Column: To still be able to be an astronaut when you’re 70 is inspirational

NASA astronaut Donald Pettit, who is America’s oldest serving astronaut, has touched down on Earth on his 70th birthday.

On one level it’s impressive they managed to bring him back on the day they had planned. It’s better than they have managed recently.

Donald had been on the International Space Station on a seven-month mission. I know the retirement age is going up but to still be able to be an astronaut when you’re 70 is inspirational.

I’m not an astronaut but I am in a position where I probably won’t be able to retire so I’m taking all the notes I can.

The reason I am bringing this story to light is that it’s probably not the space news you heard recently.

We also saw Blue Origin’s all-female crew flight to space featuring Katy Perry singing. One of these stories deserves to be in the category of space news.

The Blue Origin one should be called a space publicity stunt. It feels like I shouldn’t be snippy but they weren’t an all-female crew. The word crew is defined as a noun meaning a group of people who work on and operate a ship, aircraft, etc.

This was a space flight with an all-female passenger manifest.

And when I say space, it actually went just high enough to be technically in space. There’s a thing called the Karman line, which is 100km high and is internationally recognised as being where space starts. They went 107km up. The ISS is 408km away from the Earth.

From that distance you can’t see the full Earth as a sphere. I recently flew to Jersey to do some gigs. If I’d have look out of the window using some binoculars the wrong way I’d have seen what they saw.

The celebrity spaceship full of Amazon women lasted only 11 minutes. Most of that journey was below the Karman line but ever if you include the full trip, Mr Pettit was nearly four times higher than Katy Perry and was up there for 28,000 times longer but he didn’t get the same amount of coverage.

It wasn’t even the first time the glass ceiling was blasted through. The first all-female space flight was in 1963.

I don’t really have an issue with the Blue Origin flight, I just wish the news didn’t cover that more than someone how has manage a far more impressive space goal but in a slightly less sexy way.

Come on. It’s not rocket science.