"Twelve women are winding up five weeks of medical tests at NASA's Ames Research Center In Mountain View, Calif., in which they have been spun, examined, and studied in a research project to help set medical standards for candidates for flight on the Space Shuttle scheduled for operation at the end of this decade."


All twelve women involved in the study were Air Force nurses; the study was intended to test the stresses of space flight during "the time when persons other than pilot-trained astronauts will be making these flights."


Bedrest was an essential component of the study, which I'm assuming is where all of these cheesecake astro-babe pictures came from: "During the bedrest period, the subjects had to remain horizontal at all times, except during meals when they were permitted to raise themselves on one elbow."


"Television, stereo, books, other entertainments, and a lot of needlework by the participants helped make non-testing periods less wearing."


One of the Air Force nurses is strapped down to be tested during a simulation of reentry acceleration forces.


This woman is wearing prismatic glasses, which allow her to read her Cosmopolitan while remaining completely horizontal. Which is good news for future astronauts who hope to trap an alien lifeform with 10 Sexy Tricks.


And this, of course, is Sally Ride, who became the first American woman to travel into space, nearly 10 years later.

[Sally Ride pic via Getty.]

Aliens that resemble "little people who look strange to us" and possess technology that is much more "sophisticated" than ours and if they weren't so goddamn peaceful "we'd be gone by now." Which me wonder — and here's your "Jezebel angle," dykes! — are women more or less likely than men to believe this guy. Surely someone has polled them!

Okay, if you said "men" you can pat yourself on your surface area because 69% of men believe in life on other planets, to 51% of women, which reminded me I recently got an email from my uncle, an uncle who used to work at NASA, because he has a daughter who is somehow involved in this whole John Edwards love child scandal, and he thinks it is a shame that the mainstream media is not paying enough attention to it, not because it is so epically important but for the fact that he gave up on the space program a long time ago; decided it was a waste of money, that it was always going to be struggling for funding and relevance because too large a portion of its purpose was devoted to the investigation of Unknown Unknowns as they say, and people — women especially! I have the data to prove it! — don't really care much for investigating things they can't really control, which one one hand is fair enough, but on another hand, leaves us wasting time gossiping — oh my God, when in the UK I read this survey that said 80% of British women's workdays is spent somehow on gossip, which sounds doubtful to me but I can't prove it either way — about people and things we cannot control but at least know to be real, because they are incessantly being photographed, to the point that when some piece of gossip occurs like the Edwards scandal, whose credibility as I see it is primarily being undermined by the fact that we do not want it to be true, for the sake of Elizabeth or the children or whatever — we ignore it as part of an interesting new tradition I might call "Original Cynicism." We ignore it because we do not want to believe human nature to be that bad, even though we fully know it to be capable of far crueler, so we shut it out I guess and move on to the next animal picture, which is fine, sure, but puppies are not the beings with the far superior technology which could be deployed to obliterate us in a millisecond! Were their intentions malevolent. Which the aliens', apparently, are not! How interesting, right? That they are superior to us, and at the same time also possibly kinder! But Moe that is so sappy, you say, is that how you are going to end this post? But what can I say folks, if you have gotten this far into any of my posts without saying "I call bullshit" or "This makes no sense" you have made everything worthwhile for the past year and a half.

Aliens Exist, But NASA Covers Them Up, Says Astronaut [Telegraph]
Ed Mitchell Apollo 14
Edgar Mitchell [Wikipedia]
Do Americans Believe In Life On Other Planets? [Cosmic Paradigm]

One of the "trailing spouses" interviewed for the CNN piece, Dayna Steele, is a former radio host who just wrote a book, and she's married to Charles Justiz, 55, a NASA research pilot. The couple has been fighting recently because Steele's media appearances are becoming a bone of contention. "I have tried very hard to schedule around my husband's full-time job and keep him posted on my schedule, confirming dates before I book them," Steele says. "Then, he started scheduling things over mine without telling me." To which her husband responds: "We've had some collisions…I can't call NASA and say, 'Excuse me, I can't come in because my wife has a book signing.'"

And really — he has a point. Steele acknowledges that Justiz's job is the one with long term stability and benefits, so it would be foolish for her job to take precedence as his is necessary for their financial solvency. It seems like a vicious cycle: women often take jobs that are innately more flexible (the other woman interviewed for the CNN story was in PR), and so they don't really have a leg to stand on. However, like all things in long term relationships, each major move a couple makes takes discussion and compromise on both parts.

[Image via CA Magazine]

Career Couples Fight Over Who's The 'Trailing Spouse' [CNN]

Earlier: Why Women Are Opting Out Of The Hard Sciences

It's not like we're talking about peeing standing up or fertilizing our own eggs here. The news story is literally that two highly intelligent, well-trained and (presumably) ambitious women got to the top of their mutually-chosen profession and happened to do so at nearly the same time. It's great that they've broken yet another glass ceiling, but why is it the biggest news out of the space program since the diaper-wearing stalker lady astronaut?

In what is surely completely unrelated news, because no government agency would do this sort of thing just to get public attention, NASA's funding for Fiscal Year 08 has yet to be passed (since Congress and the President are dancing around the appropriations bills) and some people are saying that it's not nearly enough money anyway.

Space Docking, With Women at the Helm [NY Times]
One Giant Leap For Womankind As Two Female Astronauts Link Up In Orbit For The First Time [Daily Mail]
Making Sperm, No Men Necessary [NPR]
Astronaut's star was on the rise at NASA [CNN]
More NASA budget reaction [Space Politics]
FY08 NASA Budget Request Insufficient For Space Exploration Program Say Republicans [Space Daily]

• Rumors are flying that Britney Spears might appear on Sunday's Emmy Awards to apologize for her performance at the VMAs. WTF? What does she have to apologize for? She gave a shitty performance, she didn't go on a racist tirade or run over a crowd of schoolchildren. Britney, babe, don't let those assholes convince you to humiliate yourself even more for their ratings pleasure. Go home, take a shower, and play with your kids. [US Weekly]
  
• A 16-year old buy trailed a group of girl runners from his high school and yelled, "Keep going, or I'll rape you." The girls showed the little fucker they weren't scared and took down his license plate number and called the cops. Take that, punk. [NBC5.com]
  
• Holy crap, Beth Ditto from The Gossip writes an advice column? Awesome! [Guardian UK]
  
• Teen girls who diet are more likely to become smokers. Well, duh. If there's anything Kate Moss ever taught us it's that smoking fights hunger pangs and looks super sexy. [Reuters]

• After our 72-year old grandpa had triple bypass surgery, the first thing he asked the doctor when he awoke was when he could "have relations" with his wife again. That's why the news that seniors are still into humping came as no surprise to us. [USA Today]
• African pop star Angelique Kidjo has launched a campaign in her native country of Benin to encourage girls to get an education. [Reuters]
• Is today Paris Hilton's birthday? Scientists are close to developing a vaccine for chlamydia. [ScienceDaily.com]
• Two badass female NASA commanders will make history next month as they become the first pair of women to lead their orbital missions at the same time. Punky Brewster would be so proud. [MSNBC]
• MSNBC calls out Myriad, a company which is marketing their breast and ovarian cancer tests in TV commercials, for using scare tactics to increase their stock price, alleging that these ads make more business sense for Myriad than for public health or for educating women. [MSNBC]
• The debate over how to teach sex education in India rages on. Bizarrely, the situation there is really no different than the sex education vs. abstinence debate in the US — except that we're a freaking first world country and should be beyond this shit. [Economist]
• Eighty-nine year old Sylvia Levin is awesome — for the last 34 years she's spent six days a week getting people to register to vote, for free. Government experts think the 46,700 voters that Levin has registered are a national record. Think how many scarves she could have knitted instead. [LA Times]

• Fresh off her appearance on the cover of the June Glamour, Jennifer Lopez will grace the cover of Conde Nast's supremely stupid supplement Fashion Rocks. We don't know if it's more retarded that Jennifer Lopez is supposed to represent "rock" or that Conde Nast is so used to putting pointless, overexposed celebrities on their covers to sell newsstand copies that they did it on a supplement. [WWD, 2nd item]
  
• Banana Republic, on its demographic: "Our customers are creative souls, inspired by art and culture." [Uh, Substitute "creative" for "conformist" and "insecurity and markdowns" for "art and culture" and you will have the reason I shop there! -Moe] [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• Wait, seriously? NASA orange flight suits for $60 bucks? We sorta want one. [WaPo]

• Breaking News! "Jeans Still In" for college students! No way! And appearing on the crime blotter, spoons still being stolen from the dining hall. [MarketWatch]
• Dorina Dixon "D.D." Ryan died yesterday morning. The former fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar was also frequently a costume designer to Stephen Sondheim, a friend of Halston, and one of the people responsible for bringing some of our favorite books, the Eloise series, into the world. [MGross.com]
• And the finalists for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award are: too numerous to list here, Moe says. But it's one impressive class, from which we predict the three prizewinners will be Phillip Lim, the Vena Cava girls, and Erin Fetherston. Your guesses? [Vogue UK]
• First Levi's asks him to design, now Prada wants him at her parties: Will someone tell us why fashion is so relentlessly trendhumping Damien Hirst? No, seriously, we want to know. [WWD, 1st item]
• Like perfume? Then you'll love L'Artisan Parfumeur's new battery-operated "art" box that emits a burst of fragrance from magical glass beads every three minutes, yours for $230. [WWD, 1st item]
• And in other window design news, the Diesel store in London is incorporating the scorched remains of its recently burnt-down store into its holiday windows! How nouveau something!
• Husband and wife design team Y&Kei: Cried at The Notebook? [The Fashion Informer]

Nowak Attorney: Diaper Story "A Lie" [Florida Today]
Related: Lust In Space [Texas Monthly]