A record four women will be in space

It may not qualify as a giant step for womankind, but history will be made today when the number of women in space at the same time will reach four – a record.

Nasa is sending a crew of seven into space, of whom three will be women, and another female flier is already aloft by way of a Russian Soyuz capsule.

All are due to rendezvous at the International Space Station, which is now coming close to completion after years of work by astronauts and cosmonauts alike. But it is the milestone that the women fliers will pass this week that will most excite space-travel aficionados and scholars.

"I'd love to have those numbers be higher," said US astronaut Stephanie Wilson, 43, who will be making her third shuttle flight this morning. "But I think that we have made a great start and have paved the way with women now being able to perform the same duties as men in spaceflight."

No one pretends that NASA is as male-dominated a place as it once was when women were most often cast into the role of loyal wives anxiously awaiting word of husbands' galactic exploits. Indeed, the four-women-in-space moment might almost have happened unnoticed but for a vigilant reporter, who asked about it at Nasa HQ last week. The question took officials by surprise.

"Maybe that's a credit to the system. That I don't think of it as male or female," said Nasa's operations chief, Bill Gerstenmaier. "I just think of it as a talented group of people going to do their job in space."

It's been 27 years since the first female US astronaut – Sally Ride – was sent up into space from the launch pads of Cape Canaveral. Of the four women due to be aloft today, two of them are first-timers. Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a former schoolteacher, and Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki will become the 53rd and 54th women to fly in space.

The shuttle Discovery is set to arrive at the Space Station on Wednesday. The Russian capsule, with US astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on board, docked there yesterday.