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Published on: 02/13/2026 - 5:58 p.m.

Sophie Adenot has just flown to the International Space Station (ISS). With the American Jessica Meir, they are the 65th and 66th women to leave Earth for its orbit, compared to more than 500 men. The conquest of space has only come to women little by little and there is still a lot to do because only 11% of astronauts are women, according to the UN. Reserve astronaut Meganne Christian, recruited by the ESA in 2022 in the same promotion as Sophie Adenot, tells us about the place of women in space programs, the reality of training and how she, an engineer specializing in nanomaterials, was selected from 22,523 applications to join this elite program.

NASA only opened recruitment for astronaut positions to women in 1978, while the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova into space in 1963 for 48 tours of the Earth in low orbit, when she was only 26 years old. At the time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and after the exploit of Yuri Gagarin (first human in space in 1961), there were many vocations and the USSR did not want to give the United States the first chance to send a woman into space. As for China, it did not send a woman into space until… 2012, with Liu Yang. To date, only three Chinese women have gone to space: Wang Yaping in 2013 and Wang Haoze in 2024.

Capital contributions but behind the scenes

Behind the scenes, however, many of them participated in the conquest of space – with or without humans. The African-American mathematician, physicist and later space engineer Katherine Johnson was recruited by NACA – ancestor of NASA – after being hired at the Langley Research Center, within the “West Area Computers” group, exclusively composed of black women in charge of complex calculations carried out by hand. Her sisters Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson contributed to the successful launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit and the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Today, her name is known and passed down to posterity. And many other women, engineers, astrophysicists and in many other shadowy positions, have contributed to these successes but seem to have remained unknown to space glory.

Since then, many other women have contributed to research, built robots, spaceships, studied the trajectories of the planets and thought about future missions to send humans again to the Moon or even to Mars. But this sector is still largely male: in 2024, there were still only 20% women in the space field and only 11% women astronauts, estimates the UN. These figures will change but the change is slow, very slow. Symbol of the slowness of movement, this monumental failure of the first 100% female extravehicular outing loudly announced by NASA for March 2019... and the soufflé which shamefully deflates when the American space agency has to cancel, for lack of spacesuits adapted to the size of women. It was not until October 2019 that Christina Koch and Jessica Meir were able to go out together, making this “diversity” ambition a reality with the “AllWomenSpacewalk”. “It was a huge disappointment but what we have to remember is that this flight finally took place and that today, there are spacesuits in the right size, all that has changed,” specifies the reserve astronaut.

This event was ultimately a sort of dress rehearsal for women before the next “diversity” challenge: sending a man and a woman to the Moon. Which has earned NASA accusations of "tokenism", that is to say the use of women as pawns ("token", in English) to show off a bona fide inclusiveness... in appearance, at least. But for Canadian-Malagasy engineer Farah Alibay, who works in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory attached to NASA, diversity is a source of intellectual wealth: "In aerospace, we are faced with very complex problems and to solve them, there is no single 'good' solution. (…) I don't need five Farahs who all come out of MIT and who would tell me 'your idea is great'. You need different life experiences to have creativity in solutions." The ESA even began recruiting "paraastronauts" like John McFall, and Michaela Benthaus, a German aerospace engineer who became paraplegic after an accident, was able to board a Blue Origin rocket for space.

Women, better candidates for long missions

More surprisingly, several recent studies estimate that women would also be better candidates for long-term space missions, both physically and psychologically. “We are smaller so we eat less and we consume less oxygen,” explains Meganne Christian. “Our immune system is more resilient and women are also more resilient than men.” Interesting assets for trips lasting several years, such as the conquest of Mars that Elon Musk or Donald Trump aspire to. Even if the Moon seems to have once again become the priority objective of space conquest, particularly for NASA.

But there remains one point on which men and women are not equal: the creation of a family. Cosmic radiation or microgravity can be dangerous for health and the size of the sample of men and women who went into space does not allow a definitive conclusion to be drawn. Except that astronauts are encouraged to save gametes before leaving for space even though no female astronaut has had a problem conceiving after a space mission. A subject that is all the more important as space tourism is developing at full speed, as shown by the Blue Origin flight (100% female) organized by Jeff Bezos in the presence, in particular, of Katy Perry.

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