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Lesbians in SpaceIs NASA Courting the Wrong Stuff?Does it matter that Sally Ride, NASA’s first woman in Space was a lesbian? It wasn’t like the diminutive five-foot-five female astronaut was advocating or promoting same-sex lifestyles, or openly grooming young girls to become future female partners. No one outside a very small circle even knew about her sexual proclivities until after her death from pancreatic cancer.Does it matter that NASA astronaut Lisa Novak was charged with the attempted kidnapping and murder of fellow astronaut William Oefelein’s girlfriend, or that “outed” astronaut Anne McClain was accused of identity theft and “wrongfully attempting...

The Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan on 6 February 2020, at 09:12 UTC (15:12 local time), with NASA astronaut Christina Koch, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano and cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos. Christina Koch’s 328-day-long mission is the longest single spaceflight in history by a woman and the second-longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut Credit: NASA/Roscosmos

Astronaut Christina Koch will spend nearly a year aboard the International Space Station, NASA announced on Wednesday, with her return trip delayed to February 2020. During her 11 months in space, she will monitor how her body responds to the mission, producing much-needed data about how well human bodies can withstand the dangers and hardships of long-term spaceflight. So far, that data has been difficult to come by. Standard space station missions last about six and a half months, and only a handful of NASA astronauts have stayed in orbit longer than 200 days in a single spaceflight. That's problematic...