Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Without much fanfare, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will return to Earth on Saturday night—it will be Sunday morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan—aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Quietly, she will have spent 288 days in space, or nearly 10 months. The duration of her spaceflight will fall short of only one other US astronaut, Scott Kelly, who returned to Earth in 2016 with a lot more attention after 340 days.
Whitson is known around NASA's Johnson Space Center as perhaps the agency's most efficient astronaut in space, regularly getting ahead of her timelines, research, and maintenance tasks for each day. Mission controllers typically have to come up with extra work. Partly because of this, she is one of only a handful of NASA astronauts to have been selected to serve three rotations on the International Space Station.
As a result of these three long duration spaceflights, the biochemist has now logged 665 days in space. This cumulative time in space easily ranks her as the American flier with the most experience in orbit, far above the 534 days tallied by NASA's Jeff Williams and 520 days of Scott Kelly. Whitson only lags behind seven Russian men, several of whom spent time both on the International Space Station as well as Russia's Mir station.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:00AM (4 children)
It gets to show that even women can be ironmen, right?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:04AM (3 children)
Well, she certainly looks like a man.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:26AM
Ethanol burns, who knew?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @10:37AM
She looks competent, I'd say. She doesn't look especially attractive, but she's not unattractive. Then again, she's almost as old as I am - people our age don't generally look drop-dead gorgeous. Maybe your gaydar is out of adjustment? Wonder if I can find any old photos of her - I'll bet she was pretty damned good looking twenty years ago . . .
Seven years ago, she's not "hot" but showing less age - https://archive.org/details/s120e008866 [archive.org]
In 2002, she's not looking bad at all - https://archive.org/details/iss005e21040 [archive.org]
Seems everything about her has "updated" photos of her. Chase down a bio, and a very recent photo graces the page. It's like someone is trying to eliminate any photos that might show an attractive young woman. Let me look some more . . .
Here we go, a direct link to a youthful looking Whitson - https://archive.org/details/iss005e21040 [archive.org] Found with Google images, but if you visit the page directly, the photo is updated with another, in which she is at least 50 years old. Pretty, ehhh?
I got sidetracked for a few minutes. There really aren't very many female astronaut photos that make them look attractive. Most of them have little if any makeup, no airbrushing, no skintight clothing, very little skin showing (face, neck, arms, in a few cases shins). The kind of woman who wants to fly into space probably isn't much into glamour, and her employers aren't either.
There are a couple notable exceptions though. Resnick seems to get special treatment, and Seddon has a seemingly touched-up photo here - https://www.embibe.com/exams/11-top-women-astronauts-of-all-time/ [embibe.com]
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday September 03 2017, @01:38PM
Go Ethanol! Tear down cisgendered privilege!
(Score: 2) by deimios on Sunday September 03 2017, @07:32AM (4 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @07:59AM (3 children)
Your inability to link to a Wikipedia article is proof of your misogyny.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:11AM (2 children)
Does this work better? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riri_Williams [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:15AM (1 child)
I apologize for "fixing" that link. It's utter crap. Illiterate simians wrote most of that page. It's hard to say, but I suspect they were orangutans. Could have been any of the great apes, I suppose, but it seems like orangutan chatter to me.
(Score: 3, Funny) by dry on Monday September 04 2017, @02:12AM
Orangutans are actually pretty technically literate, try googling "Orangutan zoo escape".
The story told by zookeepers about the great apes when given a screwdriver.
The Gorilla jumps back in fear, and then tries to eat it.
The Chimp takes the screwdriver and tries everything except using it as a screwdriver.
The Orangutan acts disinterested, loses it and then disassembles his cage in the middle of the night.
Also the Librarian was an Orangutan, handy for getting to the high shelves but easy to bribe with a banana.