Europe’s goal: Diversify space crews
Agency encourages women to apply for astronaut openings
BRUSSELS — In a rare opportunity for Europeans dreaming of leaving the mundane duties of life on Earth, the European Space Agency is recruiting new astronauts for the first time in over a decade, with more diversity as the goal.
Of the seven astronauts from the agency ready to be sent on missions to the International Space Station, only one of them, Samantha Cristoforetti, a 43-year-old Italian, is a woman.
But the agency is now encouraging women to apply for the two dozen new slots.
It is also initiating an effort to allow people with disabilities to go into space, a program called the “Parastronaut Feasibility Project.”
“You do not need to be a superman or a superwoman,” Lucy van der Tas, the agency’s head of recruitment, said in an interview. “We want to motivate as many people as possible to apply. But in the end, we are looking for very specific candidates.”
The goal is to select four to six astronauts, as well as around 20 reserves who could take part in shorter missions. Recruits with disabilities would first join the reserve group and work with the agency to figure out any modifications needed for them to go into space.
Paradoxically, the difficulties of living in space for humans is a reason to encourage opportunities for astronauts with disabilities, Cristoforetti said. “When it comes to space travel, everyone is disabled,” she said. The solution is “just technology.”
To decide what types of disabilities are compatible with space missions, the European Space Agency, which represents 22 European countries, consulted
the International Paralympic Committee and came up with a system of categories: red (incompatible), green (compatible) and yellow (compatible with some technical modifications to the mission).
Recruitment is open to people with leg amputations, with marked differences in leg length or who are especially short.
But the hope is to open the program further.
“We feel strongly that if we don’t start now, it will never happen,” van der Tas said. “We are opening the door to a certain part of the society, so they too can dream of becoming an astronaut.”
At this stage, there is no guarantee that an astronaut with disabilities will go to space.
The successful candidate will not be “a space tourist who happens also to have a disability,” said Dr. David
Parker, the agency’s director of the robotics and spaceflight program. Van der Tas added that recruits would need the necessary motor skills to work and leave the space station independently in an emergency.
Given that life on the space station resembles a constant confinement, they would also have to be able to see and hear.
“Once everyone is locked away in a small space together, the only way they can communicate with anybody else is via a screen,” van der Tas said.
The astronaut selection procedure takes 18 months and includes psychological tests, medical screening, psychometric screening and interviews.
Ultimately, the lucky few will set out on missions to the International Space Station or to the moon or even to Mars. But first, they will have to undergo several
years of tough training, which includes learning survival skills, how to run the spacecraft, mastering Russian and spending up to eight hours underwater simulating weightlessness.
Applicants must have some minimum requirements, the agency said, including a master’s degree in natural sciences, medicine, engineering, mathematics or computer science, or a test-pilot license, and a minimum of three years of relevant work experience.
Applicants need to show that they will be able to deal with the varied challenges of space travel. Daily life in a space station consists of washing with wet towels instead of showers, arduous physical effort, meals of dehydrated, packaged food, and continual weightlessness, which transforms everyday activities like sleeping and urinating.
Astronauts must also be
willing to participate in life science experiments. One of their principal tasks is finding out what the effect of space is on human bodies.
“Space is actually quite a hostile environment for humans,” said Jennifer Ngo-Anh, the agency’s research and payloads program coordinator. “There are high levels of radiation, crews are living autonomously in confined and confining spacecrafts and are exposed to zero gravity, which leads to dramatic body adaptations.”
Loss of muscle, bone mass and strength, as well as loss of blood volume, are among the temporary physical consequences of a long stay in space.
“You need to be an all-rounder,” van der Tas said. “You don’t have to be the best at anything, but you need to be good at many things.”
So far, 90% of all astronauts have been men. The European Space Agency has sent only two women into space, Cristoforetti and Claudie Haigneré, who went there twice, in 1996 and 2001.
During the last recruitment round in 2008, only about 16% of the 8,000 applicants were women.
Recruiting more women has scientific benefits, van der Tas said.
“Space affects us very differently, depending on age, gender and ethnicity,” she said. “The astronaut corps worldwide is very small, so we need to diversify it as much as possible.”
To try to promote a scientific career among young women, there was even a Barbie doll modeled after Cristoforetti in 2019.
Cristoforetti said in an interview last year that the only time she felt being a woman was any sort of hindrance was when she had to put on a spacesuit sized for a man.
But in her book, “Diary of An Apprentice Astronaut,” published in English this summer, she admits that she experienced “discrimination that was subtle enough to have been ambiguous.”
Cristoforetti has just started training for another mission, which usually takes about two years. When she goes, she will leave behind her young daughter, now 4 years old.
Then she might face some of the challenges portrayed in a recent film, “Proxima,” which tells the story of a French astrophysicist, a single mother with a young daughter, preparing for a one-year mission in space.
Cristoforetti met with the lead actress, Eva Green, and the movie’s director, Alice Winocour, who said she wanted the film to be “as close to the reality as possible.”
“Cinema doesn’t often show women as both mothers and superheroines,” Winocour said. “It’s time that women should assume that you can be an astronaut and a mother too.”
MONTREAL — About a decade ago, comedian Mike Ward, of Quebec, mocked the voice of a well-known disabled teenage singer in a stand-up routine, roasting him for being off-key, making fun of his hearing aid and calling him “ugly.”
But he said he had defended the boy to others because he would soon die. When the teen did not die of his illness, the comedian joked, he tried to drown him.
Last week, the question of whether a comedian has the constitutional right to offend came under a national spotlight at Canada’s Supreme Court after Ward appealed a decision that the comedy routine discriminated against the singer, Jeremy Gabriel.
The case, which has grabbed headlines, is a rare example of a comedy routine becoming the subject of the highest court in the land and could have implications for free speech in Canada.
Renee Theriault, executive legal officer at the Supreme Court, wrote by email that, to her knowledge, the case is “unprecedented.”
Comedy has long reflected the cultural mores of a nation, sometimes exposing the fault lines in a society and testing the legal limits of acceptable speech. Canada and countries the world over, including the United States, have come under pressure to respect minority rights, spurring a debate of where to draw the line between harmful speech and freedom of expression.
In Canada, which prides itself on its humanism, Ward’s case has been particularly polarizing.
On the one side are civil libertarians and artists who argue that offensive jokes,
however egregious, are protected under the Canadian constitution’s freedom of expression provision. The Supreme Court policing comedy, they say, risks having a chilling effect on artistic expression across Canada.
Carissima Mathen, a professor of law and constitutional legal expert at the University of Ottawa, said that a ruling against Ward could potentially open the door to people in other provinces bringing legal cases against comedians that target them.
Under Canada’s constitution, the bar for interfering with freedom of expression is high, according to Mathen, and generally requires extreme speech; for example, speech that promotes hatred against an identifiable group.
“I don’t believe that Ward’s statements rise to that extreme level,” she said.
But Gabriel, advocates of disability rights and some human rights lawyers argue that even comedy should have limits and that bullying a disabled teenager is discriminatory and violates the right to dignity, which is protected under Quebec law.
Gabriel has Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare congenital disease characterized by skull and facial deformities. He was born deaf and received a hearing aid implant at age 6. At 8, he captured hearts across Quebec after singing the national anthem at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game. He went on to meet Celine Dion in Las Vegas, serenade Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican and write an autobiography.
Gabriel, now a 24-yearold political science student in Quebec City, said the comedy routine — and the laughter it provoked
— destroyed his self-esteem during difficult teenage years when he was already grappling with being disabled. As a result of the routine, he said he was bullied at school and became suicidal, while his parents were crushed. He said that after his complaint against Ward, he also received death threats from the comedian’s fans.
“You are already dealing with prejudices when you have a disability, and the process of self-acceptance is even harder when you are a teenager,” he said. “It became a thousand times harder when people were laughing at the idea of me dying. I felt like my life was worth less than others.”
Ward, through his manager, declined an interview request.
A stand-up comic who has twice won “comedian of the year” in a prestigious Quebec comedy award
show, Ward has appeared on television internationally and is known for his trenchant comedic style. In 2008, his joke about a 9-year-old girl who was abducted spurred death threats against him.
The Supreme Court case took root in 2010, when the comedian used his act to make fun of people in Quebec seen as being above criticism and targeted celebrities like Dion. He also targeted Gabriel and, among other jokes, made fun of his hearing aid, calling him “the kid with the subwoofer” on his head. The show was performed hundreds of times between 2010 and 2013 and disseminated online.
In 2012, Gabriel’s family complained to a commission enforcing Quebec’s human rights code, and in 2016, the province’s human rights tribunal ruled that the teenager’s dignity had been breached. Ward was ordered to pay $35,000 in damages to Gabriel and $7,000 to his mother.
After Ward appealed, the Quebec Court of Appeal in 2019 upheld the decision but dismissed damages awarded to Gabriel’s mother. “Comedy is not a crime,” Ward said after the verdict. A ruling is expected in the next few months in his appeal to the Supreme Court.
The divisions over the case were apparent last week at a Supreme Court hearing during which some of the justices, on at least one occasion, appeared irked by the arguments put forward by Ward’s lawyer Julius Grey.
Addressing the court’s nine justices, Grey argued the right “not to be offended” was not a right in Canada. Moreover, he contended that, by singling Gabriel out as a “sacred cow” that needed puncturing, he had been offering him a sense of “equality.”
The comment provoked an incredulous response from Justice Russell Brown. “Come on! Don’t go that far,” the judge told the court. “We’re not talking about Galileo or Salman Rushdie. He’s not a hero.”
Justice Sheilah Martin also weighed in. “We’re talking about someone who said he tried to drown a 13-year-old who has a physical disability,” she said.
Grey said in an interview that Ward’s comedy routine did not constitute discrimination.
“Discrimination means depriving someone of a good or service — not laughing at them,” he said.
Gabriel countered that he was singled out for ridicule because of his disability and it had shaped his life.
“It is hard to live with the consequences of a joke targeting you over your disability,” he said. “I’m not sure how I managed to build my self-confidence after that. I have grown up since I first heard the joke. I want to move on.”