Most space travellers are men despite slow rise in female astronauts

By Joshua Rapp Learn

Eugene Cernan and Ronald Evans flew on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972

JSC/NASA

The average age of space travellers has been on the rise since cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first blasted off in 1961, while the overwhelming majority of the 566 people that have been to space are male, according to a new analysis.

Svetlana Komarova at McGill University in Canada wanted to understand more about how space flight affects bones, but found that data on spacefarers wasn’t compiled into any central scientific database — such lists have only been put together by space enthusiast websites. “Only fans care,” she …