NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts

Sure, there may well be various structural factors which may explain some or all of the disparity - but it's worth noting that whenever there's an attempt to fix this, we hear endless complaints along the lines of "it's wrong to change selection procedures, there just aren't enough women or minority candidates applying, it's a pipeline problem".

Well, these comic books are an attempt to fix the pipeline problem.

In reality, there are likely multiple factors in play. But if you believe that, after removing "anything specifically targetting women" from their communications, NASA are going to alter downstream selection criteria in order to compensate then I suspect you are going to be disappointed.

You mean like: women are smaller and therefore require less life-support reservoirs? An all-female astronaut corps was investigated in the Mercury days for just that reason.

Oh wait, no, that's the opposite of what you are looking for.

Is not as rigid as you picture it.

Comics and books inspire people to get traits and achieve things like the characters from the stories. As an example: Elon, because of reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation and other sci-fi books, got inspired to do space stuff. Not to become a sci-fi writer (although that could have happened as well)

Many scientists and engineers have been inspired this way when they were kids.

> If NASA makes cool rockets then they will attract people that naturally align with their mission of making cool rockets

This reminds me of founders with a legitimately cool product being floored by their lack of sales and marketing efforts translating into a lack of sales.

Nothing sells itself. If we want astronauts, we need to keep the astronaut brand in schools. Art is a proven way to do this.

Cool rockets? I have always thought that rockets were rediculous. JWST, on the other hand, brought me to tears.

One of my introductions to engineering was watching MacGyver as a kid.

Now watching it, knowing what I do, it's comical. But it had a big part in getting me interested and in the door.

It's the with any media or entertainment. You can't take kids to space, but you can make a book, movie or comic book where they can dream about doing it when they grow up.

Put another way, it's better that kids read this comic book and not one that does nothing to develop their futures, right?

This is deeply flawed thinking. It also doesn't really make sense in the real world.

How does anyone hear about the thing you're doing or making? How do people figure out how to get involved? How do you attract different people(women, POC, etc) to your thing if they aren't already represented?

People don't just magically know about something that's interesting to them. They have to discover it.

Tons of very influential or popular figures only took their path because of things like comic books(art) from NASA. I wouldn't be an engineer today if it weren't for stuff like How It's Made or Bill Nye. Representation matters.

What is your opinion on Rosie the Rivoter?

So we should send schoolchildren up in rockets?

Well, that's certainly an opinion.