In his blog yesterday, Anil Dash posted about a Russia Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts, including American Peggy Whitson, which missed it landing by a few hundred miles while returning from the International Space Station. He reports:
The eight people who greeted her didn’t quite understand that they had encountered a spaceship gone astray, and asked about the origins of her boat.
As if it wasn’t a good enough story already:
After the crash landing (termed a “ballistic reentry“) Anatoly Perminov, the chief of Russia’s Federal Space Agency referenced the naval tradition of having more women than men on board a ship as a “bad omen”:
“You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort of thing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully,” he said. “Of course in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass” the number of men.
Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: “This isn’t discrimination. I’m just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that’s what I’m talking about.”
He did not elaborate. (link)
It seems that we are not the only country that has government leaders that say stupid stuff.
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Sea-Fever blog 
Spanish government has more female ministers than male ministers. What Russians want to say on this ?