CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - A giant leap is about
to be made for womankind.
When space shuttle
Discovery blasts off Tuesday, a woman will be sitting in the commander's seat.
And up at the international space station, a female skipper will be waiting
to greet her.
It will be the first time
in the 50-year
history of spaceflight that two women are in charge of two spacecraft at
the same time.
This is no public relations
gimmick cooked up by NASA. It's coincidence, which pleases shuttle commander
Pamela Melroy and station commander Peggy Whitson.
"To me, that's one of the
best parts about it," said Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel who will be only
the second
woman to command a space shuttle flight. "This is not something that was
planned or orchestrated in any way."
Indeed, Melroy's two-week
space station construction mission was originally supposed to be done before Whitson's
six-month expedition.
"This is a really special
event for us," Melroy said. "... There are enough women in the program that
coincidentally this can happen, and that is a wonderful thing. It says a lot
about the first 50 years of spaceflight that this is where we're at."
Whitson - the first woman
to be in charge of a space station - arrived at the orbital outpost on a
Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 12. She flew there with two men, one a Russian
cosmonaut who will spend the entire six months with her.
Before the launch, an
official presented her with a traditional
Kazakh whip to take with her. It's a symbol of power, Whitson explained,
because of all the horseback and camel riding in Kazakhstan.
Smiling, she said she took
the gift as a compliment and added: "I did think it was interesting though,
that they talked a lot about the fact that they don't typically let women have
these."
At least it wasn't a mop.
The whip stayed behind on Earth.
Eleven years ago, just
before Shannon Lucid rocketed to the Russian space station Mir, a Russian space
official said during a live prime-time news conference that he was pleased she
was going up because "we know that women love to clean."
"I really haven't heard
very much like that at all from the Russian perspective," Whitson said in an
interview with The Associated Press last week. "Russian cosmonauts are
very professional and having worked and trained with them for years before we
get to this point, I think makes it better because then it doesn't seem unusual
to them either."
"So I think I'm luckier. Shannon was probably breaking more barriers in that way than I have been," added Whitson,
who spent six months aboard the space station in 2002.
Melroy, 46, a former test
pilot from Rochester, N.Y., and Whitson, 47, a biochemist with a Ph.D. who grew
up on a hog farm near Beaconsfield, Iowa, are among 18 female astronauts at
NASA. Seventy-three astronauts are men.
What's more, Melroy is the
only female shuttle pilot left at NASA. Eileen Collins, who in 1999 became the
first woman to command a shuttle, quit NASA last
year. Susan Kilrain, who flew as a shuttle pilot but never as a commander,
resigned in 2002. Both have children.
Melroy and Whitson are
married to scientists, and neither has children.
The countdown
started Saturday for Discovery's launch. There was concern about rain on
Tuesday morning, but meteorologists put the odds of acceptable weather at
liftoff time at 60 percent. No major technical problems were being tracked.
This will be Melroy's third
shuttle flight; her first two were as co-pilot. She became an astronaut in
1995, Whitson in 1996.
Their 1 1/2 weeks together
in orbit will be extraordinarily busy and the work exceedingly complex. The
shuttle is hauling up a pressurized compartment that will provide docking ports
for the European and Japanese laboratories that will be launched over the next
few months.
The 10 space fliers, seven
of them men, will attach the new compartment, named Harmony, to the space
station and move a girder and set of solar wings from one spot to another. Five
spacewalks will be conducted, including one to test a repair technique on
deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tiles.
Melroy and Whitson will
oversee it all.
Their male crewmates offer
plenty of praise. One of them - Daniel Tani - will report to both. He'll fly up
on Discovery and swap places with an astronaut who has been living on the space
station since June, and stay on board until another shuttle comes up in
December.
"The joke has been that my
life recently is run by women," said Tani, who is married with two young
daughters. "I have two bosses at work. I've got three bosses at home and as it
was pointed out recently, much of the time when we're running the robotic arm,
I'm the assistant to Stephanie" Wilson, a shuttle crew member.
"So far, I've survived all
of it so we'll see if I can get through the next couple months," he said with a
laugh.
It's more of a novelty for
Melroy's co-pilot, Marine Col. George Zamka. He never served with or for a
woman in any of his military flying units.
"I understand it's a
wonderful thing for young women to see Pam flying, but in terms of her, I look
at her as an individual with some tremendous skills," Zamka said.
Melroy and Whitson said
they don't know of any men - American or Russian - who would refuse to serve on
their crews. It wasn't always that way at NASA, which didn't accept women as
astronauts until 1978.
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