6. Defying Gravity

Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps: Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972–2004

CHAPTER 6
Defying Gravity

Even before Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, NASA engineers and physicians spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to answer the question of how to put a person into space safely. With the Soviet Union’s flights of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova in the early 1960s, the world learned that both a man and a woman could survive spaceflight. But when NASA was finally in a position to put women in space and put men and women in space together, the unanswered—rather, unasked—questions about how to do it came to the forefront.

Despite plenty of proof that women could do the same jobs as men, men and women will always be different with respect to physical form and appearance. Even considering general body shape, it is wrong for engineers to assume that they can design equipment for women as if they are simply small men. The greatest challenge of integrating women into NASA’s astronaut corps, second only to changing attitudes, lay in engineering the space suits, the escape systems, and the personal hygiene gear for women. Although it can be argued that sexually integrating the astronaut corps made the job of putting astronauts into space more complex, what is also true is that integrating women as astronauts also pushed forward the process of development and innovation. In accommodating women’s needs, the engineers in the end actually developed simpler and safer methods of accommodating the men’s needs as well.

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. By then, the women’s movement had been going on for at least fifteen years and the Equal Employment Opportunity legislation of 1972 had been in force for over eleven. But those realities meant little when it came to many people’s ideas about personal privacy and propriety. By 1980, marked by the election of President Ronald Reagan, the American majority (the voting majority at least) had embraced neoconservatism along with the antifeminist rhetoric of Phyllis Schlafly.¹ By the end of the twentieth century, more Americans identified themselves as evangelical Christians or traditionalist in their religious beliefs. Over twenty-five years after Ride’s first flight, many Americans still identify morality with sexual Puritanism and view any challenge to heteronormativity and male dominance as disorderly, immoral, and dangerous. Nevertheless, sociologists still acknowledge that “sexual bantering, flirting, and dating are commonplace at work.”² In this context of conservatism and resurgent Puritanism, one cannot imagine NASA being anything but very careful about trying to project a strong image of respect for gender hierarchy. With the introduction of women to the flight rotation, NASA also faced the challenge of designing Shuttle architecture and flight procedures that would comply with American sensibilities.

American sensibilities about women flying aboard the Space Shuttle had less to do with women doing the job or men and women simply sharing a workspace than to do with men and women being confined together twenty-four hours a day. The Shuttle did not provide an environment for coming home after a long day at the office and slipping into something more comfortable, the idea Americans mistakenly identified with a traditional workplace. Any rest and relaxation the astronauts enjoyed, they did so surrounded by their coworkers. As with life on a military or research vessel out to sea for weeks or months at a time, coworkers served as each other’s social network. The U.S. Navy was forced to address this same issue in the early 1990s. When Congress was debating letting women participate in combat positions, the idea that men and women would be expected to live with one another aboard combat vessels raised a lot of concerns and nearly sank women’s hopes for serving in these positions.³ The moral concern over such a situation was that sexually integrating the military, the astronaut corps, or any work environment that would require employees to spend an extended amount of time together might create undue sexual tension (or worse, its release!). In the 1950s, a few Americans encouraged putting a woman into space with men as a sort of “space prostitute,” someone who could provide the male astronauts with an outlet for their stress and sexual needs on a long flight such as a trip to Mars. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, American attitudes about women and sexual equality had changed enough that such a comment likely would have provoked attacks from any number of feminist leaders and social groups. By 1978 when Group VIII was selected, it was clear that all the astronauts were there to do a job. But if women and men were put together aboard the Shuttle, some Americans still wondered if “boys would be boys.” Friendships might become something more if men and women were left together in a confined space for days on end: whether the astronauts would engage in sexual relations during a mission or not, NASA knew that putting men and women together aboard the Space Shuttle would lead to the type of controversial talk a federal agency could not afford.

When its engineers and contractors were designing the Space Shuttle, NASA put a lot of emphasis on what was called “privacy.” In July 1995, NASA revised its handbook of guidelines for human factors engineering. Known as NASA Standard 3000, the tome outlined the requirements, policies, and specifications for designing suits, hardware, equipment, and architecture for the Shuttle (and later the International Space Station). With respect to privacy, the Standard stated, “There are cultural and individual requirements that should be considered. Certain personal activities such as sleeping, personal hygiene, waste management, and personnel interactions require some degree of privacy. These private areas should not be placed in passageways or highly congested activity centers.”⁴ This policy certainly reflects 1995 attitudes about privacy. But privacy concerns were no less important to NASA in the early 1970s when it was designing the Shuttle that would carry a sexually integrated crew.

Carolyn Huntoon made it clear that the JSC’s administration was determined to treat the women in the same way that they treated the men. If this were the case, then making privacy a priority during the design process should have occurred regardless of whether women astronauts would be on board. The designers responsible for the habitability of the Shuttle knew that privacy was important, but they treated it as a human issue, not a “male versus female” issue. Allen Louviere, Chief of the Engineering Technology Branch in Houston, wrote a letter in January 1972 emphasizing the importance of privacy on orbiting spacecraft, while never mentioning the possibility of women on board. Louviere listed certain criteria “which cannot be placed in mathematical terms [that] were derived from the preference of crewmen who are highly motivated.”⁵ The criteria included an “enclosed hygiene/toilet component,” “provisions for privacy without isolations,” and an “interchangeable interior.” “Each person should have ready access to privacy as well as social relationships with other personnel at his option,” Louviere wrote. In addition, “movable partitions, modularized appointments, and variable lighting should be utilized to satisfy personal arrangements and accommodate different functions, e.g. dining, recreation, sleeping, etc.”⁶ Essentially, the men were entitled to the same privacy from each other as the women. The NASA Standard 3000, which came to serve as the bible for all the engineers who worked on human interfaces, listed “privacy” time and again as a priority design criterion that must be considered when making design decisions.⁷ In a spacecraft, however, with limited room and inflexible weight restrictions, sometimes privacy had to be sacrificed. NASA knew what the Shuttle should have with respect to habitability. Making it all work was the challenge.

In a document from early January 1973, C. C. Johnson, chief of the Spacecraft Design Division, spotlighted habitability as a concern for the Shuttle designers when he wrote, “I began marking your marked copy of subject document when I realized that the document is different from any other system’s space by reason that there is no such thing as a ‘habitability’ system, per se—we can only specify guidelines that influence the definition of performance and interface specification for the individual hardware systems that make a habitable spacecraft. Okay—so let’s set forth the habitability requirements and let the subsystem managers see to it that their hardware will provide same.”⁸

Louviere’s January 1972 letter laid out the elements of habitability for the Shuttle. But defining “habitability requirements” was more difficult than just making sure the Shuttle provided adequate life support. Johnson wrote, “Avoid non-quantitative or non-definitive motherhood statements that really tell the subsystem’s man nothing more than he now knows,” “avoid explanations and rationale,” and “avoid specification. If you don’t really know, say nothing. Your guess isn’t any better than the next man’s.”⁹ Certainly not having strict habitability requirements gave the engineers more freedom and opportunity to be creative with their designs. But making everything work for both sexes and still fit on board was the hard part.

One design element that NASA and the Shuttle contractors at Rockwell International (the contractor for the orbiters) had to sacrifice to some degree was individual sleeping berths. NASA’s vision for the Shuttle’s sleep stations developed out of its experience with Skylab. The Skylab berths were equipped with a sleeping bag, a small music system, and individual light and environmental controls, all in an enclosed space about the size of a telephone booth. The sleeping accommodations did not offer much room to spread out, but they did give the astronauts some privacy and quiet. The difference between Skylab and the Shuttle, however, was that only three astronauts flew aboard Skylab at any one time whereas the Shuttle would eventually carry seven. In addition, Skylab’s habitable space measured 9,550 cubic feet compared to the Shuttle’s 2,525 cubic feet.¹⁰ Space was a commodity that Skylab had and the Shuttle really did not.

In June 1974 E. P. Smith, Rockwell’s Chief Program Engineer on the Shuttle project, wrote to Aaron Cohen, NASA’s manager for the Space Shuttle, asking for some clarification about the technical requirements for the sleeping bunks. Smith and his engineering team needed more information about things like sleep station configuration, orientation, and size; privacy requirements and volume per “man’’; sleeping surface firmness and the effects that movement in one sleep station may have on adjacent sleepers; individual or combined sleep station closeout curtains, and to what extent these were to be lightproof; temporary stowage bags or straps in each sleep station for personal articles; restraint or retention straps required if a sleep station was used as an off-duty personal area; and stowage requirements for the sleep station when they were not in use, including whether they should extend and stow individually or as a unit.¹¹ As with all engineering tasks, the engineers worked to design something that best met the criteria. But issues of cost, time, efficiency, and—with the Shuttle—size and weight demanded some compromises. NASA worked hard to ensure that the astronauts could have their privacy and maintain their modesty. Providing sleeping bunks was part of that strategy. But given the design and engineering restraints, the Shuttle engineers found that the lack of physical space on the Shuttle’s mid-deck ultimately dictated the design of the sleeping accommodations.

When the Shuttle started flying in 1981, it could carry up to four bunks. Mounted on the starboard bulkhead of the mid-deck, three bunks lay horizontally and one stood vertically near the access to the flight deck. The bunks each had a sleeping pallet, sleep restraints to keep the astronaut and bed sheets from floating away, a pillow, a light, ventilation ducts, a fan, a communication system, and a sound suppression blanket.¹² The sleep stations provided the privacy that NASA wanted, but the bunks took up a lot of room. Consequently, the crews usually flew without the bunks at all. Ultimately, NASA completely did away with the sleeping bunks in the Shuttle mid-deck. The astronauts valued elbow room over privacy.

The irony of the sleeping bunks is that the only time the Shuttle crews even had them on board was when the crews were at maximum size, when space was a premium. Instead of the bunks serving as a privacy accommodation, they actually served as a respite when Shuttle missions were divided into two shifts. The practice is called “hot bunking,” or two astronauts sharing one bunk.¹³ Because one shift’s sleep cycle overlapped with the second shift’s work cycle, the bunks were seen as the best way to ensure that conditions remained quiet and dark enough for crew members to sleep.

On flights when everyone was bedded down at the same time and no sleeping berths were installed, the crew members slept wherever they could. NASA’s primary alternative to the bunks had been sleeping bags that the astronauts simply strapped to the walls. On STS-41G, the first Shuttle mission to have two women aboard, Bob Crippen slept in the commander’s seat on the flight deck, Sally Ride slept in the pilot’s seat, and Kathy Sullivan bunked behind them on the aft flight deck. Downstairs, Dave Leestma and Paul Scully-Power slipped into sleeping bags strapped to the starboard bulkhead and Marc Garneau floated free in an Apollo bag. Jon McBride, the pilot, snuggled between the two space suits in the airlock.¹⁴ Without the privacy of individual sleeping berths, however, NASA astronauts did uncover a new issue—sleepwear.

At a meeting of the National Aviation-Space Education Convention, Robert Overmyer, NASA’s deputy manager of construction for Space Shuttle Columbia and the pilot of STS-5, noted that with women participating in Shuttle flights, they needed to discuss the “problem of nightwear.” Prior to STS-7 (Sally Ride’s first flight), all of NASA’s flights were all-male missions. Overmyer explained that on those flights the astronauts “usually just stripped down to their skivvies and slept wherever.”¹⁵ He said that the women had requested some sort of “nightie” to wear to bed in orbit and observed, “It does shed a different light on the subject of space flight.”¹⁶ JSC’s crew systems office, which provided all the astronauts’ wardrobes and suits, came up with a solution to the nighttime wardrobe problem by issuing gym shorts and a t-shirt to don at night.¹⁷ If only all the problems could have had such a simple solution. But, as Carolyn Huntoon discovered when making the JSC training center ready for the female ASCANs, the question of appropriate sleepwear for every astronaut on board was not necessarily something that NASA officials had thought through. Pajamas were not much of an issue before women entered the astronaut corps. But the political and social ramifications of allowing the astronauts, male or female, to float undressed through the crew cabin when the opposite sex was aboard was not likely to instill much confidence in NASA’s choices.

Wardrobes for the Shuttle astronauts turned out to be one of the simplest accommodations to make with respect to the introduction of women. The living accommodations on the Shuttle, like Skylab, were relatively comfortable. Because of the Shuttle’s pressurized environment, astronauts abandoned the space suits that Mercury astronauts had to wear throughout the flight. With the exception of the one-piece flight suits that were worn during launch and landing (scrapped after the Challenger accident for specially made protective suits), NASA’s preference was that all the clothes that the astronauts wore during orbit be comfortable and, if possible, commercially available.¹⁸ Buying clothing off-the-rack for the Shuttle missions gave the astronauts some flexibility in terms of style and sizes, but also saved a lot of time and money designing and making specialty items for each astronaut.¹⁹

Even though NASA purchased essentially all of the astronauts’ clothes from department stores, “engineering” the wardrobe still took time. Throughout 1983 to 1985, during which the first eight women astronauts flew (including Bonnie Dunbar and Mary Cleave, selected in the class of 1980, otherwise known as Group IX), the human factors engineers continued to tweak the clothing selection and their quantities based on comments the astronauts made during their debriefings after the missions. Other than not providing enough warm clothes for those astronauts who tended to get cold, the biggest problem with the astronauts’ wardrobes was that their clothes were too tight, most often around the waist.²⁰ Some of the men found their pants to be so tight that they cut the elastic waistband to make them comfortable enough to wear.²¹ Without laundry facilities on the Shuttle, the crew systems department had to pack everything the astronauts needed for the duration of the flight. Over time, those in crew systems at Johnson established a working wardrobe for the astronauts. Based on each astronaut’s sex, according to the NASA Standard 3000, everyone was allotted one shirt for every two days of flight, one jacket for every two weeks, one pair of trousers per week, shorts or panties and a t-shirt or brassiere for every day, socks for every day, a handkerchief for every two days, two pairs of gym shorts and two exercise shirts for each week (one set for exercise, the other for sleeping), and a pair of slipper socks for every three months.²²

Because NASA could buy so much of the astronauts’ wardrobes retail, the introduction of women into the astronaut corps had little impact with respect to that aspect of crew systems. But all the astronauts did still have to change clothes. Despite the propensity in Hollywood films and television, Americans are still very sensitive about nudity. As the 1983 flight of Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut, approached, journalists began publishing newspaper articles suggesting that people were concerned about how NASA and the astronauts were planning to handle interactions between the sexes.²³ Typically, instead of management dictating behavioral codes, crew members usually reached some agreement among themselves over how to handle issues of privacy. Kathy Sullivan, the first American woman to perform a spacewalk or extravehicular activity, recalled, “Every crew finds its own equilibrium with these things.”²⁴

In Sullivan’s case, the issue of privacy came to a head when she and fellow spacewalker Dave Leestma met for their first EVA dress rehearsal. It quickly became apparent that no separate facilities had been provided for her to change into her Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), a suit of long underwear lined with tubes for running water to keep the astronaut from overheating in the protective outer suit. Surrounded by a room of male technicians, as Sullivan recalled, “We’re standing side-by-side holding these things, and there suddenly was this unstated moment when you realize that this is the moment when normally the two guys just stripped down and get in their LCVGs with everybody standing around and nobody much cares.” But this time was different because Kathy was a woman. Sullivan turned to Leestma and said, “Dave, let me tell you how I feel about modesty at a moment like this. I have none.” Dave said, “Fine,” and the two proceeded to disrobe. The technicians, on the other hand, were apparently unprepared to watch these two astronauts strip. As Sullivan remembered, the technicians could not leave the room fast enough.²⁵

On the ground, the astronauts had their own restrooms, locker rooms, or a private changing area. When the Shuttle flew with the sleeping bunks in place, the astronauts at least could change their clothes in their bunk in private. But without the bunks, finding some privacy for doing anything more than using the toilet was difficult. The crews simply found their own ways to adjust. Sullivan said, “One crew of mine, because we didn’t have bunks, … everybody mainly used the potty or the airlock when they were going to peel off their shirt or something. On another one of my crews, the guys or I would just say, ‘I’m going to change my shirt.’ The dynamic of that crew was that statement was a gentle announcement of a little preference for some privacy [but also] that there was not going to be some big hassle or embarrassment if somebody did turn around or come by me with my top off or a guy in his skivvies.”²⁶ The circumstances of close quarters forced the crews to suspend or even dismiss many of the concerns over privacy when changing clothes that they may or may not have maintained when on the ground.

The “shirtsleeve environment” aboard the Shuttle simplified any clothing issue that the introduction of women might have otherwise created. But to walk in space, as Kathy Sullivan did in October 1984, an astronaut needed specialized equipment. Suits designed for men simply did not fit women very well and remained one of the major restrictions to women’s opportunities in space.

In the 1960s, when the idea of American women astronauts still remained a flickering hope, one academic cited the difficulties of designing a space suit for a woman as a strong reason for why NASA had not yet launched a woman into space. Dr. Harry Hess, a geology professor at Princeton and the chair of the National Academy of Science’s Space Science Board, predicted in 1968, “It would cost us more than $100,000 just to redesign the space suit to fit the female anatomy.” As a way of explaining the American problem, he added, “The Russians used their lady astronaut in a shirt-sleeve environment.”²⁷ Once NASA started working on the Shuttle design, the engineers were able to start working on a new space suit for EVAs that agency officials hoped would be easier to don but also would cost less to build and fit more astronauts, including some of the women.

The key feature of the Shuttle-era suit was its modular design.²⁸ The main piece of the suit was the hard upper torso section, which served as a conduit to the primary life support system backpack and as the building block for the rest of the suit. The upper torso had four connector bearings: one at the neck, one below each shoulder, and one large bearing above the waist. To accommodate the largest number of astronauts, the rest of the suit was put together with suit sections of varying sizes for each part of the body. The arm section connected to the upper torso below the shoulder, and the gloves attached to the arm just above the wrist. The lower torso, or the suit pants, was made up of leg and foot sections that joined at the hip, the knee, and the ankle. Instead of making an entire EVA suit from scratch for each astronaut, the engineers simply assembled a suit with the prefabricated sections to fit an astronaut’s individual shape and proportions.

In December 1978, six months into Group VIII’s astronaut training, NASA released a news statement announcing that the engineers at Hamilton Standard, the company responsible for the suit design and production, were redesigning parts of the suit to “accommodate extra-small sizes for women.”²⁹ Making the suit pieces smaller helped, but, anatomically, female astronauts needed more than just a smaller suit. Compared to men, women typically have narrower shoulders, wider hips, and larger breasts. Wider hips were not much of a problem; Hamilton Standard’s size range of lower torso pieces usually met the need. But a woman’s shoulders and breasts made the fit of the upper torso section difficult. The upper torso was a hard shell. So if an astronaut’s arms did not fit into the armholes of the suit, his or her mobility likely would suffer. Given that almost all of the work the astronauts performed as part of an EVA involved one’s arms, shoulders, neck, and hands, mobility and upper-body strength were crucial.

As one of her technical assignments, astronaut and physician Anna Fisher worked on space suit design. In her comments to the aerospace correspondent for the Washington Star, Fisher reported that smaller female astronauts found it difficult to move when wearing the suits designed to fit the men.³⁰ Specially tailored space suits made fitting the smaller women possible, but as Fisher further explained, performing an EVA would still tax their strength. When Kathy Sullivan performed the first spacewalk by an American woman on October 11, 1984, the Washington Post suggested that she might well be the last woman for a while to do so, based on the fact that she was the only female astronaut of the eight in the corps at the time who had been fitted for an EVA suit! “At 5 feet 6 and 150 pounds, she is also the most robust of the eight.”³¹ Sullivan’s height and strength gave her an advantage as a spacewalker over the smaller women in her class.

As Anna Fisher stated, the smaller suits may have fit the smaller women well enough, but moving in them made it impractical for most women to perform a spacewalk. In fact, to move in a smaller suit actually requires greater strength, an attribute more developed in men than in women. Imagine the sleeve of a space suit as a spring. You can twist a spring to make the coil tighter. But if you cut the spring to shorten its unstretched length, and then tried to twist it, the task becomes harder to do. The principle was the same with a space suit sleeve: shorten the length between the shoulder and wrist bearings and it became harder to turn one’s hand at the wrist. Since women tend to have shorter arms and less upper-body strength than men, the suits themselves actually restricted most of the women astronauts from participating in EVAs. Consequently, only ten women at NASA (Sullivan, Kathy Thornton, Linda Godwin, Tammy Jernigan, Peggy Whitson, Susan Helms, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Sunita Williams, Nicole Stott, and Tracy Caldwell Dyson) have performed spacewalks.³² That fact has not gone unnoticed by NASA. But the cost of fitting the suits for women is high. In 2002, budget restrictions forced NASA to stop work on a $16 million project to develop a new space suit for the smaller women. NASA’s administration received both internal and public criticism for its decision to stop work on the suit, suggesting how important this project was to some.³³ But politically, when many continue to question spending money on the American space program when there are more pressing national problems, justifying a $16 million expenditure in a public forum on a project that only employs a small number of people (meaning only the astronauts) is as risky for NASA as spaceflight itself.

Until January 1986, the problem of fitting women into space suits only affected spacewalks. But in response to the Challenger accident, which killed Judy Resnik, one of the first female astronauts, along with six others, NASA started requiring everyone aboard the Shuttle to wear a protective suit during launch and reentry. Known as the LES (or Launch/Entry Suit), engineers designed the garment to protect against the loss of cabin pressure up to an altitude of 100,000 feet, cold atmospheric and water temperatures after bailing out of the Shuttle, and contaminated atmospheric conditions. The LES was also designed as a partial pressure suit, important during reentry.³⁴ After extended exposure to a microgravity environment, a person’s blood tends to pool in his or her lower extremities. With a partial pressure suit, an astronaut’s heart does not have to work as hard to keep blood flowing to the brain, thereby reducing the risk of fainting during and immediately following the Shuttle’s return to Earth.

These suits, along with the new full pressure Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) introduced in 1995, came in a range of sizes based on the U.S. Air Force twelve-size system from extra-extra small to extra-large tall.³⁵ The range of suit sizes accommodated all the variations in torso size within the astronaut corps, while whatever arm and leg length adjustments and circumference adjustments that were made could be concealed under the cover layers of the suit. With the range of sizes and the flexible material used to make the suit itself, it was possible to fit an LES and ACES for everyone in the astronaut corps.

NASA engineers designed the suits using a set of anthropometric standard measurements. Prior to the introduction of women into the astronaut corps, the astronauts’ body types and sizes all fell between the 5th percentile and 95th percentile. Since women on average measured only 92 percent of the male size and weighed about 75 percent of the male weight, NASA had to expand its anthropometric standards for them.³⁶ According to NASA Standard 3000, agency engineers began designing suits to fit astronauts as small as the 5th percentile Japanese woman and as large as the 95th percentile American man, and later considered extending the smallest size to the 5th percentile East Indian woman.³⁷

NASA introduced launch-entry suits, whether LES or ACES, as part of its intensified safety protocols following Challenger. As anyone who has worn a bulky winter coat and snow pants has realized, wearing thick extra layers made it difficult to move. For that reason, engineers knew that the key design factor for the launch-entry suits was mobility. Even the smallest astronaut needed to be mobile and flexible enough to get herself out of the Shuttle in an emergency. Along with the introduction of the new suits, the human factors engineers added the option of a special pair of gloves or an individualized tool that gave the astronaut the extra capacity she needed to escape from the Shuttle in an emergency. For Kalpana Chawla, the smallest person in the astronaut corps prior to the selection of the 2004 class, the crew systems engineers manufactured individualized gloves small enough to keep her fingers from backing out toward the palm section of the gloves when she moved her arms.³⁸ NASA designed the launch-entry suits effectively enough that the female astronauts reported very few problems with them.

When women first entered the astronaut corps, generally veteran human factors engineers felt that they would not need to make many accommodations with respect to gear and equipment for the women.³⁹ Over time, to fit smaller women, they came to realize that they needed to address one additional logistical problem. The LES and ACES were both one solid piece of material that covered all but the astronaut’s head and hands. Because the suits all used one standard-size neck ring, as the suit sizes got smaller to accommodate a woman’s narrower shoulders, the width of the shoulder section of the suit decreased. As part of the emergency egress procedures, every astronaut wore a parachute. But the small shoulder area made it difficult to secure a proper fit for the parachute harness. The easiest fix required the suit technicians to replace the existing neck ring with one of a smaller diameter. The helmet then needed to be made to fit the smaller ring as well. The engineers and technicians involved in the redesign did not see changing the neck ring size of an ACES as too problematic. But the women’s presence in the astronaut corps—whether it was because of their size, strength, anatomy, or cultural expectations—was seen as a problem, a challenge, or even a disruption that had to be addressed.

As with the suits, the kinds of adaptations that NASA has had to make for women astronauts were not always about modesty; some adaptations were strictly making sure the women could do their jobs safely and well. But there was one technical element of the Shuttle that brought functionality, safety, and modesty for male and female astronauts all to the forefront. How do the astronauts use the restroom? The ubiquitous lines outside women’s public restrooms compared to the “drive thru service” available for men should be enough to demonstrate the different modalities of urinating. Because of limited space and weight restrictions, the Shuttle crews had to share a single toilet, so the toilet’s design had to work for both sexes.

Hamilton Standard, a division of United Aircraft Company (now United Technologies) and a longtime contractor for NASA, ultimately won the contract to design the toilet for the Space Shuttle. Joseph Swider, an engineer at Hamilton Standard, outlined the challenges of such a job in an August 1972 news release. He explained, “Our astronauts have been using strapped-on tubes, bags, and even diapers for emergencies…. As soon as the shuttle was given a clear go-ahead, the people at NASA knew the old way just wouldn’t do.”⁴⁰ The news release identified the eventual participation of women in the Shuttle program as the reason why NASA wanted a new toilet design. “Aside from the inconvenience to people not trained as astronauts’’—and for the Shuttle those people were the payload specialists who were not members of the astronaut corps but would still fly as mission-specific experts—“questions arose about safeguarding privacy in cramped spacecraft.”⁴¹

On top of designing a space toilet effective for men and women, the engineers needed to think about the restraints of putting it aboard a spacecraft, specifically limits related to weight and size. Those requirements stimulated the designers to think unconventionally. One early proposal for the toilet came from the Loewy/Snaith Corporation. It was a “face the wall” configuration that the company’s study found “was entirely acceptable to the user” and “more convenient to zero-gravity restraint than conventional, one-g configurations.” Further, the toilet and hand-washing station could be reduced in width to fit within a thirty-inch compartment “without cramping the user.”⁴² With such a toilet, the astronaut slid into position from an opening above the unit and straddled the toilet as if he or she were riding a horse. The design saved space and was enclosed behind a wall for privacy. The crew systems engineers chose not to select this design, most likely because they preferred to handle fecal material differently than urine. But C. C. Johnson, the chief of the Spacecraft Design Division, believed that the Loewy/Snaith design would have been workable and could have satisfied the anatomical and physical needs of both sexes while at the same time occupying only a limited amount of precious space on the orbiter’s mid-deck.

Designing a toilet that both men and women could use in space was simple at some levels and complicated at others. Everyone knew what worked on Earth and understood intuitively what would work for men and women in space. Hamilton Standard’s design for the Shuttle toilet closely resembled an airplane toilet. The seat had a more contoured shape, as well as restraints that swung across the legs to keep the astronaut from floating away. Both design features helped form a tighter seal between the seat and body than a ground-based or airplane toilet seat created. That was the easy part. The engineers’ unique design challenge for the toilet was figuring out how to compensate for the absence of gravity, which did a good portion of the work when people urinate or defecate in a normal gravity environment. Gravity helped to pull urine and feces away from the body and into the plumbing. Hamilton Standard engineers designed a fan system for circulating air through gaps underneath the toilet seat down into the “waste containment system” (the sanitized NASA designation for the space toilet). When speaking at a science club workshop for the promotion of careers in science and engineering for girls, Sally Ride commented that the experience was like “sitting on a vacuum cleaner.”⁴³

In space, having a seal between the body and toilet seat was crucial to sanitation. The toilet’s vacuum system needed to pull all the waste into the containment system for storage. Should the vacuum fail (which it did on occasion, particularly on STS-41G, Judy Resnik’s first flight) or an astronaut forget to turn on the fans, urine and feces could float out of the commode and leave the astronaut with a less than pleasant cleanup job. Prior to development of a working space toilet (which was first introduced on Skylab in 1974), astronauts had relied on fecal bags for relief. A long plastic bag with adhesive around the opening for use in creating a seal, the fecal bag included a small sheathed protrusion near the opening of the bag that an astronaut could slide his finger into and direct feces away from his body and toward the base of the bag. The male astronauts viewed the fecal bags to be a reliable and adequate, but not ideal, solution. But the Shuttle offered its crew a bit more space and some opportunity for privacy. Consequently, the Shuttle contractors made it a priority to design a toilet that would work well for all astronauts.

Creating a seal and preserving the airflow for the suction system were essential to making a space toilet work. Once the engineers had an effective prototype, they had to test it. Because the toilet needed to work for both men and women, both sexes had to participate in those tests. By 1972, NASA had a prototype but did not have a contingent of women that the agency could ask to fly aboard a zero-g airplane—a KC-135 known to the astronauts as the “Vomit Comet’’—and try out the toilet. During the tests, the modified KC-135 flew in a series of parabolas. During the rapid descent portion of each parabola, the crew experienced weightlessness. Because weightlessness was such an unusual feeling, NASA wanted to conduct the testing with women “familiar with the flight environment, thus able to become comfortable quickly during the parabolic flight sequence and while working within the test protocol.”⁴⁴ So NASA turned to the air force for help.⁴⁵ For three weeks in September 1972, four female flight nurses from Wright-Patterson AFB helped NASA test the proposed seat and waste collection system. In 1974 NASA repeated the tests on two modified prototypes, one from General Electric’s space division and the second from Hamilton-Standard, both based on the evaluations and comments that the female nurses gave the engineers during the 1972 testing. Until NASA hired some female astronaut candidates that the engineers could use as test subjects, the nurses served as a positive and valuable alternative.

Based solely on its appearance, most people would likely be able to identify the Shuttle’s waste containment system as a “space toilet.” But the Shuttle’s toilet served more than just its obvious function and consequently had some design characteristics not normally seen in an Earth-based toilet. Part of NASA’s primary mission was to conduct scientific experiments involving the life sciences. In a letter from Charles Berry, longtime NASA director of Life Sciences, to Myron Malkin, director of the Shuttle program, Berry expressed his concern over the Shuttle’s waste containment system’s abilities to collect fecal and urine samples and provide the wet and dry mass data and volume measurements that the Life Science division needed to collect as part of its program of medical experiments.⁴⁶ Because the experiments usually needed urine and feces kept separate and the astronauts would be more compliant to the experimental protocols if that process was made relatively easy and sanitary, the engineers designed the toilet to collect those waste products separately.⁴⁷

The other factor in designing the collection process related to weight. All human waste has a high water content, which makes it heavy. By vacuum drying the solid waste and venting the liquid along with any urine not collected for testing and other wastewater into empty space, the astronauts could reduce the weight and volume of the waste they brought home. In order to separate the solid and liquid wastes, designers equipped the toilet with an external urination hose. Each astronaut had a personal funnel attachment to help direct his or her urine stream into the containment system. The male version of the funnel was just a simple cone. Because the space toilet used a suction device to replace gravity, the male astronauts did not “hard dock” with the funnel attachment.⁴⁸ With a little separation between the funnel and the penis, male astronauts found they could urinate without much need for cleanup.

Because women were not as physically capable as men of controlling the direction of their urine streams but still needed to use the urine hose for separation and collection purposes, the crew systems engineers needed to design special female urine collection funnels. To prevent a “space age mess,” the best plan for women astronauts, indeed, was to “hard dock.” Not only did the funnels need to fit a woman’s anatomy, but they had to be designed with special slots to maintain the airflow for the suction system (the men were able to maintain that airflow simply by not making contact with the funnel). Eventually, the engineers in consultation with the original six women astronauts narrowed the options down to four funnel designs. One was conical, like the male funnel. The other two were variations of an oval. Rhea Seddon described the testing and evaluation process as “totally strange!”⁴⁹

The only way to flight-test the funnels to see if they would work in a zero-g environment was to have the women try them out on the Vomit Comet. Seddon recounted,

The [engineers] wanted to try several different designs. The problem is, of course, you’ve got this [very short] period of time [of weightlessness]. We talked about it ahead of time; we planned it out. You’d fill up your bladder before you left and hope there wasn’t any delay in the take-off or in the line at the toilet. And then we’d each go in there and in 30-seconds, you wait, you get lined up, you get situated. Then when you’re at 0-g, you pee. And of course again, it’s hard to pee on cue. And then if it starts to leak, if you don’t have a good seal, and you’ve got a full bladder, you’re trying to stop. You can do that sort of. But then, do you restart? Do you wait for the pullout [at the bottom of the parabola]? Do you stay in there during the 2-g pullout? It was just kind of bizarre.⁵⁰

The women had to repeat this exercise for each of the four funnel designs. Seddon recalled, “You try to pee early, get in one of the early parabolas. Then go back in the back and drink a whole bunch of stuff [and] hope you weren’t sick. You try to fill yourself up with [more] urine, and then try it again.”⁵¹ Despite the benefits of being able to try out the waste containment system on board the KC-135, the real test of the funnels only came once they were in orbit. According to Seddon, “You had to get there and try it a few times and have plenty of tissues around so that if you didn’t place it quite in the right place or have a good seal, you could mop up. Over the course of several days you got to be reasonably good at it. But it took some practice.”⁵²

When the Shuttle was finally ready for its first operational flight test (STS-1, in April 1981), the waste containment system got its first real trial run. Commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen returned to Earth with moderate praises for the waste containment system, but they made it clear that the compartment housing the space toilet, even with a privacy curtain, left a lot to be desired. Young reported, “I don’t think the WCS door holds any structure and I tell you if we’re going to have women fly on this thing, they can’t be modest because I don’t see how you can use that thing and stay healthy on a reasonably long mission without taking every stitch you got off and clean yourself.”⁵³ From the beginning of the Shuttle’s development, the engineers envisioned some sort of privacy door or curtain for the toilet, but the flight report from STS-1 confirmed its importance. After every Shuttle flight, the crews participated in a technical debriefing when they reported back to the engineers and flight surgeons about habitability issues. Based on these reports, the engineers learned what needed to be adjusted, retrofitted, or completely abandoned in favor of a new design.⁵⁴

Generally, the space toilet worked well enough with only minor glitches. On STS-8, the five-man crew reported, “The W[aste] C[ontainment] S[ystem] proved to be very easy to use in the urine collection mode. Although the airflow seemed adequate, there was usually some liquid remaining on the inside of the funnel after use that had to be cleaned up with tissue.”⁵⁵ Sanitation was part of the process that every astronaut had to perform. Rhea Seddon commented that everyone was courteous and respectful of their crewmates’ desires for a clean and odor-free toilet. So wiping all the equipment free of any waste that the system did not collect on its own with biocidal towels was a must!⁵⁶

The handling of solid waste created additional problems. A device commonly called the “slinger” chopped up the feces and hurled it against the wall of the toilet’s internal canister so that the waste had the largest surface area for freeze-drying. But chopping up the feces created “fecal dust.” The STS-8 crew reported, “From the first five flight days, the WCS worked well in the slinger mode. The crew was very conservative in use of tissues, since the presence of significant amounts of tissue in the slinger had been blamed for causing problems on previous flights.”⁵⁷ It was clear after just a few flights that the astronauts needed to adjust their Earth-based practices of simply “flushing” all their used toilet paper. The toilet simply could not process all the additional material. Instead, they stowed most of the used wipes in sealed bags that they disposed of after landing, only flushing the bare minimum of tissue. The slinger, however, still struggled. The flight report continued,

Commencing the morning of flight day 6, the slinger began making sounds which led the crew to believe that solid materials were loose and being slung around within the cavity. Several crewmembers also noticed particles floating or being ejected from the gate valve area. These particles varied in size from dust to centimeter size and the larger ones were encountered outside the WCS area. Later that day, the slinger began laboring during use and continued to do so until WCS closeout on entry day. Although the slinger was still functional, the crew was concerned about WCS health had the flight duration been extended a day or two.⁵⁸

As flights got longer and NASA looked forward to the construction of a Space Station (construction on the International Space Station began in November 1998), the engineers found these reports to be invaluable for retooling the Shuttle’s toilet for future designs.

Unfortunately, when things went wrong with the toilet, they went very wrong for women. On STS-41D, Judy Resnik’s first flight, the toilet completely failed on the fourth day of the seven-day flight. As the flight crew report stated, “Urinal op[eration]s were terminated the evening of flight day 4 due to the inability to dump the waste tank. Apollo fecal collection bags and some emesis bags were utilized for urine collection the remainder of the mission. These bags were found to be totally unacceptable for this purpose, and a different backup urine collection scheme needs to be devised.” While the men could physically urinate into the bags, they did experience a lot of splashing. They solved the problem by putting a dirty sock in the bottom of each bag to serve as an absorbent. The bags, however, did not work for Resnik. Her best option was to urinate directly onto a towel that she could hold in place and then dispose of it in one of the bags. The situation was far from acceptable, and the astronauts pushed for a better contingency plan to be put in place. But male and female astronauts alike will suffer through a considerable amount of unpleasantness to stay in orbit for one more day.

Designing a toilet for the Shuttle that would accommodate both men and women was challenging enough. But an even bigger challenge—and a more interesting problem from a historical and social perspective—was how to handle urine collection for women during launch, reentry, and EVA, all times when the astronauts did not have access to the space toilet. Since the Mercury era, the men wore an external catheter device connected to a urine collection bag, which they continued to wear on the Shuttle. But the women needed something different. One of the early design concepts for a similar external device for women resembled the feminine napkin belts worn by women into the 1970s. When Joe Kosmo, one of the human factors engineers at Johnson Space Center, saw these sketches in 2004, for the first time in three decades, he said with some apparent embarrassment and regret, “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”⁵⁹ Rhea Seddon wrote of them, “Borrowed from chastity belt designs for sure!”⁶⁰

Most Americans would laugh and many women might cringe at the design of this female urine collection device (UCD). It consisted of a contoured funnel made of hard plastic that was held in place close to the astronaut’s urethral orifice by the support briefs. On the surface, this design embodied every good intention among NASA engineers to accommodate women astronauts—it was noninvasive, and it mimicked the UCD with its external cuff and tube attachment that the men had been using. At the same time, it seems that none of the male engineers assigned to this project felt comfortable enough to consult a woman first. Despite the awkward appearance, one of the major design criteria for the female urine collector actually was comfort.

Once it was clear that women would be included in the Shuttle program, the human factors engineers knew they needed to start developing some system for female urine collection. But getting started was more difficult at the time than it sounds. They turned first to the medical community, looking at solutions for incontinence. But often those techniques, such as a catheter, were invasive. In addition to discomfort for the astronauts, the flight surgeons would have likely vetoed the idea because of the increased risk of infection. Devising a noninvasive system, however, also had its problems. As Joe Kosmo admitted, the engineers were not very knowledgeable about female anatomy and relied on speculations about how a woman’s urine stream behaved in zero-g. To solve the problem, air force flight nurses, again, volunteered to “pee for posterity” aboard the Vomit Comet, urinating while camera crews filmed how the urine reacted in a microgravity environment.⁶¹ Understandably, NASA’s public affairs office did not announce this experiment publicly.

Step one to designing a UCD for the women astronauts was learning how urine behaved in zero-g. Step two was understanding a woman’s anatomy well enough to design an apparatus that would function. One female engineer a generation younger than Kosmo asked about the men’s apparent ignorance of female genitalia, “Didn’t you have wives?” He replied, “We didn’t look!”⁶² Despite some of the strides made during the sexual revolution in the understanding and awareness of women’s bodies and health, these male employees at NASA had grown up during the 1950s with its rather strict expectations of modesty even within intimate relationships. The whole idea of designing intimate technologies for the women astronauts caught the engineers a bit off guard, and initially they dealt with it through banter and occasionally some off-color humor, in other words, by evasion. One engineer used the plaster model of female genitalia that sat on his desk as a pencil holder.⁶³ But despite how poorly American culture had prepared them to handle this sexually charged engineering task, they still had to develop something that the women could use.

Based on conversations they held with the women astronauts, the engineers rejected the so-called chastity belt design. For the design to work, it needed to keep a fairly tight seal. The women astronauts were not convinced that the device would stay in place well enough to be effective. Not everyone completely abandoned the concept, however. In November 1979 Terence Finn from NASA’s Office of Legislative Affairs responded to an inquiry from U.S. representative Ron Paul about the Female Urine Incontinence Collection Apparatus (FEMUICA). Finn explained that the FEMUICA was a spinoff from the materials and processing technologies for custom-fitted earpieces the astronauts used in their communications headgear.

NASA applied for two patents in 1978 and 1979 and hoped to market it as a health care device for the handicapped and elderly.⁶⁴ Ultimately the engineers proposed to the women astronauts that they try a diaper-like garment called the Disposable Absorption Containment Trunk (DACT). Looking like a pair of super-padded bicycle shorts, the DACT offered the women more security and gave them more confidence that the garment would work no matter what position they were in or how much they moved. In hindsight, this seems like an obvious choice given that all astronauts today regardless of their sex wear a similar device. But at the time, there were real technological and cultural hurdles to the diaper design. From a technical perspective, while NASA engineers were trying to design a UCD suitable for women astronauts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was still developing the absorbent material for use in trapping water in otherwise arid soil that eventually made the space diapers feasible.⁶⁵ In addition, adults preferred to use an uncomfortable UCD over a diaper, which they viewed as embarrassing and humiliating. In his book Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dino Brugioni discussed how U-2 pilots felt about wearing diapers. He wrote, “There are provisions for urinating in flight but no provisions for defecating once strapped into the cockpit. In the early phases of U-2 flight training, pilots were offered diapers, but all felt that this was demeaning and chose the high-protein, low-bulk meals as an alternative.”⁶⁶ Diapers were degrading. But for the women astronauts, the DACT seemed like the most practical option. After all, they wanted something that they could trust would work when they needed it. So, they were willing to test them.

Rhea Seddon remembers testing the DACT for the first time. She described the experience as successful, but definitely a little weird. “I took mine home and both stood and laid down in the bathtub and finally could convince myself to wet my pants. Believe it or not, that’s hard to do. I actually was glad that I [had tested the DACT] because it gave me confidence sitting on the pad that it was going to work.”⁶⁷ The absorbent material used in the DACT to trap fluid—just like the material developed by the USDA—turned into a gel when it got wet. Seddon commented with a chuckle, “It felt like you were sitting in a pile of JELL-O.”⁶⁸

Ironically, because the women astronauts had tested the DACT on Earth, they were at some level better prepared for spaceflight than the male rookie astronauts. Seddon postulated, “I think a lot of the guys had this horrible realization when they were lying on the pad that they either psychologically or physically could not pee on their back.”⁶⁹ The men were well aware that they would be fitted with an external catheter connected to a collection bag for launch. As this essentially was the same system in use since the Mercury program, the male astronauts spent very little time practicing with it. Seddon said, “It just looked like it worked. So I think some of them had a rude awakening lying on the pad with a very, very full bladder and not being able to sit up or stand up to relieve themselves.”⁷⁰ Laughing, she concluded, “You know when people say, ‘Are women better at some things than men?’ Probably peeing lying on their backs is one of them!”⁷¹

Because the DACT was so successful and adult diapers were becoming available in drug and discount stores at prices much lower than anything NASA could produce on its own, all the astronauts began to opt for a diaper instead of a catheter. Historians may speculate as to whether male astronauts would have made the switch on their own or when they would have transitioned to the new technology had women not entered the astronaut program when they did. But most would likely argue that the technologies NASA’s engineers developed for the first group of female astronauts ultimately benefited the entire corps’ flight experiences.

Throughout the Shuttle era, new gender- or sex-specific issues came up that either the astronaut office or the engineers needed to address. When the engineers designed the seats for the Shuttle, they paid particular attention to making sure that women would fit without compromising safety.⁷² During the Space Station design phase, they focused on the architectural dimensions. In zero-g, an astronaut does not use his or her legs much, so their legs are often very relaxed and float naturally as if in a partially seated position. Consequently, taller astronauts fit into a smaller space than they would on Earth. By the same logic, the smaller astronauts benefited from smaller architecture. According to NASA Standard 3000, the aim was for all workstations “to meet the functional reach limits of the smaller of the defined crewmember size range and yet shall not constrict or confine the body envelope of the larger of the defined crewmember size range.”⁷³ Because women were generally smaller than men, women astronauts were naturally better suited to the architecture of both the Shuttle and the Space Station.

One cultural issue that ultimately became a concern for the astronaut office was hair. When the Group VIII women were still ASCANs, the astronaut office chose not to issue a policy that would dictate hairstyles for any of the astronauts. But when Marsha Ivins, known for her long hair, flew aboard STS-32 in 1990, people outside of NASA took notice of the problem. One of Ivins’s crewmates snapped a photograph of her with a huge halo of hair floating around her head. An industrial safety engineer who saw the picture in the newspaper wrote to NASA, expressing his concern that Ivins’s untethered hair created a danger of getting tangled in equipment.⁷⁴ Despite the astronaut office’s previous hesitance about dictating a policy on hair, Donald Puddy, the Flight Crew Operations Director, felt obliged to issue a memo to all the astronauts that hair “long enough to present an obvious hazard” must be tied back during flight.⁷⁵ Although, to date, the hair policy has only been a factor for the female astronauts (none of the male astronauts have grown their hair long), the fact that NASA has been dictating policy and making changes only when the issue truly becomes an issue of safety is a positive sign of how the politics and logistics of women in the astronaut corps have developed since the 1970s.

The changes and adaptations that NASA has made to its vehicles, hardware, and policies for women have been extensive. The challenges of space make any human excursion difficult and demanding. Each time engineers had to design single pieces of space-based equipment that would work for both male and female bodies, the complications grew. On top of functionality, NASA engineers also had to think about propriety. It is probable that not every astronaut wife or husband was thrilled about her or his spouse spending extended lengths of time in relatively close quarters with the opposite sex. It is also likely that not every American was thrilled with the idea of sending unmarried people into space without the benefit of much privacy. But as an agency, NASA and its design teams addressed those problems within an agency-wide organizational context that proved generally responsive.