3. "The Damn Crazy Things!"

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

CHAPTER 3
“The Damn Crazy Things!”

Between February 1960 and July 1961, thirteen women underwent, and passed, medical tests at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, physical and psychological examinations highly similar to those given at the clinic to the astronaut candidates who became the original Mercury Seven.¹ Masterminding the program was Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace, the chief physician of the Albuquerque clinic, who, after completing tests on the men destined to become the nation’s first astronauts, wondered how a group of the nation’s best women pilots would stack up to their male counterparts.

Dr. Lovelace was not the first person to explore such an idea. As a publicity stunt for Look magazine in 1959, 33-year-old aviatrix Betty Skelton had participated in some astronaut exercises at an air force base in San Antonio, Texas. Look reported the results of Skelton’s testing in a fall 1959 article, “Should a Girl Be First in Space?”² Around the same time, fellow pilot Ruth Nichols, a stately 58-year-old, submitted to aeromedical tests at the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio. Independent of Nichols’s testing, but also in Dayton, Air Force Brigadier General Donald Flickinger, from his office of Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), initiated his own research program on women and spaceflight. When the ARDC promptly cancelled the fledgling project, Flickinger transferred sponsorship of the program to Dr. Randy Lovelace, his friend and colleague.³

The first woman of the thirteen to be tested by Lovelace was Geraldyn Cobb, an experienced and accomplished aviator. Not yet 30 years old in 1960, “Jerrie” Cobb felt at the time that she might actually get the chance to fly in space.⁴ But it was a dream soon shattered. Even though Cobb and the other twelve women passed all the medical tests that Lovelace threw at them to test their fitness for becoming astronaut candidates, it did not take long for NASA to deny support for Lovelace’s program and reject the notion of a special program to train women for spaceflight. How and why NASA in the early 1960s refused to truly consider the possibility of a program for American female astronauts is a two-part question that deserves a more definitive answer than historians—and certainly NASA—have ever provided. What a deeper inquiry into this matter shows is that the space agency chose not to perform a serious investigation into the possibility of sending women into space during the 1960s for reasons that were largely political and cultural in nature, less so technical and certainly not medical. Leadership of the “manned” space program believed that its reasons for not considering women for use as astronauts were totally legitimate, even if it could not productively share—or at least sensibly articulate—those exact reasons with the American people.

The story of the thirteen women who underwent astronaut-related testing at the Lovelace Clinic has become relatively familiar in recent years, thanks in part to Jerrie Cobb’s efforts in the 1990s to get a seat on board a Space Shuttle flight. When NASA announced in 1997 that 77-year-old senator John Glenn was being put on the crew of STS-95 as part of a study on aging, Cobb reignited her personal fight with NASA for a chance to go into space and used the Jerrie Cobb Foundation to promote that possibility.⁵ Also bringing the story of the thirteen women to the public, a bit earlier, was Eileen Collins, the first female Shuttle pilot, who invited all of the surviving women from the Lovelace test group to attend her Shuttle launch in February 1995. Subsequently, a number of the women recorded their personal stories. Following up on her earlier book, Woman into Space (1963), in 1997 Cobb penned her autobiography, Jerrie Cobb, Solo Pilot. In 2001, Bernice “B” Stead-man published Tethered Mercury: A Pilot’s Memoir: The Right Stuff… But the Wrong Sex. Still much has been left unexplored about the proposed women-in-space program and the reasons for the American public’s too often negative perception of what the women who dreamed of flying in space were really all about.

It did not take long after the birth of the space age until the idea of putting a woman into orbit began to make sense, at least to some people. Generally, women were smaller in size, weighed less, ate less, and used less oxygen. Because every pound of weight launched required three pounds of fuel, it seemed, to some, inherently cheaper and easier to launch a woman into space. Testing the basic physiological characteristics and capabilities of a select group of young women appeared to be the logical first step.

In World War II initiatives such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots showed that women could fly airplanes in a professional manner, as hundreds of them did. The leap from piloting an airplane to piloting a spacecraft, it was therefore felt, need be no bigger for an experienced female than for an experienced male. Piloting any sort of flying machine required talent and special training, but there was no inherent reason why a talented woman pilot could not at least qualify for astronaut candidacy.

General Flickinger, when selecting candidates for his experimental program, used the records of the Civilian Aeronautics Authority to identify a group of women based on age, height, weight, medical history, and flight experience.⁶ Because of her impressive flying record and growing recognition as a pilot, Flickinger selected Jerrie Cobb as one of the earliest test subjects. When ARDC cancelled the project, Flickinger transferred the responsibility for Cobb’s testing directly to Randy Lovelace, believing that the Albuquerque clinic was the next best place to initiate research into whether women could qualify medically for the astronaut program. Cobb’s successful completion of the battery of medical tests at the Lovelace Clinic in February 1960 persuaded Dr. Lovelace to deliver a paper on the subject of women astronauts at the Space and Naval Medicine Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, on August 19, 1960. Cobb’s excellent performance on the tests also led Lovelace to extend his medical testing to other female pilots.⁷

Between January and July 1961, eighteen more women underwent testing in Albuquerque; thirteen of them, including Cobb, passed the tests.⁸ Identical to the tests conducted on the Mercury astronaut candidates, with the exception of the gynecological exam, Lovelace’s exams explored not only the subject’s general health but also her hearing, vision, balance, stamina, and aerobic conditioning. The entire gamut took a week to complete. Because the program had neither military nor NASA funding behind it, the women had to pay for their travel, meals, and lodging. Noted aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, a longtime friend of Randy Lovelace and a woman who had her own desires to fly in space, helped defray some of the costs.⁹ The problem of expenses was compounded by the fact that the medical testing at Lovelace’s clinic represented only the first portion of what was to be a three-phase astronaut qualification process. For a woman to be considered for a role in the U.S. “manned” space program, as Lovelace made clear, she would have to pass each phase of testing.¹⁰

Lovelace hoped that all the women who completed Phase I in Albuquerque would participate in Phase II testing, and he personally encouraged all thirteen of them to take part. The second phase involved psychological testing at a clinic in Oklahoma City headed by Dr. Jay Shurley, a psychiatrist. The main element of the psychological testing involved surviving the ordeals of an isolation tank. Shurley put subjects in a soundproof, lightless tank in order to test the women’s ability to deal with the type of isolation and sensory deprivation that astronauts would experience in space. Only three of the women—Cobb, Rhea Hurrle, and “Wally” Funk—completed Phase II. And only one of them, Cobb herself, went on to complete Phase III. The third phase involved advanced aeromedical testing at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida.

In making the arrangements for the three phases of testing, Lovelace had been deliberately vague and ambiguous in what he had told the women about their chances of actually being considered by NASA for entry into its astronaut corps. Since neither the military nor NASA served as official sponsors of the testing, Lovelace made all the arrangements for further testing informally.¹¹ Some of the women believed that Lovelace had promised them futures as astronauts if they finished the program. Examining the language that Lovelace used in his letters inviting the women to participate in the testing, one can see how easy it was to get the impression that a formal program to put women in space was already in place. In the letters, Lovelace referred to his project as the “Woman in Space Program.”¹² Although he never specifically said that NASA was an official sponsor of his project, he made explicit references to the “Woman in Space Program,” leaving the impression that a door to becoming an astronaut was definitely open to them.¹³

But the truth was that NASA had neither officially nor even semi-actively involved itself in Lovelace’s program. The only connection that Lovelace had to NASA was through his chairmanship of NASA’s Special Life Sciences Committee. Yet this connection was enough to reinforce the women’s impression that their testing was formally associated with the space agency.¹⁴ Intentional or not, the language Lovelace used with the women misled some into thinking that a space program for women was in the offing.

Media stories reinforced their belief. Even before NASA’s first day in existence, October 1, 1958, newspaper articles had discussed the idea of putting women into space. One article from September 1958 envisioned a male-female team as a way of easing some of the psychological tension that astronauts would surely suffer. At a meeting of the American Psychological Association that month, a team of doctors had suggested that astronauts, in order to counteract the “protracted isolation and boredom” of spaceflight, should enjoy “an occasional cocktail.” Better yet, the doctors said, “feminine companionship” would make spaceflight less strenuous. “The spaceman is sure to retain his interest in having a female companion aboard even if liquor loses its appeal.”¹⁵ In the scientific viewpoint of the early space age, women were important only by being reduced to a component of the environment of the essential astronaut, who was male.

That same year fluid mechanics expert Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, the 45-year-old director of the Avco Research Laboratory in Massachusetts, put forth a more responsible plan for women astronauts during a lecture at the University of Maryland Space Research and Technology Institute. In his talk the former aerodynamics researcher with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor, postulated that the first person in space “could well be a woman.” In his view, the weight advantage alone provided reason enough to give a woman the edge, especially if she were a qualified physician, “preferably a specialist in physiology.” For Kantrowitz, it was essential that the first astronaut be a doctor “so that the human physical and mental capabilities under space travel conditions can be more accurately reported.”¹⁶ Except for that requirement, the sex of the first human in space mattered little to Kantrowitz. His notion of a woman in space reflected a certain bias, without question, but at least it did not endorse the notion of a “housewife-astronaut,” which was the stereotyped image that most often appeared in popular caricatures of the woman astronaut at the time.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower possessed an even clearer vision of who the first astronauts should be, and it was a vision that, without naming them specifically, completely ruled out women as candidates. Briefly pondering the question of what sort of person would make the best astronauts, Ike and members of his administration decided that the best-qualified individuals were military test pilots, elite members of a specialized field of military aviation, one that just happened not to include women.

Eisenhower’s views matched up with NASA’s thinking perfectly. What NASA wanted, along with expert piloting, were the finely honed skills of technological observation that were necessary for progress in aerospace performance, solid scientific and engineering knowledge and know-how, a high tolerance for stress, and the ability to make quick and forceful decisions.¹⁷ Although Eisenhower was determined to keep NASA separate from the military, it made sense to him that military test pilots would make the best astronauts.¹⁸ Recruiting them from existing ranks within the army, navy, and air force would also go a long way toward avoiding a flashy, highly publicized national recruitment process that might take months to complete.¹⁹ Finally, relying on military test pilots would minimize the risk to human life by giving the job to those individuals who were already risking their lives in the air every day.²⁰

As a consequence of lengthy discussions between T. Keith Glennen, the first NASA administrator, and Hugh Dryden, his deputy administrator, and then final approval by President Eisenhower, the Mercury astronaut selection committee required that the first class of astronauts have a total of 1,500 hours of flight time. Candidates must also be qualified jet test pilots.²¹ Whether Eisenhower purposefully meant it to be so or not, these two basic requirements assured that no women would meet the minimum requirements, which proved efficacious to NASA when outspoken critics wrote to Washington protesting the space agency’s exclusion of women. NASA did not exclude women, its spokesmen could say. There simply were no women who were qualified.²²

A number of the thirteen women who passed Lovelace’s medical tests actually did meet the minimum standard for flight time.²³ But as late as 1961, it was still only the military that offered access to jet aircraft. Jackie Cochran, the financial sponsor behind Lovelace’s experiments, had, on one occasion, gotten a chance to fly a jet aircraft, thanks to her friendship with air force legend General Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, who in 1947 became the first pilot to travel faster than sound.²⁴ But that experience did not “qualify” her as a jet pilot. Blocking all of the women was a classic Catch-22: Pentagon policy did not allow women to be admitted to a military test pilot school, meaning that she could not become a test pilot who flew jets. There was simply no way for her to qualify as an astronaut candidate. Not until 1972 did the Pentagon grant permission to the individual branches of the military to lift their restrictions against women in test pilot school.

To those few Americans who thought about it, none of the motives involved in American astronaut selection appeared flagrantly discriminatory to women. In September 1960, an official NASA spokesman acknowledged, “Women some day will ride spacecraft into orbit around the earth or on missions to the moon or planets.”²⁵ But until that time, NASA was not purposefully restricting women. It was just that no women met the minimum requirements.²⁶

Throughout the 1960s, each time NASA announced a call for a new astronaut class, a number of women did apply. Between 1961 and 1967 NASA selected six groups of astronauts, the first three groups all as “pilots,” and, starting with the fourth group in 1964, either as “pilots” or “scientist-astronauts.” Although NASA adjusted the minimum requirements for almost every new class, the chances that a woman would meet even the revised qualifications were extremely low. Each time no woman was selected, another skirmish over NASA’s alleged discrimination against women broke out in the press.

To many, it continued to appear that NASA was purposefully discriminating against women in its selection of astronauts. In this highly sensitive public environment, it was difficult for NASA to defend itself by answering that, whether it was proper to label it discrimination or not, it remained that American women at the time were not working in career fields that prepared them well to be astronauts. Nor could NASA leadership, even if it knew how to articulate it thoughtfully, hope to get away with its position on women astronauts by laying the matter of discrimination on the basis of sex at the feet of broader American culture or the American military. In retrospect, perhaps it is justifiable to ask whether NASA in the 1960s could have found some way still to define the job of astronaut differently without ruling out all women, especially those who had truly extraordinary credentials as pilots. If the answer is found that there was really no way for that sort of definition to have properly gone into effect at the time, then one must wonder, what was NASA guilty of in terms of not choosing any women as astronauts?

In 1985, Joseph D. Atkinson, Jr., a former chief of the Equal Opportunity Programs Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, published a telling book about NASA’s early astronaut recruitment program that gives a clear picture of how the requirements and standards for astronaut candidates changed from the time of the Mercury program to the time of the Space Shuttle in the late 1970s. As a minimum requirement for “pilots,” NASA continued to require a minimum number of hours of flight time in high-performance aircraft, experience that Jerrie Cobb and her “Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees’’—or “FLATs,” as Cobb dubbed them early on—did not possess. For its second group of astronauts chosen in September 1962, NASA had lowered the maximum age from 40 to 35 years.²⁷ The agency did this because it realized that it took a few years before an astronaut made his first flight. Someone who was 35 when selected could be pressing 40 before he ever flew into space. Given how important it was for its astronauts to remain vital and healthy, NASA could not afford to waste valuable time and resources on astronauts who aged into a “degraded” flight status. Two of the Original Seven’s older astronauts had in fact been taken off of flight duty owing to health concerns: Deke Slayton for a heart irregularity, and Alan Shepard for Meniere’s disease, a chronic inner-ear problem causing vertigo. By limiting the maximum age of candidates to 35, NASA had hoped to guarantee that its astronaut corps would stay healthy at least until after they had completed a minimum of one or two flights.

In the early 1960s, NASA had also concluded that individuals who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree in engineering made the best astronauts. These spokesmen for this judgment argued that individuals who were highly skilled in research and experimental practices contributed best to NASA’s advanced spaceflight systems. Every candidate selected for Group II, in fact, held engineering degrees. For Group III, NASA extended its educational requirement to include candidates with a degree in physical or biological science, but technological abilities remained paramount. This bias also proved to be a high hurdle for the inclusion of women, because so few women at the time were earning college degrees from engineering and science programs. Very few of them who did also flew airplanes.

There was no question that NASA’s policies were exclusionary, and that posed an insurmountable problem for the FLATs. None of the women held degrees in science or engineering. Sarah Gorelick had earned a bachelor of science degree in mathematics, with minors in physics and chemistry, but her qualifications as a pilot, although impressive for a 28-year-old woman in 1962, did not meet NASA’s standards.²⁸ Candidates still had to have amassed 1,500 hours of flight time as a test pilot and be involved with an experimental flight program, although NASA did now permit candidates to earn their experimental experience not just from the military but also from industry or from NASA’s own flight research facilities.²⁹ One of NASA’s Group II astronauts was, in fact, purely civilian: Elliot M. See, Jr., had flown as a test pilot for General Electric. And Neil Armstrong, although he had learned to fly as a naval aviator and had flown combat missions during the Korean Conflict of the early 1950s, was no longer in active service—or even flying in the naval reserve—when he became an astronaut in 1962. Armstrong, the future commander of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing in July 1969, had served from 1956 to 1962 as a civilian test pilot for NASA and its predecessor agency, the NACA.

NASA issued its third call for astronauts in June 1963. The Gemini project that provided the bridge between Mercury and Apollo was in full swing. For this candidate group, NASA made very few changes to its requirements. The most notable was the decrease in the flight-time requirement, from 1,500 to 1,000 jet pilot hours. If the candidate was currently working in an experimental flight program, this requirement was waived. But neither of these changes did anything to open up astronaut candidacy to women.³⁰

The selection of Group IV in October 1964 marked the first significant change in astronaut recruitments, as NASA opened up its astronaut corps for the first time to so-called “scientist-astronauts.”³¹ For this new category of astronauts, flying status was still desirable but not mandated. Candidates selected who did not possess jet pilot experience were to be given one year’s worth of jet flight training. NASA still held strongly to its position that the astronaut candidates must be in excellent physical condition. Although the selection committee relaxed the physical standards somewhat for the scientists, they, too, had to pass a Class I military flight-status medical exam.³² The greatest emphasis for the new class of astronauts was professional experience in science or engineering. NASA especially liked candidates who had done doctoral-level graduate work in science, medicine, or engineering or had “comparable occupational experience.”³³

The new emphasis on science and engineering did nothing to help women become astronauts.³⁴ As stated earlier, very few women worked in the fields of science and engineering within the United States, and a miniscule number of them had any experience, or even ambition, in aviation. With such a very small number of young American women participating actively as professionals in technical fields, it remained almost as difficult for women to qualify for the scientist-astronaut program as it was to meet NASA’s earlier pilot-astronaut standards.

It is easy to understand why NASA, on that basis, felt that it was not responsible for “excluding” women from its astronaut corps. And, in truth, it was not really any outward, conscious discrimination against women by NASA that was the problem. Given the high risks, the great unknowns, the international geopolitical significance, and the high public visibility of the space race with the Soviet Union, the agency understandably wanted, and needed, its astronaut corps to be the very best, filled with the most experienced test pilots—and later scientist-astronauts—that the nation offered. Social experimentation could not be the agency’s priority when America’s success in space was critical to victory in the Cold War. As NASA and many in the rest of the country saw it, women simply did not meet the requirements. What was highly important about the scientist-astronaut initiative of 1964 for the eventual entry of women into the astronaut corps was not that the initiative enabled women to immediately become qualified as astronauts but that the initiative broadened the definition of astronaut in a way that, by the 1970s, would enable a later generation of women to meet the requirements by successfully achieving the educational levels in science and engineering that met the new NASA requirement.

NASA selected three more astronaut groups before the Apollo program ended in 1972. Group V, chosen in 1966, consisted of nineteen men, all of them “pilots,” while Group VI, selected in 1967, brought eleven more men into the program, all “scientist-astronauts.” Group VII, the last astronaut class prior to the Shuttle era, came to NASA in June 1969 through the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program (MOL).³⁵ For these three classes, the only change that NASA made to its qualifications was to raise the age limit from 34 to 36 years.³⁶ Given the continuity in the minimum requirements, it is clear that NASA had grown comfortable with the quality and abilities not just of the pilots but also of the scientists coming into the program.

Although it may be unfair to criticize the early space agency for discriminating against women, one can still ask, why didn’t NASA through the 1960s give the idea of putting a woman in space at least some serious consideration? Given the Kennedy administration’s emphasis on the role of manned space exploration in America’s prestige and propaganda battle against communism, why did American leadership choose not to show the world that an American woman could travel in space? After all, a Soviet woman, Valentina Tereshkova, orbited the globe in June 1963. The Kremlin used Tereshkova as an example to the world of the Soviet Union’s sense of equality and the superiority of its women over those in the West. The success of Tereshkova’s flight and the media attention that followed triggered a barrage of criticism of the U.S. space program—not just from the FLATs, but from other people as well, both men and women—for failing to give an American woman a chance to prove her mettle.³⁷

The majority of the American people did not share this concern, however. All the contemporary evidence suggests that the U.S. public, to the limited extent that it even thought about the issue, was divided at best on whether it was a good idea to put a woman in space. Generally, American men—and even a great many American women—still expected women to stay at home and raise their families. In her breakthrough 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women’s activist Betty Friedan (1921-2006) offered a powerful critique of the traditional social views straightjacketing American women. Cultural values embraced by both men and women had led to a “feminine mystique,” a mental framework that trapped women inside their domestic roles as wives and mothers.

But other female voices of the era argued that the status of wife and mother was no trap whatsoever.³⁸ In dozens of magazine articles, women writers noted that American women were achieving success in the workplace while also keeping a home and family.³⁹ Regrettably, what many of the authors failed to express sufficiently were the tremendous difficulties most women faced when trying to balance a career and a family. A father could come home from a hard day at work and expect dinner to be waiting on the table and the children clean and ready for bed. After her day on the job, a mother would have to cook that meal, see to the children’s care, and do her housework. According to historian Joanne Meyerowitz, who studied what journalists and essayists said in the 1940s and 1950s about women’s place in society for her 1994 article “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” feminine stereotypes “served as conservative reminders that all women, even publicly successful women, were to maintain traditional gender distinctions.”⁴⁰ For the extraordinary women wishing to pursue opportunities as astronauts, those cultural notions worked sternly against them.

The popular American image of the astronaut from the Mercury era through the Apollo program reflected uniquely masculine characteristics. One contemporary television description of an astronaut used such terms as “vitality,” “strong,” and “vigorous.”⁴¹ In the magazine articles whose content about women was examined by Meyerowitz, authors typically described their subjects’ femininity by remarking on a woman’s “frail, willowy appearance.”⁴² Embedded even in those articles that applauded women who were succeeding in the workplace rested the message that American society still most appreciated feminine women, with femininity meaning, at least inferentially, physical weakness, mental inability, emotionality, and even sickness. The FLATs fought this attitude as best they could. Whenever Jerrie Cobb was interviewed, she wore a dress for the reporters and expected a question or two about her cooking abilities and favorite recipes.⁴³ Despite the extraordinary talents of Cobb and the other FLATs, it was impossible for any woman, however rare and talented, to fit both American society’s standard image of the astronaut and its standard image of the feminine woman.⁴⁴

No public criticism of NASA’s astronaut qualifications had surfaced until after Lovelace’s project came to an end. Very few Americans knew that the program had even taken place. The first public mention came when Marion Dietrich, who had undergone testing in March 1961, just a couple weeks before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, discussed her experiences in a McCall’s magazine article published in September 1961. Most of the publicity about the Albuquerque tests and the FLATs’ subsequently persistent pursuit of astronaut candidacy came only after the navy retracted its offer to participate in Phase III. Stories critical of NASA surfaced when Jerrie Cobb and Jane Hart testified to Congress in July 1962 on sexual discrimination in the astronaut program. Although many articles supported the interests of the Lovelace women, they did not provoke any strong public reaction in favor of women becoming astronauts; in fact, much of the reaction was unsupportive of that goal. In the eyes of most Americans, being an astronaut took heroic qualities of mind and body that the normal female did not have.

One might think that the attitudes of men about their own “maleness” and about their chivalric domineering of “the weaker sex” constituted the major stumbling block, and there is no question that such ingrained gendered attitudes posed a real problem. In an article entitled “Women Astronauts” published in Space World in September 1961, author Donald Cox wrote, “The biggest initial obstacle to an accelerated ‘astronette’ program still to be overcome is the cultural bias of American men against exposing their women to the hazards of spaceflight.”⁴⁵ A much different article from the period, one that described Jerrie Cobb’s Phase I testing in Albuquerque, delivered a narrow-minded, farcical attack on the whole idea of women going into space. “Most men feel imprisoned when they’re in a barbershop chair,” the anonymous author wrote. Women, on the other hand, “spend apparently blissful afternoons under the hair drier, nipping at the Ladies’ Home Journal and dissecting personalities with the other girls…. Any organism so placid and so easily amused should thrive on a mere 250,000-mile trip.”⁴⁶ Other than that, the journalist judged that nothing about the female personality translated well into being a space traveler. The astronette “would probably use her insidious influence to get softer cushions in the rocket ship, more room on the inside, curtains over the portholes, antimacassars, throw rugs and pastel walls.”⁴⁷ The only sensible solution, according to the misanthrope, was to “leave women at home until men had time to prepare the raw ground, as they did at the frontiers of earth.”⁴⁸

Although most readers would have believed the anonymous author to have been a man, it was possible, given the attitudes of the time, that the writer was a woman. Into the 1970s, if not beyond, many women, particularly middle- and upper-class women, looked at the world from within the traditional cultural framework that distinguished between proper male and female roles. Until that mentality changed in fundamental ways, neither men nor many women would come out as strong advocates of women becoming astronauts.

The special hearing in Congress on NASA’s alleged discrimination against women becoming astronauts stimulated some newspapers to query their readers on how they felt about the issue. Results indicated mixed feelings. The Boston Herald, in its August 27, 1962, edition, published quotes from six people—three men and three women—responding to the question, “Should there be women astronauts?” One of the male respondents, Leo O’Hara, seemed to like the idea: “It’s unfortunate the Russians seem to be ahead of us in this. With more [rocket] thrust like the Russians have now we could get more women in orbit.” But O’Hara then joked, “They [women] have been going around in circles for years anyway.”⁴⁹ Charles Scott’s answer gave somewhat stronger support to the idea of women in space: “I don’t see why not. They’re supposed to be the weaker sex, but I don’t see any real evidence of that.” Joe Ceraso put less faith in the abilities of women: “That’s a tough question. If the women were screened properly I think some would be found who could do it. I don’t think the average woman has the stamina. On the average a man would come much closer to do what is required than a woman would.”⁵⁰ Two of the three women favored the idea. Mary Stafford, a nurse, felt that women had “qualities that men don’t have and could make a real contribution to the space age.”⁵¹ In contrast, Adele Durell, the only full-time housewife whose interview the paper published, expressed disdain for those women who pushed to go into space: “I don’t see any reason why there should be [women astronauts]. There are enough men in the armed forces to take care of that. I think the women are silly who make a fuss about it. It’s ridiculous. When you get right down to it I don’t even see why women should be in the service.”⁵²

Ironically, Jackie Cochran, who had paid for most of the women to take the tests at the Lovelace Clinic, issued the most forceful denunciation of the idea of accepting women candidates for the Mercury space program. Cochran had a history of only supporting projects that benefited her personally. She felt herself the most qualified to be the first woman in space,⁵³ but her advancing age (she was 56) and declining health made her selection impossible. In her testimony before Congress, Cochran blindsided her fellow women pilots (Cobb and Hart also testified) by asserting, “I do not believe there has been any intentional or actual discrimination against women in the astronaut program to date.” Inclusion of women in the space program “should not depend on the question of sex but on whether it will speed up, slow down, make more expensive or complicate the schedule of exploratory space flights.”⁵⁴ Medical testing did not yet offer sufficient evidence on how women and men compared physiologically and psychologically.⁵⁵ If politicians pushed for a women’s space initiative, Cochran warned, Congress had better be prepared to absorb significant additional cost, because many of the women beginning astronaut training would never finish it. Based on her experience as head of the WASP during World War II, she predicted that 40 percent of the women would drop out owing to marriage and pregnancy.⁵⁶ In response to Cochran’s remarks, Representative James G. Fulton (R-Pennsylvania), one of the strongest backers of having a woman astronaut, declared that all the male astronauts in 1962 had children, some of them quite young, and those children were assets in their lives, not problems. Cochran retorted, “It would not be an asset while you were having the babies.”⁵⁷ The effects of Cochran’s appearance before the special congressional committee deflated any hope that the federal government would mandate a change in NASA’s astronaut qualifications opening the door to women.

Various leaders of the space agency, including a few astronauts, did their best to respond thoughtfully to those critics who felt that NASA should be opening its astronaut corps to women. One of them was Dr. George Low, the director of spacecraft and flight missions at NASA Headquarters, who also appeared before the special congressional committee.⁵⁸ A trained engineer who had done aeronautical research with the NACA in the 1950s, Low tried to answer the questions he was asked with what he considered to be straight facts. The “fact” was that astronaut requirements were such that no women yet qualified. Further, modifying the national plan to include putting a woman in space, Low thought, would greatly slow progress toward putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, the bold goal that President Kennedy had established.⁵⁹ To many Americans, however, Low’s statements sounded eminently reasonable.

Mercury astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter reinforced Low’s view. In the comments they issued, however, they offered that it was only a matter of time before some women would qualify to train as astronauts. In the meantime, it was critically important for NASA to carry out the early phases of space exploration with the best-qualified people. So little was known about the stresses of spaceflight, it only made sense to select the first astronauts from test pilots who had, in Carpenter’s words, “demonstrated that they have certain capabilities and have been employed in the field that most closely approached space flight.”⁶⁰

Interestingly, astronaut John Glenn, a future Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio, felt that the fact that no women yet qualified for astronaut selection indicated that “there may be something wrong with the social order.”⁶¹ Glenn continued, “Men go out and fight the wars, fly the planes, come back and build them. We haven’t seen the idea of women in space put forward because they’re better qualified. Nobody [has] put them forward as [being] better qualified, but just because they’re women.”⁶²

Glenn’s recognition was critical. America of 1962 still clung to very powerful stereotypes about what types of jobs and roles in society a man and a woman should and should not pursue. Reiterating what George Low and Scott Carpenter told the subcommittee, Glenn compared the FLATs’ success during the Lovelace testing to a preseason physical exam given by the National Football League’s Washington Redskins. “My mother could probably pass that,” Glenn said, “but I doubt that she’d play in many games.”⁶³ In his view, the testing in Albuquerque demonstrated only that some women met a medical baseline, not that they could actually do the job.

None of the individuals who testified before Congress in 1962 said that women could never be astronauts. Even Jackie Cochran believed that a woman-in-space program was not too far down the road, and she strongly encouraged the idea if it was done “intelligently” and “properly.”⁶⁴ But trying to do it in the midst of an urgent space race, one whose goal was landing on the Moon before the end of the decade, did not make sense to her—or for the nation.

In September 1962, NASA announced its second group of astronauts, the class of astronauts that would fill most of the slots for the upcoming Gemini and Apollo projects. The first Gemini flight was expected to launch in late 1963.⁶⁵ Gemini’s goals of orbital rendezvous and docking, extravehicular activity (EVA) or “spacewalking,” and long-duration spaceflight had to be achieved quickly if Gemini was to provide effective technological building blocks for the Apollo Moon landing program. NASA projected that by early 1967 it would be ready to attempt a circumlunar flight.⁶⁶ Given the demands of this compressed schedule, it was hardly unreasonable for NASA leadership to believe that a woman-in-space initiative was a distraction that the nation could not afford.

NASA administrators felt significant pressure to succeed.⁶⁷ A highly effective selection of astronauts who could excel in their jobs was absolutely vital to the success of the space program. Robert R. Gilruth, the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston (later named the Johnson Space Center in honor of President Lyndon B. Johnson), replied to a letter written by Jerrie Cobb in which he tried to explain the basic position in which NASA found itself: “The manned space flight program is a serious scientific endeavor and we cannot include any but the best-qualified personnel in our flight teams…. We are in competition with the Soviets, not for the accomplishment of propaganda stunts, but for the acquisition of sound technical and scientific information on the problems of human space flight.”⁶⁸

There was no question that Gilruth believed in the correctness of his position independent of any personal or institutional bias against women: “I feel that we must conserve our efforts and concentrate on problems of a more pressing nature without introducing additional variables into our equation from either a scientific or public-relations standpoint.”⁶⁹ Putting a woman into space, even if the Soviets were planning to do it themselves, simply could not be a priority. The space race was serious business and, as such, NASA had to put all of its efforts into getting the job done. If that meant women could not yet be astronauts, so be it.

For Gilruth and most other officials of NASA’s manned space program, the issue of personal risk was not a primary factor in the arguments they used about why women could not yet train to be astronauts. Indeed, spaceflight risked the lives of astronauts, and many Americans still felt that women should be spared from such hazardous duties, in the civilian space program or in the U.S. military.⁷⁰ But in Gilruth’s view, national priorities were enough to explain why NASA could not be training what it deemed to be unqualified applicants. Gilruth did not water down that rationale by throwing in the matter of not wanting to risk women’s lives.

In the context of the early 1960s, perhaps the strongest argument made by the advocates for women becoming astronauts was the fact that the Soviets were training women for spaceflight. Flying a woman in space had tremendous propaganda value for the Soviets as they tried to convince the rest of the world that the social and sexual egalitarianism of the communist system was inherently superior to the misplaced, exploitative values of the decadent, capitalist West. Lovelace Clinic test veteran Jane Hart played this “space race card” herself when she petitioned members of Congress for a woman-in-space program in March 1962. Hart reported that there was “considerable evidence” indicating that the Soviets were training women as cosmonauts: “It is my belief that the Russians will have successfully space flown a woman by next September.”⁷¹

While privately acknowledging that the flight of a woman cosmonaut would make good propaganda for the Soviets, NASA leaders believed that winning the space race by getting ahead of the Russian program generally, and especially beating the U.S.S.R. to the Moon, was ultimately the best way to show the superiority of “the American Way.” To accomplish that primary goal, according to a column written in March 1962 by journalist William White, the emphasis had to be “a sound, slow job in fundamentals, all the fundamentals.”⁷² “The public,” White opined, “requires education in the basic fact that this is an immensely serious and adult business in which there is only one real possibility that we shall ‘lose.’”⁷³

While NASA risked alienating some of the American people for maintaining astronaut standards that ruled out women, on the whole the country understood NASA’s rationale and accepted what needed to be done. By including women as astronauts, NASA would risk much more politically than isolated criticism from feminist spokespersons. The agency’s existence depended entirely on federal money. NASA leaders understood that meeting the country’s primary expectations for its space program was much more important than accommodating a social agenda that seemed to be a serious concern to only a small minority of the American people.

This rationale did nothing to appease those women who were intent on getting a chance to fly in space. In fact, their persistence grew, as did the number of young women who wanted to join the astronaut ranks. In June 1963 the Soviet Union did launch the first woman into space. Valentina Tereshkova completed forty-eight orbits around the Earth during a mission lasting almost three days. News of her flight incensed the FLATs, a fact that did not escape the national media. Following Tereshkova’s achievement, the Washington Post reported that NASA Administrator James Webb, the “hardworking, harassed head of the National Space Agency,” was “now getting browbeaten by the ladies.”⁷⁴ Referring to the FLATs, noted columnist Drew Pearson wrote, “The U.S. lady pilots are boiling mad that Jimmy Webb turned them down.”⁷⁵

Exacerbating their disappointment was the fact that, back in May 1961, Webb had appointed Jerrie Cobb as NASA’s consultant on women in space. Cobb later described her role as that of “the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency.”⁷⁶ At every opportunity, Cobb and the FLATs in support of Cobb’s role spoke out on the issue, hoping to raise the public consciousness about what they came to feel even more strongly was NASA’s discrimination against women pilots.

A close look at the Soviet attitude toward women in space would have shown that it was hardly enlightened. In evaluating the Soviet achievement of putting the first woman in space, one must understand that the ideological context for achieving “the first” overrode all other considerations. By launching Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6, the Soviet space program accomplished two feats, only one of which was primarily conceived for its propaganda value. Tereshkova’s flight, indeed, gave the Soviet Union another space “first,” which Premier Nikita Khrushchev hammered upon internationally as another indicator of the superiority of communism and the Soviet system. But, also by launching Tereshkova in the one-person Vostok spacecraft, the hands-on managers of the Soviet “manned” (the Russian word was also expressed in the masculine gender) space program avoided the trouble that could come when putting a man and a woman together in such an intimate working environment. Not that Soviet society as a whole viewed a man-woman spaceflight as especially problematic, but by segregating the women cosmonauts into a separate training group and by launching Tereshkova singularly and alone in her spacecraft, the whole issue of integrating men and women into a team of astronauts—something that the Soviet program was not really interested in doing—could be avoided. In the American space program, such segregation of women astronauts and isolation of their missions would not have been acceptable. In the American context, bringing women into the program meant integrating women and men into one astronaut corps, an altogether more difficult and problematic proposition than what the Soviets had done or, at that point, were planning to do.

Even in the midst of reports of Tereshkova’s training for her space flight, the idea of sending a woman into space as part of the American program garnered widespread criticism in the American press. One columnist, Robert Ruark of the Washington Daily News, seemed to be supporting women astronauts in August 1962 when, in fact, he made farce of the idea: “Most of the women with whom I have driven in automobiles would make admirable test pilots of anything, since each sally-forth is a fresh adventure.”⁷⁷ “As for engineering,” Ruark continued, “anything a woman can’t fix with a hairpin is unfixable by a corps of engineers.”⁷⁸ Concluding his damning by faint praise, he smirked, “Strike the shackles from our women, cry I, and cut them loose in space! It might even serve to free them from the Martini lunch and encourage them, after the novelty has worn off, to return to the kitchen.”⁷⁹

Not all the women who wanted to go had the same reasons for wanting to become astronauts, but they shared certain assumptions. Following the introduction of the first class of scientist-astronauts in 1965, which included no women, one could have expected criticism of NASA to intensify, but such was not the case. Mary Ann Noah, the winner of the 1964 Powder Puff Derby (an air race open only to women fliers), confessed, “I hate to be a traitor to my sex, but I do think men can go it alone…. Space flights should be left up to the men for the time being.”⁸⁰ Cattie Lou Miller, commissioner of public information for the state of Kentucky, observed, “I’ve always thought [of technology] as a field for men, anyway, and I’ve never given a thought to women invading it.”⁸¹ New England socialite Eleanor Lally, whose opinions were reported in the Boston Globe in April 1965, felt she had no time to waste on a frivolous trip to space: “I’ve got sufficient to do down here. Now honestly, you’d think, to hear them talk, that we women should feel discriminated against. I don’t feel discriminated against. I just feel indifferent. If I were an escapist, maybe I’d want to go to outer space, too, but really I’m just too busy. So let them have it.”⁸² In accord with Lally, Judith Thompson asked, “Why should some darn fool woman want to shoot herself to the moon?”⁸³ Another voice, belonging to a “Miss Irma Reynolds,” was so incensed by the FLATs’ actions that she wrote a letter to James Webb at NASA supporting any plan to bar women from space: “Keep the women out of the space flights. The damn crazy things. They would cause you a lot of trouble and expect special consideration and favors. The hell with them.”⁸⁴

At work were well-taught social prejudices on the proper ambitions, desires, and behaviors of women. Mary Aikens, Mary Ann Noah’s copilot for the Powder Puff Derby, made a highly illuminating observation in 1965, when she said, “This country feels protective toward women and leaves it to the men to do the pioneering.”⁸⁵ Other critics questioned the women’s motivations for becoming astronauts and asked whether any woman was really prepared to handle the extreme conditions. Dorothy Roe, a staff member of the Orlando Sentinel, reported that men could handle being dirty, not having a change of clothes or a chance to shave, and living with other men in a spacecraft. Women, she argued, only a little tongue in cheek, would not want to rough it: “The first thing a girl astronaut would think of, naturally, is a good supply of perfume and deodorants. Some air freshener might come in handy, also.”⁸⁶ No woman could survive on board a spacecraft without shampoo, moisturizers, dry cleaning products, and cosmetics. Roe asked, “And how will a girl keep her hair curled in outer space?”⁸⁷ Like many other Americans, Roe could not picture any woman of the 1960s going into space who did not match the fundamental female stereotype.

Into the 1970s, Americans seriously questioned whether women should fly in space. The strong consensus was that women were not yet ready for that role and that the goals of the national space program were too important and urgent to try anything that might turn out to be ineffectual or cost additional resources. As John Glenn had implied, a transformed social order might make it possible someday for women to be astronauts, but that time had not yet come. Others felt that women would never be ready and should quit fussing about it.

The decade of the 1970s did bring social and political movements, new technologies, new government legislation, and new pressures for women to be more fully integrated, in meaningful ways, into the country’s professions—including its elite astronaut corps. No single historical event related to NASA or the space program made this a reality; rather, it happened gradually as a result of underlying social, political, and economic changes taking place in America as a whole.

Still, the path to women in space would remain bedeviled with traps and ogres of various kinds. Even once NASA began to promote greater participation by women (including women of color and ethnic minorities of both sexes) in traditionally all-white, all-male positions—a significant step forward—that would enable women for the first time to meet the basic requirements for astronaut selection, a den of administrative, bureaucratic, organizational, logistical, and technological dragons continued to rear their ugly heads, breathing smoke if not fire over the issue of getting women into space.