Her Space with Bridget Mensah: She flew to the moon, they made sandwich jokes

Christina Koch became the first woman in history to leave low Earth orbit. The TikTok comment section responded exactly as you would expect, which is precisely the point.

On April 1, 2026, four human beings rode NASA’s to do what no one had done since 1972; fly to the moon. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and mission specialist Christina Koch completed a nearly 10-day, 695,081-mile journey that took humanity back to lunar space for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. They swung around the far side of the Moon on the 6th of April, travelling 252,756 miles from Earth and surpassing even Apollo 13’s distance record. They witnessed an earthset behind the lunar horizon. They came home on the 10th of April, splashing down in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego to thunderous celebration from a watching world. It was, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary things our species has ever done.

Christina Koch was not there as a diversity hire or a gender token or a carefully placed symbol for a press release. She was there because she is, without any conceivable argument to the contrary, one of the most rigorously qualified human beings NASA has ever had the good fortune to employ.

            For the people at the back.

Let us go through it, since some people apparently require the full tour. Christiana Koch holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from North Carolina State University, followed by a Master’s in Electrical Engineering. She also studied in Ghana as an exchange student, then spent years developing scientific instruments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, contributing to missions studying astrophysics and cosmology. She then worked for three and a half years in the Antarctic and Arctic, completing a full winter-over season at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at temperatures reaching minus 79 degrees Celsius, and served on firefighting teams and ocean and glacier search-and-rescue operations. After that, she worked on instruments for the Juno and Van Allen Probes missions at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and later served as NOAA station chief for the American Samoa Observatory. She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013 from a pool of over 6,000 applicants. She then spent 328 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station in 2019 and 2020, setting the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, and conducted six spacewalks including the first ever all-female spacewalks, totalling 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station. During Artemis II, she manually piloted the Orion spacecraft in deep space. And on the 6th of April 2026, she became the first woman in human history to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

This, apparently, is where the internet comes in.

⚠  ACTUAL COMMENTS FROM THE VIRAL TIKTOK POST

The kitchen joke alone appeared in multiple variations, accumulating hundreds of thousands of interactions between them. Not from bots. From people. From human adults who looked at a woman who survived Antarctic winters, built instruments for space telescopes, conducted spacewalks in the vacuum of space, and flew around the Moon, and their first thought was, sandwiches.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being a woman watching this. Not surprise, mind you. Never surprise. But a specific, bone-deep weariness at having to once again explain that no, we have not reached the post-feminist promised land, and no, a woman orbiting the Moon does not mean the work is done. If anything, it is Exhibit A for precisely why it is not.

“The kitchen joke is not clever. It is not even really a joke. It is a reflex. A little twitch of insecurity dressed up as banter.”

Because here is what those comments tell us, loudly and without ambiguity, it does not matter what a woman achieves. The achievement can be historic, technically extraordinary, physically gruelling, and of genuine benefit to all of humanity. It can require decades of preparation, multiple advanced degrees, survival in conditions that would break most people, and the courage to sit atop 8.8 million pounds of thrust and allow it to send you a quarter of a million miles from home. None of it will prevent a man on the internet from reducing her to a domestic punchline.

The joke is the point of the joke. It exists to remind her, and everyone watching, of where she is supposed to be.

And yet we are told, with great regularity and considerable smugness, that feminism is no longer necessary. That we are in 2026 and surely things are fine now. One of the screenshots taken from the very TikTok post celebrating Koch contained exactly this sentiment, overlaid on a photograph of her floating inside the Artemis II Orion spacecraft: “we don’t need feminism anymore it’s 2026.” The year does not do the work that people imagine it does. The calendar advancing does not, it turns out, automatically upgrade the contents of the human skull.

Feminism is not the insistence that women are superior, or that every female achievement must be announced through a megaphone, or that no one may criticise a woman under any circumstances. It is the considerably more modest proposal that women are full human beings, that their accomplishments ought to be measured by the same standards as men’s, and that a woman who flew to the Moon should not have to wade through a thousand sandwich jokes for the privilege of being celebrated for it. That is the bar. That is the whole bar. And the comments section demonstrated, with the kind of clarity that no think piece could manufacture, that as a species we have not cleared it.

“Planet Earth, you are a crew.” She came home from the Moon more generous about humanity than humanity managed to be about her.

Koch herself returned from the Moon with something considerably more gracious than the comments section deserved. Watching Earth recede through the Orion window, she reflected, “Honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe.” And upon returning, she offered what may be the defining statement of the entire mission: “Planet Earth, you are a crew. A crew is a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked.” One suspects Christina Koch is a bigger person than most of us. Certainly, bigger than the comment section. But she should not have to be. She should not have to return from the Moon radiating cosmic perspective while strangers on TikTok type kitchen jokes for engagement. The fact that she does, and still speaks about humanity as a crew worth saving, is either the most inspiring or the most exhausting thing you will read all week. Possibly both at once.

Society has, as the original post rightly observed, still got a long way to go. A woman flew around the Moon. The comments are still in the kitchen. Your move, crew.

Bridget Mensah is a PR, Marketing & Communications professional and General Secretary of the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB). A dedicated feminist and advocate for women in media, she champions workplace excellence whilst empowering voices and building bridges across the industry. Bridget is passionate about amplifying women’s stories and driving positive change in Ghana’s media. She can be reached via email at [email protected]

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