NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid faces more than science duties in her historic visit to the Mir space station: The Russians expect she'll help keep the place nice and clean because she's a woman.
Gen. Yuri Glazkov, deputy commander of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, said Lucid will brighten Mir during her five-month stay and that her male crew mates will be on their best behavior."The side effect we anticipate is that the fans will be taken care of in a more timely manner, because we know that women love to clean," Glazkov said Tuesday at a NASA news conference.
He did acknowledge that women can be better workers than men and that gender doesn't matter in space.
"We don't have to expect that there are going to be curtains on the windows due to the fact that there is a woman on board," he said.
Lucid, due to leave for Mir on Thursday aboard shuttle Atlantis, is set to become only the third woman - and first American woman - to live on the 10-year-old space station.
Before Tuesday's remarks by Glazkov, Lucid had said she never felt any discrimination during the past year at the cosmonaut training center and didn't expect any chauvinism on Mir, either. She was in quarantine Wednesday, as is typical for astronauts right before launch, and unavailable for comment.
"Maybe I'm just not perceiving things," she said in a recent interview, "but I don't have anything to complain about."
Her crew mates for most of her stay will be Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev, who arrived there late last month.
NASA astronaut Norman Thagard lived on Mir for nearly four months last year, the only American to spend time on the space station.
"The simple presence of a lady on board the Mir station helps . . . our crew members because they simply pay more attention to the way they behave, they act, they speak and so on," Glazkov said.
The last time a woman - cosmonaut Yelena Kondakova - lived on Mir, her male crew mates returned to Earth "even more cultured than they used to be," Glazkov said. Her nearly six months in space, in 1994 and 1995, is an endurance record for women.
Despite claims by Glazkov and other Russian officials that women get a fair shake in the Russian space program, Kondakova is the only woman in the cosmonaut office, and she's not awaiting another flight.
Another woman was just accepted, "which means women will fly," Glazkov insisted.
Lucid, 53, a biochemist who has flown four times on space shuttles and is one of NASA's original female astronauts, will be given a few station chores in addition to her U.S. science duties. She'll take care of the life-support and thermal-control systems and fulfill the duties of "engineer No. 2." That's third-in-command of a crew of three.
In the 35 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, the Russians have sent only four women into orbit, including the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, did not fly until 20 years later.