the moment, they remain a minority and with the private flights that are announced, we do not think that the trend will be reversed.If you take those who can afford these private flights, these tourist flights, the majority of billionaires are not women ".

Yael Naze wrote the book Female astronomy (CNRS editions).