Highlights from an Emmy Award-winning digital actuality expertise have fun ladies dwelling and dealing in area.
“Girls in Spaceflight” launched Wednesday (March 8) on Meta Quest to deal with the ladies astronauts who have been featured within the four-part “House Explorers: The ISS Expertise,” which was launched in 2020. The collection garnered Canadian creators Felix & Paul Studios a Primetime Emmy Award in 2021 for Excellent Interactive Program.
The free mini-VR expertise, accessible right here (opens in new tab), launched to coincide with Worldwide Girls’s Day together with Girls’s Historical past Month; the latter runs for the month of March.
If digital actuality headsets are your factor, then remember to try our finest VR headsets and VR headsets offers guides for all the perfect merchandise and reductions. We even have an in depth checklist of the finest VR area video games.
Associated: Worldwide House Station info, historical past & monitoring
The astronauts themselves shot the footage on the Worldwide House Station utilizing specifically designed cameras that allowed digital actuality customers to swivel their view in actual time as a narrative performs out within the headset. A central focus level can be accessible for folks watching on flat screens.
Outstanding ladies featured embody aviator and Mercury 13 participant Jerrie Cobb; NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, who carried out the first all-female spacewalk in 2019; and NASA astronaut Anne McClain, one of many few identified LGBTQ+ astronauts.
“My favourite a part of ‘Girls in Spaceflight’ is Anne McClain’s mother asking if the children and lecturers who ridiculed her dream to turn out to be an astronaut labored at NASA —as a result of in the event that they didn’t, then their opinion simply did not matter,” Katarina Soukup, vice-president of manufacturing at Felix & Paul Studios, stated in a weblog submit (opens in new tab).
(opens in new tab)
McClain stated her strategy was to maintain making use of for an astronaut job till NASA advised her “no” definitively, Soukup stated, including that anecdote was an excellent instance of “the ability of reducing out the noise and the naysayers.”
Whereas Soukup stated the ladies astronauts themselves didn’t need to “fixate on reaching historic milestones as a result of it’d imply compromising security,” she stated that girls will notch extra spaceflight achievements because the varieties of recruitment turn out to be extra various. For instance, in October 2022, Nicole Mann turned the primary Native American girl to achieve area. Mann, a member of the Wailacki of the Spherical Valley Indian Tribes in northern California, arrived on the ISS on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission, which is able to return to Earth this weekend.
NASA counts 73 ladies astronauts who’ve flown as of March 2023, however the quantity will increase when contemplating suborbital journeys. The variety of folks in area total is greater than 600, once more various relying on which flights are counted. The overwhelming majority of flights was once by white males, largely as a result of NASA and different companies drew from the army, however that has quickly modified in current a long time amid worldwide efforts to extend range.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a e book about area drugs. Observe her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Fb (opens in new tab).
