3 BRILLIANT MINUTES: Why female astronauts may be more suitable for space missions than their male counterparts

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) - It’s a simple matter of mathematics: According to NASA, the cost of getting payloads to space stations like the ISS is $93,400 per metric kilo or roughly $42,366 per pound. For the most part, women are lighter than men, so it’s just cheaper to use female astronauts.

Also, researchers from the Space Medicine Team, European Space Agency in Germany have conducted a study published in “Scientific Reports” that found female astronauts have lower water requirements for hydration, total energy expenditure, oxygen (O2) consumption, carbon dioxide (CO2) and metabolic heat production during space exploration missions compared to their male counterparts.

In the study, “Effects of body size and countermeasure exercise on estimates of life support resources during all-female crewed exploration missions,” the team utilized an approach developed to estimate the effects of body size on life support requirements in male astronauts. For all parameters at all statures, estimates for females were lower than for comparable male astronauts.

In other space news: The Perseverance Rover sends back interesting photos of an ancient riverbed on Mars.

And: LEGO announces a Perseverance Rover model.

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