China to take women to heaven and back China is considering sending two female astronauts into space on its first manned missions to its space lab module next year. An unmanned spacecraft, Shenzhou-8, is launching this evening and will be testing space docking with Tiangong-1. If the mission is successful, China is planning Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 next year, at …
Russia had the first woman in space (20 years before America?), the reason why the US have a (more) balanced gender set up is probably more due to the fact that governmental funding is only available when there is equal gender opportunities, a requirement that was put into the start of the space shuttle programe... which "coincidentally" is when women started to fly in the US space program (but not until STS-7), despite passing all the requirements, no women were selected for early (pre shuttle) missions.
The Russians probably had a more pragmatic (and politically incorrect) approach, when you are talking elite of the elite the likelihood is that men will have the edge, this may seem a rather sexist comment (and I suppose it is), but consider athletics, men can generally work harder, for longer (think marathons, the mens record is 15 mins faster than the womens), this is a simple biological fact due to maximal oxygen consumption (vo2max) which is higher in men (and higher in male elite athletes than women athletes), also the way that oestrogen affects metabolism means that when working longer, women will burn fat before carbs, again this gives an endurance advantage to men. There's a similar advantage in IQ, with men being (on average) 5 points higher, there's twice as many men at IQ 125 than women, and five times as many at genius level (155).
So, purely on the numbers, smart, elite athletes (pretty much a requirement for an astronaut) are more likely to be men, it would have to be a truly exceptional woman to get to the same level, the fact that NASA have no choice but to take women (or lose their funding) probably has more to do with their choice (when Russia had no such constraint).
I'm not sure if this counts as gender equality or not.
If the Chinese pull this off, and there's no reason they won't, I believe it will make them only the second nation to make a completely unmanned docking after Russia. The USA have docked a lot of things, but there has always been a pilot driving at least one of the craft involved.
You could also include ESA, which isn't a country of course, although both ATVs docked automatically with a manned space station.
Depends what their goal is. In spite of having the ISS, the countries involved in that haven't put a great deal of work into long-term living up there. They're only really going for short-term survival, given loss of muscle tone and bone mass, which is why the crew need regular replacement. If the Chinese are going to look seriously at this, it'd be a big step forward.
In practice, once you've gone to the effort of putting a reliable life support system into space, the additional mass of actually putting a person inside is fairly small and the differences between one person and another are insignificant.
If you were actually in the business of optimising your budget, you'd use a robot for messing about in Earth orbit. You'd use a less reliable rocket to put up much less mass and save millions on every mission.
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