Stating “we know women love to clean,” Gen. Yuri Glazkov predicted that female astronaut American Shannon Lucid will clean up and brighten up the Russian space station Mir during her five month stay expected to begin Saturday (3-22). Speaking at a NASA news conference, Glazkov, deputy commander of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, then stated that women can be better workers and that he wasn’t worried about there being any “curtains on the windows” due to a female presence, but was glad to “anticipate that the fans will be taken of in a more timely manner.”
Though Lucid says she has never experienced discrimination during the past year at the cosmonaut training center, other women astronauts working with Russians in space have reported receiving an apron and being told that space fight is “hard work, not a women’s work.” When a French woman arrives on Mir in July, it will be the first time two women live on the station at the same time.
