One of my older posts about our crew announcement made it to the wrong side of the internet and instead of trying to correct all the weird and wrong insinuations and insults in the comments, I sadly ended up taking it down. Of course I love the visual representation of three women doing science in space, but I love even more that it wasn’t planned this way— it just happens to be three women. I also appreciate how our research institute always points out that while the upcoming science crew is only incidentally all-female, it’s still worth celebrating how notable and special that is. People seem to forget that merit and diversity are not mutually exclusive. The IIAS-02 mission in 2026 is a planned follow-up to our IIAS-01 mission in 2023, and in addition to furthering the fluid dynamics research that I performed in that first mission, we’re so excited to introduce novel research related to biomedical sciences (especially neuroscience & women’s health), materials sciences, and space ...