Not on our watch

Nasa, one of the most technologically advanced organisations on the planet, made prospective astronauts take inkblot tests to determine their sexuality.

- BY DIONNE CHRISTIAN

If she hadn't seen the evidence for herself, photographer Mackenzie Calle might have laughed at the idea that Nasa once made its astronauts undergo heterosexuality tests.

To Calle, a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, the idea that a person's sexuality could prevent them from becoming an astronaut seemed out of this world. So did the fact that an organisation – surely one of the most technologically advanced and progressive on the planet – used, among other psychological examinations, inkblot tests to determine the sexuality of its astronauts.

But delving into Nasa's own archives, she discovered that heteronormativity and space exploration were, according to Nasa at least, part of the same realm. From the late 1950s, astronauts on Nasa's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes had to take two mandatory heterosexuality tests to ensure that anyone launched into space was a cis-gender heterosexual man (or, later, woman).

"There have been around 600 astronauts in the world, so statistically, about 43 or 44 of them should identify as LGBTQI+ but no one has ever flown into space as an openly LGBTQI+ person," says Calle, whose own sexuality - she identifies as queer - and a comment by the first US woman in space, Sally Ride, roused her interest in the subject.

"I always admired Sally Ride. She was the first female astronaut with Nasa and a symbol for women in the US. She once said, 'You can't be what you can't see.' I didn't discover, until around 2021, that she'd actually had a female partner for 27 years."

Ride waited until her death, from pancreatic cancer in 2012, to make public the fact she had been in a relationship with a woman for nearly three decades.

Why she kept this quiet was the initial spark for Calle's award-winning photography project,