Anatoly Perminov also sexist?
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by blue collar scientistI have previously reported on Anatoly Perminov, head of Roskosmos (the Russian space program), caving in to superstitious people when it came to the numbering of missions.
After today’s Soyuz TMA-11 mission landed 400 km (250 miles) off course, with astronauts returning from the International Space Station aboard, Anatoly Perminov is at is again:
Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.
“You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,” he said. “Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.
Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behavior or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.” He did not elaborate.
I guess it would just be too much trouble to engineer your vehicles to work right, and accept the occasional malfunction as both a design certainty1 and a cost of doing business. I guess it is far easier to just blame the women.
Hat tip to Jeff Foust on the Space Politics blog.
- One would, of course, expect the malfunctions to be held to a certain acceptable frequency, that critical systems have redundancy, etc. [↩]
Tags: Anatoly Perminov, Roskosmos, sexism, soyuz
April 24th, 2008 at 9:32 am
[...] Due to my interest in astronomy and space sciences, I’ve been following the story of the way-off-course landing of Soyuz TMA-11 - which now appears not only to have been way off course, but also to have entered with an incorrect, and dangerous, attitude. The whole story, I’m sure, will come out in the coming weeks - this sort of thing is sure to attract high-level attention from NASA and maybe even from Congress. In the meantime, I’ve already reported on Roskosmos head Anitoly Perminov blaming the problem on women. [...]