NASA Encourages Women To Become Astronauts By Lowering Radiation Safety Standards

This would not work for a smarter sex, if that smarter sex would just ignore its little head.

New NASA radiation standards for astronauts seen as leveling field for women

h ttps://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/new-nasa-radiation-standards-astronauts-seen-leveling-field-women

By Anil OzaJun, 29 June 2021

A blue-ribbon panel has endorsed NASA.s plans to revise its standard for exposing astronauts to radiation in a way that would allow women to spend more time in space.

“If it’s not safe for women to be astronauts then we need to redefine ‘safety’.” Thus disproving any correlation between education and wisdom.

A report by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released on 24 June encourages NASA to proceed with its plans to adopt a new standard that limits all astronauts to 600 millisieverts of radiation over their career. The current limit is the amount of radiation that correlates with a 3% increase in the risk of dying from a cancer caused by radiation exposure.a standard that favored men and older astronauts whose cancer risk from radiation was lower. The proposed standard would limit all astronauts to the allowable dosage for a 35-year-old woman.

Segue

h ttps://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/30/1027445/nasa-space-radiation-astronaut-missions-women/

This means that at the low end [of the 3% standard], a 30-year-old woman could be exposed to no more than 180 mSv throughout her career; at the upper limit, a 60-year-old man could endure up to 700 mSv before being grounded.

End segue

The future of female empowerment never glowed so brightly. Not dying of radiation sickness is male privilege!

The changes are in line with current data and puts women on an equal footing, says Hedvig Hricak, [age 75,] a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and chair of the committee that wrote the report. .There’s no evidence for significant gender difference in the radiation exposure, and associated risk of cancer,. she says.

Her pic is textbook Karen. Her lies are textbook feminist.

The new standard comes as NASA gears up for renewed exploration of the Moon and, eventually, a mission to Mars. The change should remove gender from the list of factors used to decide who gets chosen for those missions, says Paul Locke, an environmental health expert at Johns Hopkins University who was not on the committee. .Women will not be penalized because they are, under the old model, at higher risk,. he says.

They had to go outside NASA to find an expert who sees no problem with confining men and women in zero privacy for months on end on a dangerous trip lasting longer than nine months. I’m not even talking pregnancy, I’m talking about men going for a walk without a space suit just to end the nagging.

Francis Cucinotta, a biophysicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, doesn’t agree with the report’s backing of a single dosage level. Instead, the former chief scientist for NASA.s radiation program thinks equity should come in the form of equal risk rather than equal dosages of radiation.

.[It] sounds like they’re just going to ignore the science and try to make it comfortable for everybody,. Cucinotta says, arguing that age, sex, and race affect an individual’s risk of developing cancer and should be factors when determining the amount of time astronauts can spend in space. .When they’re selected to be astronauts, there’s a lot of things where it’s not equal.it.s based on performance capability. But they’re not applying that model here..

Cucinotta would stick with the 3% increase in the risk of dying of cancer. For a Mars mission, which is expected to expose astronauts to 1000 millisieverts, he proposes raising that maximum risk to 5% after conducting research on countermeasures and weighing genetic markers that lower an astronaut’s risk of developing cancer.

He’s both correct and smart enough to frame his objection in terms of equity rather than “this is stupid”-style mansplaining. *sigh* Like me.

Although a mission to Mars is not planned for another decade, NASA also wants to improve how it tells astronauts about the risks. In particular, the agency proposed using a stoplight, color-coded system.using green for those at lowest risk, yellow for those with higher risk, and red for those that would exceed the lifetime radiation limit. Any astronaut on a mission expected to exceed the proposed limit would be asked to sign a waiver.

Is radiation exposure not already covered under the “let’s strap you to a pile of explosives built by the lowest bidder, light that candle and see what happens” waiver?

Ann Bostrom, a risk communication expert at the University of Washington, Seattle, who served on the committee, worries such a system may not be able to convey such complex information. .Sometimes if it’s too simplistic, it causes people to overlook nuances that they would otherwise see,. Bostrom says. .So [NASA] really needs to test this..

That makes two women who served on the committee to redefine safety so that women could pretend to be men. I want a group photo. *checks* Heavily paywalled, but this link to the first chapter…

h ttps://www.nap.edu/read/26155/chapter/1#v

8 of 16 are female AFAIK. None of them are employed by NASA but Georgetown and Harvard are represented. Here’s the Georgetown chick, Alejandra Hurtado De Mendoza:

Before & after what, I’m not sure. Left pic is Linkedin, right pic is researchgate. Maybe there’s two different AHdeMs? I’ve started to get paranoid about using Linkedin.

Cucinotta and others worry astronauts don’t have the perspective to make an informed decision to accept the likely health risks of their next mission. But Scott Kelly, [a former astronaut that spent nearly an entire year in space,] who was exposed to 240 millisieverts of radiation during his 20-year career.which translates to a 1.4% increase in his risk of developing cancer.pushes back.

.There are so many factors in whether you get a fatal disease,. he says. .You’re accepting a lot of other risks by flying in space, and this one is not the biggest..

This is not about risk. This is about female empowerment. This is girls wanting to play with the boys and the boys lying to her about the consequences in order to appease her… exactly Original Sin. But not to worry! Experts are developing a brave new form of birth control to help women handle the additional risk that doesn’t exist!

…Which will protect womens’ reproductive organs from both hard radiation and accidental groping from lonely men not allowed to use porn. News flash, tits: if you’re going to Mars then your reproductive organs are no longer needed. Indeed, the last thing you want is to have a baby upon reaching orbit. It’s about a nine-month trip, yes?

That’s the Astrorad radiation shield, if you’re interested. Not the military preggo-simulation aid for men. Remember, as quoted above by the chairwoman, .There’s no evidence for significant gender difference in the radiation exposure, and associated risk of cancer,” But the space community developed the Boobie Rad Shield anyway because reasons.

I close with an article from the Atlantic on Scott Kelly. Turns out, he has a twin brother astronaut and was intentionally kept in space to study the consequences of long-term weightlessness. Which involved genetic changes that no amount of lead shielding can prevent:

What a Year in Space Did to Scott Kelly

h ttps://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/what-happens-human-body-space/586966/

By Marina Koren, 11 April 2019

In the debate over whether human beings should set off to other worlds beyond Earth, one of the most compelling cons is this: Our bodies don’t like it.

Few people know this better than Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station from 2015 to 2016. Like other astronauts, Kelly served as a test subject in the study of space travel’s effects on the human body. Unlike other astronauts, Kelly has an identical twin, Mark, an astronaut himself. This gave researchers an uncommon opportunity to monitor the two brothers as they lived in two very different environments.one on Earth and the other 250 miles above it.

According to their results, published Thursday in Science, Scott experienced a number of changes that Mark did not. Most of those changes went away after Scott returned to Earth. The long stint in space, the researchers say, produced some unexpected changes.but did not lead to any clinically significant health differences. …

Some of the most intriguing changes occurred at the chromosomal level, in the protective bits at the ends of chromosomes that make sure they replicate properly when cells divide. These caps, known as telomeres, are known to shorten as a result of stress. Researchers expected to see this change in Scott. Instead, the astronaut’s telomeres lengthened. .You might at first think, Oh, this is great. He’s going to live longer,. Susan Bailey, the Colorado State University professor who led the telomere research, once told me. “But the opposite side of that coin is always that it also increases cancer risk, because one of the very first things cancers do is turn telomerase on to maintain telomere length so they can essentially be immortal..

Most of the telomeres bounced back after Scott returned to Earth, but he now has more short telomeres than he did before his mission. In general, this puts someone at greater risk for quicker aging, Bailey said.

Researchers found some surprises in Scott’s gene expression. On Earth, changes in gene behavior occur in response to shifts in routine activities, such as sleep and diet, and Mark’s gene expression changed as well. But the changes to Scott’s gene expression were distinct, and scientists were stunned at the number of changes they recorded, especially in mitochondrial genes, which help the body produce energy, and in genes related to the immune system. More than 90 percent of these genes returned to normal when Scott came back. (This doesn’t mean, researchers are careful to note, that the rest are somehow .mutated,. as some news reports erroneously suggested last year.)

Researchers also detected changes in the mechanism that cells use to control gene expression, but they were too tiny to matter by the time Scott came back.

.We don’t know yet if these changes are good or bad,. explains Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who led this part of the research. .This could just be how the body responds. But the genes are perturbed, so we want to see why and track them to see for how long..

We don’t know what space will do to our bodies long-term, but we do know that the presence of a goddess, I mean, commissar, that is to say, feminist is absolutely essential for any new accomplishments in SPHESSS!!!