Space, women's final frontier

Today could see another great achievement in space exploration. Another great excuse for boys to celebrate their toys.

This may be a great day for space exploration but it's no good if you happen to be a shy and retiring Martian. Today is the day that the earthlings are due to pay a visit to the Red Planet via the Pathfinder Probe and its robotic runaround, the Sojourner Rover. The mission is due to last seven days, its cost is put at $266m and the pictures are expected to be magical, if a bit red.

Millions will watch from around the world - the BBC has an entire Weekend in Mars planned, including weather reports - and inevitably we will be seduced by the science created by this ultimate boys-and-toys adventure. Even as you read this, ever more complicated graphics are being created to show how the probe is going to burn through the planet's thin atmosphere, pop its parachute, and bounce on to the boulder-strewn surface, protected by a "gang" of airbags. Pathfinder should hit the ground at about 45mph and bounce four to 10 times.

As so often with these space missions that cost $266m, nobody knows if it will work. "The landing is considered so iffy that space scientists describe the mission mainly as an engineering study," reported Newsday in New York. It is amazing that the newspaper managed to find a scientist still speaking a human language. Most seem to have given up. Airbags have been tested in "rock-studded impact zones" and are "designed in five layers of Vectran". Everything is risky, exciting and "neat". "Three bang, bang, bang technologies have to go, go go," said one scientist of the landing.

There is another space event this week: the publication of a slim volume called Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, written by Constance Penley, a professor of film and women's studies in that other alien culture, California. If you could pick one person with whom to watch Pathfinder "go, go, go" you could do worse than choose Ms Penley.

But don't be surprised if she talks about sex more than space. You may have got the impression over the years that space was the final frontier - a place where the Right Stuff is never wrong and the atmosphere oozes JFK feelgood factor. Ms Penley does not think so. Space, she says, is really about gender politics.

Forget all that stuff about airbags and impact zones and Martian life- forms. She's got bigger questions. Why won't Nasa take women seriously? What planet can you find New Men on? And, finally, why did it take so long to put a woman in charge of the Starship Enterprise? As you can see, it's the kind of book that you have to read carefully to follow the plot.

It is also hard to remember that this is non-fiction. She is at her best when looking at Nasa, the American space agency, which Penley claims is "pale, male and stale". But boys who love toys need money to buy them, and few need quite as much money as Nasa. Women are good PR, good television and, therefore, good fund-raisers. It is not exactly girlpower, but it is a way in.

It has been a rather painful learning curve. Sally Ride, an astrophysicist who piloted a jet to her own wedding, may have been America's first woman in space, but she was not the last to endure endless questions about lipstick. Last year the Russians welcomed Shannon Lucid on to Mir, confident she "would brighten things up", because "women love to clean". Roberta Bondar was described in a headline as doing "housework" on the Discovery shuttle, but her most controversial moment in space came when the boys decided to substitute Bondar for the coin tossed up in the air before the Super Bowl kick-off back on earth. Bondar obediently curled up in the foetal position and was "flipped". Her hometown newspaper said it showed what a good sport she was.

Up until 1986 Nasa had picked its female astronauts from a pool of over- achievers (and good sports) with PR in mind. Christa McAuliffe was also chosen for media reasons, but this New Hampshire teacher was no over-achiever. "The media hook was precisely her representative mediocrity," says Penley, "which was immediately given a more appealing spin as her ordinariness."

She may not have been the best teacher for the job but she was the best girl next door and Nasa launched a public relations frenzy. Her fellow astronauts were not impressed and she was told "in serious jest" never to touch any of the 1,300 switches in the shuttle cockpit simulator. The sad part of it is that she probably didn't really want to anyway.

The Challenger disaster is considered by some to be as traumatic for America's younger generation as JFK's shooting was for their parents, and entire articles have been written on the jokes told in the aftermath. Ms Penley has quite a collection herself. This was the first sick one she heard:

What were Christa McAuliffe's last words?

"Hey guys, what's this button?"

The message behind this - and others - is that women are a technological disaster zone, incapable of setting a video, much less anything else. Six men and one woman died on their way into space, but the joke was only on the one.

Nasa understood this all too well and has reacted by choosing incredibly over-qualified women for space. Take Canadian Julie Payette. She is a research engineer in computer sciences, a linguist, a musician, a triathlete and a trapeze artist. Mae Jemison, the doctor astronaut who flew on the 1992 Endeavor voyage, has studied medicine and chemical engineering and worked in the peace corps in Liberia, is fluent is six languages, and is an artist, too. Most women cannot compete at this level; men, of course, do not have to.

At this point we need to beam aboard the Starship Enterprise for a moment. It is Penley's well-researched theory that Star Trek and Nasa are inextricably linked in people's minds and in reality. This suits Nasa because Star Trek enjoys the kind of popularity it can only dream of.

This goes way beyond the bumper sticker mentality. Some politicians may be branded as Vulcans, but others swear by the the Federation's Prime Directive not to interfere in developing cultures. In its annual Women We Love issue, Esquire magazine celebrated Barbara Adams, the alternative Whitewater juror who reported for duty in full Star Trek uniform, complete with tricorder and phaser.

No surprise, then, that Nasa has named its Mission Control computers Scotty and Uhura, and the shuttle's on-board computer just had to be Spock. But when it comes to equal opportunity, Star Trek has been taking lessons from the real world. It took 78 episodes, six movies and two more television spin-off series before there was a female captain for the Enterprise. And Ms Penley believes that both have something else in common: they are afraid of that other frontier, sex.

This word does not seem to be in the space vocabulary. It is certainly not the kind of thing you see listed as a shuttle experiment. Some have even gone so far as to call Nasa "puritanical" in its attitude to sex in space. Evidently one anthropologist was fired for merely noting how important the topic was if both sexes were going to be part of long-range space exploration.

Penley is extremely practical on this point: "If Nasa refuses to study contraceptive techniques in weightlessness, for example, this will ensure that women do not go into space, given the danger and inconvenience of pregnancy in an environment with so many unknown factors."

These are not the kind of thoughts that space usually inspires. For most of us it is still a place of wonder, and the pictures from Mars will hardly inspire ideas about contraceptive devices. But Ms Penley has a point. When I was a girl, my father said that one day our whole family would travel into space for a holiday. That was the dream, but the reality cannot change until the space culture does, too. Women may be from Venus and men from Mars, but the future, certainly, begins on Planet Earth.

`Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America', by Constance Penley, is published by Verso, pounds 11.