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100th woman in space, Emily Calandrelli, stands up to 'small men' on the internet: 'I should have expected this.'
The astronaut and MIT engineer's monumental milestone was marred by misogyny: "Instead of being on cloud nine, I’m crying in my seat."
Emily Calandrelli made history on Nov. 22, 2024, when she became the 100th woman to go to space. But thanks to "small men on the internet," the monumental milestone was marred by misogyny, Calandrelli told Live Science.
"This is something that I had been working towards for two decades," the astronaut, MIT engineer, bestselling author, TV host and STEM influencer, told Live Science. "It's been a dream of mine for the longest time and in every moment leading up to me being in space I was nervous that it wasn't actually going to happen. Then once we got into space, all of these emotions came welling up, like 'I did it. I'm here. I'm in space!'"
Footage of the historic launch, led by aerospace company Blue Origin, was shared by the company to social media. But it wasn't long before misogynistic, objectifying comments began to flood in.
"This all happened as I was flying home after experiencing the most perfect, wonderful dream-achieving experience of my life," Calandrelli, of West Virginia, wrote in a post on Instagram. "Instead of being on cloud nine, I’m crying in my seat staring out the window. Because of course this happened. Of course I should have expected this."
In the post, she said that hoards of internet trolls made sexual comments about her voice and reaction, leading Blue Origin to take the video down.
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"I didn't expect to see so many people really mocking a reaction to a dream like that," Calandrelli told Live Science. "I got to experience something that only 100 women in history have seen, and 700 humans in the history of this planet, out of 100 billion humans that have ever lived — of course I'm going to have a pretty extreme reaction to that."
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However, Calandrelli has not let this deter her from sharing her excitement — she put the video back up on social media in a post that has received over 6 million views across TikTok and Instagram as of Friday (Dec. 6).
"The only thing in this world that I can compare it [the spaceflight] to is literally having my children," she said. "I'd always dreamed of being a mom and you have this baby in your belly for nine months. You love it, you see it on the sonogram, and then you finally get to meet them."
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Spaceflight is still a heavily male dominated industry — according to World Space Flight statistics trackers and United States Airforce Definitions, 714 people have been to space as of Dec. 6, 2024. Only 14% have been female.
"For these big dreams, you really have to want them. They're not just going to come to you, you have to fight for them. You have to risk a lot of things for them," Calandrelli said. "You have to sacrifice certain things. And I think that grit and that resilience to failure is one of the best life skills that anyone can learn."
More details of Calandrelli's career running up to the launch can be found on Live Science's sister site, Space.com.
Pandora is the trending news editor at Live Science. She is also a science presenter and previously worked as Senior Science and Health Reporter at Newsweek. Pandora holds a Biological Sciences degree from the University of Oxford, where she specialised in biochemistry and molecular biology.