Peter Grant has dug up one of those stories that — in today’s insane world — I can’t categorize.
Is it an outright hoax, scam? Weird performance art? Are they freaking serious?
Vulva Spaceship aims to counter prevalence of phallic spacecraft
A German feminist art group has revealed a vulva-shaped spaceship concept, which it is encouraging the European Space Agency to help realise in order to better represent humanity in space and “restore gender equality to the cosmos.”The group Wer Braucht Feminismus? (WBF?), which translates to “Who Needs Feminism?”, created the Vulva Spaceship concept to challenge the convention of phallic spacecraft design.
WTF?
Jasmin Mittag, the founder of the group backing this, is supposedly an artist. That seems to argue for “performance art.”
WBF Aeronautics’ “Dr. Lucia Hartmann” is a mystery. The only “Dr. Lucia Hartmann” I’ve found seems to have co-authored a single paper on field-effect transistors. Nada about aeronautics.
If they’re for real, which I strongly doubt, I think they’re in for a shock when they learn that the prevalence of cylindrical shapes in aircraft and spacecraft design has very little to do with masculinity, and a hell of a lot to do with aerodynamics (especially at high Mach numbers), pressure containment, craft center of balance, and efficient packaging of all the systems needed to make a rocket work.
They claim that their design was “aerodynamic” in a wind tunnel, but I’d put money — if I had it — up against them having tested that weird convex/concave/bulbous design at even the Mach 1 envelope, where I’m dead certain turbulence would tear it apart.
Added: Thinking about this… If it’s for real, I suspect that geometry would require a huge cavitation initiator spike (think the needle nose on supersonic aircraft) to be at all stable at high Mach numbers.
Ironically, that would give it the appearance of an upside down sperm cell. Sorry, ladies.