I Googled "Peggy Barnes;" "Peggy Barnes NASA;" "Peggy Barnes astronaut" to see if she is some OTL person I should know about but don't. The only relevant cites that show up on the first pages of the searches are of course links to this very update right here on this thread.
She could of course be an OTL person who doesn't use the last name "Barnes" it being an ATL married name, or her maiden name when OTL she goes by a married name. Or she never gets cited as "Peggy" OTL.
So I did more searches with the name "Margaret." I doubt it can be Margaret Rhea Seddon since Seddon is her maiden name though I suppose ITTL she might have married some guy named Barnes and adopted his name professionally. Seddon is of the right generation though. However she is a physician, whereas this Peggy Barnes spacewalked to tend exposed experiments, so we'd have to butterfly her choice of profession as well as personal life.
If Seddon is in the ATL program, I guess the astronaut corps has to get used to there being a number of "Peggys" around!
And Peggy Barnes, I conclude, is a woman of no fame at least none connected to the space program OTL.
As it happens, OTL both Sally Ride and Margaret Seddon joined NASA at the same time, in 1978. Here, with none of the hiatus in manned (ahem, human) spaceflight that happened OTL I suppose the recruitment was...
Well, I don't have to guess, do I? The good authors have had the grace to include a table of contents in the form of post summaries here; I infer that Peggy Barnes was one of the "Twenty Freaking New Guys!" of Post 14--which I note was posted nearly 12 Freaking Months Ago! I can be forgiven I think for forgetting, and again profusely and seriously thank the authors for giving us this index.
The post says the open application period was announced in 1977 and doesn't say how long it ran; since this is very close to the time Ride and Seddon joined up, I am torn between guessing whether either or both of them were edged out in the competition (I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess NASA didn't select as many as 10 women out of the 20 astronaut candidates selected; 5 would be fantastically many I fear), chose not to enroll for whatever reason, or even are butterflied away completely ITTL (car accidents and the like).
This makes me sad because viewing Ride's life in retrospect we were damn lucky to have her in NASA. I never heard of Seddon particularly before but I'm damn protective of all the women who have managed to break this particular glass ceiling, of whatever nationality.
Well, there was that one who went nuts back in '07 or '07 and got involved in a scandal straight out of the most lurid tabloid involving attempted kidnapping and God knows what else. Even her, I'm more sad about than contemptuous of.
So, Peggy Barnes I hope is up to Sally Ride type standards anyway.
The post says Barnes is the first non-Russian woman to orbit; it doesn't say whether the Soviets rushed another female cosmonaut up to try to rack up a score of 2 before her mission as OTL. But Soyuz T-7 which included Svetlana Savitskaya did not fly until August 1982 OTL; to beat Barnes for second woman in space, they'd have had to fit one in earlier. I guess they could have ITTL since they are more active in space too (or are they? Are they just keeping the same pace pretty much as OTL, at least until Vulkan/TKS missions start operating?)
Anyway OTL the Soviets and later Russians I think didn't manage the degree of gender balance the American program eventually did. This list shows 45 women who have gone to orbit in an STS at least once (counting those lost on their first mission, in Challenger and Columbia) versus about 10 total in Soviet/Russian craft and one Chinese woman in a Shenzhou to date. (It's exactly 8 women who only ever went up in a Soyuz or in Tereshkova's case of course a Vostok; I lost count of whether it was 2 or more American women astronauts who have also flown in a Soyuz--there's one American woman astronaut who has only ever flown in the Soyuz but I believe that she's in the US program, it's just that we aren't sending up any more Shuttles!)
Well, I'm having a hard time determining just what portion of the 528 people who have gone into space to date were launched by the Soviet/Russian programs versus the US, but I'd guess overall about a third at least were Russian-launched, so on the whole the US program seems to take gender equity a bit more seriously.
Also, looking at the list of women in space, we sent a whole lot of them up before the Challenger disaster; I'm guessing that in the late 70s while ramping up for STS NASA recruited a lot more than 20 astronauts rather than their having firmly reserved half the seats for women. Overall it looks like it was somewhere between 1 in 8 to one in 6 for the American program.
So, with the added capability of the Apollo III+ and the same social forces at work on this ATL program as were in play in the 80s and after OTL, I'm guessing that future Apollo missions with at least one woman aboard will become more common than those with none.
And that we'll be hearing more from Peggy Barnes, though not until several other women astronauts (some of them from other nations) have had their turn.
Still hoping to hear from Sally Ride as well...
Is there a fingers crossed emoticon? There should be.
She could of course be an OTL person who doesn't use the last name "Barnes" it being an ATL married name, or her maiden name when OTL she goes by a married name. Or she never gets cited as "Peggy" OTL.
So I did more searches with the name "Margaret." I doubt it can be Margaret Rhea Seddon since Seddon is her maiden name though I suppose ITTL she might have married some guy named Barnes and adopted his name professionally. Seddon is of the right generation though. However she is a physician, whereas this Peggy Barnes spacewalked to tend exposed experiments, so we'd have to butterfly her choice of profession as well as personal life.
If Seddon is in the ATL program, I guess the astronaut corps has to get used to there being a number of "Peggys" around!
And Peggy Barnes, I conclude, is a woman of no fame at least none connected to the space program OTL.
As it happens, OTL both Sally Ride and Margaret Seddon joined NASA at the same time, in 1978. Here, with none of the hiatus in manned (ahem, human) spaceflight that happened OTL I suppose the recruitment was...
Well, I don't have to guess, do I? The good authors have had the grace to include a table of contents in the form of post summaries here; I infer that Peggy Barnes was one of the "Twenty Freaking New Guys!" of Post 14--which I note was posted nearly 12 Freaking Months Ago! I can be forgiven I think for forgetting, and again profusely and seriously thank the authors for giving us this index.
The post says the open application period was announced in 1977 and doesn't say how long it ran; since this is very close to the time Ride and Seddon joined up, I am torn between guessing whether either or both of them were edged out in the competition (I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess NASA didn't select as many as 10 women out of the 20 astronaut candidates selected; 5 would be fantastically many I fear), chose not to enroll for whatever reason, or even are butterflied away completely ITTL (car accidents and the like).
This makes me sad because viewing Ride's life in retrospect we were damn lucky to have her in NASA. I never heard of Seddon particularly before but I'm damn protective of all the women who have managed to break this particular glass ceiling, of whatever nationality.
Well, there was that one who went nuts back in '07 or '07 and got involved in a scandal straight out of the most lurid tabloid involving attempted kidnapping and God knows what else. Even her, I'm more sad about than contemptuous of.
So, Peggy Barnes I hope is up to Sally Ride type standards anyway.
The post says Barnes is the first non-Russian woman to orbit; it doesn't say whether the Soviets rushed another female cosmonaut up to try to rack up a score of 2 before her mission as OTL. But Soyuz T-7 which included Svetlana Savitskaya did not fly until August 1982 OTL; to beat Barnes for second woman in space, they'd have had to fit one in earlier. I guess they could have ITTL since they are more active in space too (or are they? Are they just keeping the same pace pretty much as OTL, at least until Vulkan/TKS missions start operating?)
Anyway OTL the Soviets and later Russians I think didn't manage the degree of gender balance the American program eventually did. This list shows 45 women who have gone to orbit in an STS at least once (counting those lost on their first mission, in Challenger and Columbia) versus about 10 total in Soviet/Russian craft and one Chinese woman in a Shenzhou to date. (It's exactly 8 women who only ever went up in a Soyuz or in Tereshkova's case of course a Vostok; I lost count of whether it was 2 or more American women astronauts who have also flown in a Soyuz--there's one American woman astronaut who has only ever flown in the Soyuz but I believe that she's in the US program, it's just that we aren't sending up any more Shuttles!)
Well, I'm having a hard time determining just what portion of the 528 people who have gone into space to date were launched by the Soviet/Russian programs versus the US, but I'd guess overall about a third at least were Russian-launched, so on the whole the US program seems to take gender equity a bit more seriously.
Also, looking at the list of women in space, we sent a whole lot of them up before the Challenger disaster; I'm guessing that in the late 70s while ramping up for STS NASA recruited a lot more than 20 astronauts rather than their having firmly reserved half the seats for women. Overall it looks like it was somewhere between 1 in 8 to one in 6 for the American program.
So, with the added capability of the Apollo III+ and the same social forces at work on this ATL program as were in play in the 80s and after OTL, I'm guessing that future Apollo missions with at least one woman aboard will become more common than those with none.
And that we'll be hearing more from Peggy Barnes, though not until several other women astronauts (some of them from other nations) have had their turn.
Still hoping to hear from Sally Ride as well...
Is there a fingers crossed emoticon? There should be.