Women have enough to deal with on earth, but now they apparently have to worry about the patriarchy in space.

While most of the United States was dazzled by Elon Musk's SpaceX launch that sent a Tesla Roadster into the stratosphere earlier this month, Stanford University researcher Marcie Bianco had a different take.

"Houston, we have a problem," she writes in a Wednesday op-ed published on NBC News. "And it's the patriarchy."

In her scathing critique of this century's space race, Bianco, the Editorial and Communications Manager of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, says billionaires' atmospheric ambitions are a "desire to colonize" tinged with patriarchal undertones.

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Bianco says the drive to settle on Mars is motivated by "the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything — and everyone — in their line of vision is theirs for the taking. You know, just like walking up to a woman and grabbing her pussy."

The researcher goes on to critique Musk's "Columbusing attitude" that is driven neither by the "nationalist" fervor of the Cold War nor "the American spirit of invention."

The impulse to colonize, she writes, "has its origins in gendered power structures," including the "entitlement to power, control, domination and ownership."

Bianco closes with an invocation of environmentalism. "This 21st century form of imperialism," she writes, "is the direct result of men giving up on the planet they have all but destroyed."

On Thursday, Musk tweeted a video of SpaceX's newly deployed broadband satellites. Named Tintin A and Tintin B, the satellites are a test for the company's forthcoming Starlink broadband service.

Tesla did not immediately respond to SFGATE's request for comment.

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.