Former NASA astronaut Janet Kavandi says she was lucky to have support as a woman leader at the agency, and she hopes more people will get that chance soon.
Kavandi was a space shuttle astronaut who flew a trio of flights between 1998 and 2001, with milestones including visiting the Russian space station Mir and controlling the Canadarm robotic arm in space. Then she moved on to numerous management positions within NASA to help others, before retiring in 2019 and joining Sierra Space as president to help the company with its commercial space ventures.
“At NASA, I felt completely at ease being a female in a leadership position. I didn’t even think about it,” Kavandi told Space.com last week for a Women’s History Month-themed interview; the annual event runs until the end of the month.
“It was very, very common to have half of any leadership team be female, or to have the person in charge of any program or project center to be female,” Kavandi said of her NASA days. “My center that I ran, the Glenn Research Center, the top four people in charge [at the time] were women.”
Related: International Women’s Day: Female astronauts keep making strides off Earth
Kavandi forms part of a small but rapidly growing minority of non-male astronauts; NASA says 72 women have flown to space as of March 2023, although the number grows when considering suborbital jaunts. Kavandi is also partially responsible for getting more women to space in the last decade.
One of her many management roles at NASA was chair of the 2013 astronaut class selection committee, which she performed while serving as director of flight crew operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kavandi created a diverse selection board and asked for fairness and diversity in the agency’s astronaut choices, which created the first-ever astronaut class with equal splits between male and female selectees.
Kavandi also was branch chief for the International Space Station (ISS) and did her best to be inclusive for women in that role, following on from mentors such as NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid. Lucid herself was one of the first-ever women astronauts hired by the agency in 1978, and she continued in numerous management roles afterward, like serving as NASA’s chief scientist.
Related: Pioneering women in space: A gallery of astronaut firsts
(opens in new…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Space…