Astronauts

How it started

NASAEstablished October 1, 1958, under President Eisenhower’s National Aeronautics and Space Act, in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. introduced its first astronaut class, the Mercury SevenNamed for Project Mercury, itself named after the Roman god of speed. “Seven” simply counts the men selected., on April 9, 1959. The selection requirement seemed simple enough: candidates had to be graduates of military jet test pilot school.1

Grounded before liftoff

That single requirement, set by President Eisenhower himself in December 1958,5 did the actual work of exclusion: the U.S. military didn’t allow women to become test pilots at all, not at the Air Force's school at EdwardsU.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, founded 1944, relocated to Edwards Air Force Base, California in 1951., not at the Navy's at Patuxent RiverU.S. Naval Test Pilot School, founded 1945 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.. By NASA’s own rule, no woman could qualify, without NASA ever having to write a policy that said so directly.2

They proved it themselves

Between 1959 and 1961, physician William Randolph LovelacePhysician who designed NASA’s original astronaut physical exams, then privately tested nineteen women pilots using the same battery of tests. and Air Force General Don Flickinger recruited nineteen women pilots to take the same physiological battery given to the actual Mercury astronauts, thirteen passed. The tests were exhaustive: X-rays, a four-hour eye exam, a tilt table to test circulation, electric pulses to test nerve reflexes, ice water shot into each ear to induce vertigo, a rubber tube swallowed so stomach acid could be sampled directly, hours on a weighted stationary bicycle pedaled to full exhaustion, even a nuclear counter to measure lean body mass.3 Cobb herself later coined a name for the group: the FLATsFirst Lady Astronaut Trainees, a name Jerrie Cobb coined for the group herself. Later nicknamed the “Mercury 13” once their story became public., First Lady Astronaut Trainees.5

Three of the thirteen, Jerrie CobbRecord-setting Oklahoma pilot, the program’s first test subject and its most public face., Wally FunkThe youngest of the thirteen at 23, already a flight instructor with 3,000 hours logged before testing began., and Rhea Hurrle, went on to a second phase in Oklahoma City: a sensory-deprivation tank, sealed off from all light, sound, and vibration, plus psychological evaluation. Funk set the outright record at ten hours and thirty-five minutes without hallucinating, more than three times what any of the male Mercury astronauts had managed.4 A planned third phase, advanced jet and military-equipment training at a Naval base in Pensacola, was canceled for the whole group days before it began: without an official NASA request behind it, the Navy wouldn’t open its facilities to an unofficial program.3

CobbRecord-setting Oklahoma pilot, the program’s first test subject and its most public face. flew to Washington to fight the cancellation, writing to President Kennedy and meeting with Vice President Johnson. In July 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso convened a special Congressional subcommittee to investigate. Cobb and Jane Hart testified in the program’s defense. Jacqueline CochranFirst woman to break the sound barrier (1953) and wartime director of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). Funded the Mercury 13 testing from the start., who had funded the testing from the beginning, testified that she worried a dedicated women’s program could hurt the broader space effort.3 NASA officials and astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified next, not about the women’s results, but in defense of NASA’s own rule that candidates had to graduate from military jet test pilot school with an engineering degree.3 Glenn put the reasoning plainly: women being excluded was simply “a fact of our social order.”2 The subcommittee was sympathetic. No action followed, two years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act made this kind of discrimination illegal.3

NASA didn’t open the astronaut corps to women until 1978, when it expanded eligibility beyond military test pilots to include scientists and engineers.3 Sally RidePhysicist selected in NASA’s 1978 astronaut class. Became the first American woman in space in 1983, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. was one of six women selected that year, nineteen years after the Mercury Seven. NASA’s mostly male engineering corps greeted them by designing a dedicated in-flight makeup kit, a decision Ride would later recall, dryly, as a study in exactly who’d been in the room when it was decided.5