4. Making Space

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

CHAPTER 4
Making Space

NASA designed its post-Apollo vehicle, the Space Shuttle, to make access to space routine. Its idea was to create “an integrated, efficient, economical space capability consisting of permanent space station modules and a low unit-mission cost space transportation system that will make earth-moon space easily and economically accessible to man.”¹ The agency sold the idea of the Shuttle as a “space truck,” a craft to haul people and cargo back and forth into space not just for NASA, but also for the Department of Defense, other government agencies, commercial users, as well as foreign nations.² In accord with a changing NASA approach to public affairs, the Space Shuttle also brought with it the first real opportunity for women to fly in space.

By the mid-1960s when NASA officials began thinking about a combined Space Shuttle/Space Station concept as one of the foundations of America’s long-term goals in space, consideration of the idea of women flying in space became much more reasonable than it had been during the scramble to get to the Moon. Into President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, NASA’s budget remained relatively strong.³ Public excitement about the race to the Moon kept NASA in the spotlight.⁴ There was every reason to hope that the country would support “the next logical step” in space, whatever NASA deemed it to be.

As had been envisioned by Wernher von Braun and other space visionaries of the 1950s, that “next logical step” was a space station that would serve as a staging platform for regular flights to the Moon and to other parts of the solar system.⁵ Those missions would require much longer stays in space for the astronauts. As already discussed, psychologists as early as 1958 had suggested that including women on board these longer flights might be the best way to protect against “protracted isolation and boredom” for male crew members.⁶ By the late 1960s, advocates of women in space offered a more sophisticated perspective on the contributions women could make to American spaceflight.

At a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in March 1968, U.S. Air Force research scientist E. G. Johnson led a discussion about women in space. “Who knows?” Johnson offered. “An all-female crew might be the best to go to Mars.”⁷ Although most still found problems with mixing crews, some experts were at least talking about it. The AIAA discussion in the late 1960s centered mostly on the general differences between men and women that might interfere with a mission. Johnson himself commented, “There’s just too much difference between men and women. We really don’t speak the same language. Imagine putting them together for that long. We’d be creating a communications problem that could be avoided.”⁸ Walt Stranahand, a guidance and control specialist for NASA, added, “They may well be the best crews—all women as opposed to men. Actually, there’s a scientific need to know [how women could perform]. A woman’s psychological and physical makeup may be best suited for such flights.”⁹ Yet insecurities about sexual matters persisted. Walton Jones, who worked in the office of life sciences at NASA, made the most blatant comment: “They’d certainly complicate things because there’s quite a moral question involved that would have to be overcome. For instance, you’re almost going to have to have separate facilities. Our spaceships just haven’t been built for a mixture.”¹⁰ If women were to be involved, the new Space Station and Shuttle designs would have to be designed to accommodate sex-and gender-related matters that the exclusively male AIAA speakers found innately troublesome.

As planning for the Space Shuttle and Space Station began, no one at NASA specifically stated that American space exploration would be beginning a new phase in which women would participate as astronauts. But media coverage suggested that NASA’s next big space project would likely have room for women as crew members.

As early as 1964, a year before NASA began launching its manned Gemini missions in preparation for the Apollo program, agency insiders suggested that the future of American spaceflight included women astronauts. John “Shorty” Powers, NASA spokesman and the “Voice of the Astronauts” during the Mercury era, wrote the Space Talk column for the Houston Chronicle. In answer to the question “Is a woman astronaut qualified to perform every necessary function that a man can in outer space?” Powers replied, “I have no doubt but that she could perform every bit as well—and, according to my wife, probably better than our male astronauts. I think certainly we will yet see American girl astronauts flying in space.”¹¹ Astronaut Neil Armstrong, who would not make his first spaceflight until Gemini VIII in March 1966, predicted in July 1964, “Some day we will have qualified women and I’m sure they’ll be included in the program.”¹² Even John Glenn, who had testified against the FLATs joining the astronaut corps in 1962, anticipated that women would fly in space, perhaps even as part of Apollo. The first American to orbit the Earth acknowledged that the new scientist-astronaut program should “offer a serious chance for space women.”¹³ The idea that NASA might be poised to consider selecting women for the astronaut corps seemed ready to crystallize.

NASA began to talk seriously about its plans for the future of American spaceflight even before Apollo 11 made the historic first Moon landing in July 1969. That March, in the journal Astronautics and Aeronautics, Dr. George Mueller, associate administrator for the Office of Manned Space Flight, published an article on the Shuttle and Space Station that NASA felt could be beginning operations by the mid-1970s. A drawing of one possible design for the Shuttle depicted twelve crew members on board, four times the number of astronauts that either the United States or the U.S.S.R. had ever launched.¹⁴ A subsequent newspaper story indicated that the larger crew size meant that women would likely have the chance to fly. Although acknowledging that “NASA hasn’t said so specifically,” the reporter had uncovered that “one of the aerospace companies designing the piggyback spacecraft shows the Shuttle transporting women scientists to space stations in earth orbit.”¹⁵ The journalist added, “Space stations, still on the drawing board, will be roomy enough to accommodate dozens of residents, with privacy for all” (author’s emphasis).¹⁶ Without some provisions made for privacy, naturally, a large part of the American public would keep its qualms about men and women mixing company in space. That some industrial contractors were already creating spacecraft designs that provided space for both men and women clearly suggested, however, that NASA itself was ready to take a step toward integration of the astronaut corps.

NASA’s plan to build a spacecraft capable of accommodating a mixed-sex crew reflected the era’s changing social mores and attitudes. In the sixties, the civil rights movement had incited and transformed communities across the nation, as followers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) fought for equality for African Americans. “Race riots” had broken out in the Watts area of Los Angeles, resulting in thirty-four deaths.¹⁷ Similar riots erupted in Newark, San Francisco, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Dayton.¹⁸ While institutions and individuals in southern states strained to sustain what amounted to the country’s most egregious racial discrimination, segregation in the schools of fifteen large northern cities increased significantly between 1950 and 1965, despite the landmark court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954.¹⁹

With the battle over racial equality being so hotly contested, the best strategy in the fight for women’s rights in America seemed to lay in riding the momentum created by the civil rights movement. When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII of the bill made illegal any employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race.²⁰ When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, the regulatory office founded as part of Title VII to ensure that the law was followed) opened in 1965, over a third of the complaints received by the commission came from women claiming sex discrimination.²¹ But as the only female commissioner on the five-person EEOC, Aileen Hernandez, remembers, “The message came through clearly that the Commission’s priority was race discrimination and apparently only as it related to Black men” (italics in original).²² Remarks made by an airline executive during this time, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, made clear just how deeply American men feared any such fundamental change in the social hierarchy of the professions: “We’re not worried about the racial discrimination ban. What’s unnerving us is the section on sex…. What are we going to do now when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify?”²³

On the surface, America’s space agency seemed largely untouched by the social and cultural turmoil of the period. A snapshot of Mission Control during the Apollo era captured a landscape of white, male scientists and engineers with crew cuts, neck ties, pocket protectors, and slide rules. These men tended to live traditional and conservative lifestyles. But not even NASA operated in a vacuum. As historian Terry H. Anderson has written in his book The Sixties, “The nation’s two most pressing problems [race and war] forced citizens to make decisions about the course of the nation, even about their culture, because at the same time a youthful counterculture emerged to confront the values of mainstream society.”²⁴ Those changing values, which were also taking place in and around the families of all NASA employees, influenced how society viewed women and their public roles.

Few Americans took Title VII’s sex discrimination ban very seriously; what was more, as a federal agency, NASA was actually exempt from the law. But the documentary record involving NASA’s efforts to encourage the employment of both women and racial minorities in the second half of the 1960s suggests that NASA officials understood and respected the importance of Title VII.

On March 31, 1966, NASA administrator James Webb issued an agency-wide policy directive on equal employment opportunities for women. Four and a half years earlier, John Kennedy had established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women via Executive Order 10980, and Administrator Webb followed suit: “It is my intention to take positive steps to ensure equal opportunity for employment and advancement for all qualified persons on the sole basis of merit and fitness and without discrimination on the basis of sex.” Webb expected NASA employees “at all organizational levels to give full support and cooperation to this problem.”²⁵ By early that summer, Webb had laid out clear policy and instructions for equal employment and designated an equal opportunity officer for NASA. His June 1966 document stipulated, “It is the policy of NASA to promote and insure equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, national origin, politics, marital status, physical handicap, or sex, employed or seeking employment with NASA.”²⁶

Sweeping cultural change cannot simply be dictated by such policy, yet the significance of Webb’s actions on behalf of equal employment at NASA should not be downplayed. The policy enacted by Webb exceeded the federal law’s requirements of the agency. When President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 in September 1965, which ordered the federal government to prohibit discrimination in the workplace, the order still only protected against discrimination by “race, creed, color, or national origin.”²⁷ Not until 1967 would Johnson amend his order to include “sex.”²⁸ For Webb to move for protection against discrimination inside NASA based on politics, marital status, physical handicap (against which the federal government did not mandate protection until 1990), and sex showed remarkable open-mindedness and forward-thinking, a reflection of the fact that Jim Webb was an extraordinary man and career federal bureaucrat.²⁹

From the late 1960s, the Manned Spacecraft Center³⁰ (MSC) in Houston worked to accommodate the employment directives coming down from the administrator. Robert Gilruth, the director of MSC from its inception in 1962 until his retirement after the last Apollo mission in December 1972, took Webb’s new policies seriously. In January 1969, Gilruth established the position of Deputy Employment Opportunity Officer for MSC. By August, he named Joseph Thibodaux, Jr., as the center’s EEO counselor.³¹ Gilruth also designated H. Mervin Hughes as the coordinator for the Federal Women’s Program.³² Over the next two years, the MSC director continued to emphasize the importance of the EEO office through the distribution of “Management Instructions” and the naming of more people to the growing body of EEO counselors at the center.³³

Nowhere in the relevant NASA documentation did NASA management in either Washington, D.C., or Houston ever excuse the astronaut office from making the same efforts to address equal rights and equal employment opportunities. Aside from the fact that astronauts still had to meet the physical requirements and that the tasks of each spaceflight mission would directly influence if not determine the judgment as to who would best serve on board a particular flight, nothing administratively within NASA now stood in the way of qualified women entering the astronaut corps.

Along with this active executive encouragement for all American institutions to respect the rights of women, an additional major federal policy change soon opened the window of opportunity for the employment of women even wider. On March 24, 1972, Congress enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which re-affirmed and shored up the nondiscrimination laws in the federal government.³⁴ The amendment also permitted the EEOC to handle lawsuits for complainants of unfair employment practices based on sex. Of all the federal policies enacted as part of the women’s rights movement, the 1972 amendment stated most clearly that the government would no longer overlook sexual discrimination in the workplace.

Not everyone felt that NASA was keeping up with the times—or believed that the space agency was actually part of leading the charge. In 1978, a woman by the name of Sharon E. Macha wrote to the Houston Post chastising one of America’s first female astronaut candidates for not giving more recognition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to the women’s movement as the key to NASA’s willingness to open the astronaut corps to her and other women.³⁵ What Macha failed to realize was that as an organization NASA had already moved forward rather aggressively on the question of equal employment rights for women, in all its professions, well before the federal government and the strength of the women’s movement had much to say about the issue. NASA acknowledged the work of its female employees—and promoted the contributions they made to space science and exploration—largely through stories in its individual centers’ newsletters and internal publications. One of the agency’s most famous women during the 1960s was Dr. Nancy Grace Roman. Born in 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee, Nancy Grace was the only daughter of music teacher Georgia Smith Roman and geophysicist Irwin Roman. After earning her bachelor of arts from Swarthmore College in 1946 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1949, she joined the radio astronomy program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C. When the staff and facilities of NRL’s Vanguard satellite program were transferred to NASA shortly after the establishment of the space agency in 1958, Dr. Roman became a NASA scientist and transferred to the agency’s new facility in suburban Maryland, Goddard Space Flight Center. There she served as the first chief of astronomy in the Office of Space Science—and, as such, was the first female to hold an executive position in NASA.

Early on, NASA issued a great deal of publicity about her work because, as Dr. Roman remembers, “the women’s pages were so very anxious to get material.”³⁶ As a result, she became a primary resource for other women interested in careers in space. Roman delivered public talks on the roles of women at NASA and corresponded regularly with other professionals on the topic.³⁷ More importantly to the growth of female numbers in the sciences, she mentored young women interested in working for NASA. In a letter to one female high school student, Roman lamented, “Relatively few women choose the scientific and technical occupations which are the necessary background for an astronaut. This, in turn, probably results from their early guidance: a boy gets toys to take apart and put together again; a girl gets dolls. I hope that interest such as yours indicates that more women are becoming interested in technical subjects. The training is long and arduous, but the rewards make it worthwhile if the field really interests you.”³⁸ As a woman scientist serving in a high-ranking position at a NASA facility, Nancy Grace Roman served as an important role model of female achievement. During her career, she held major responsibilities for the design and operation of several astronomical satellites, including the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Hubble Space Telescope. Throughout her distinguished career, she received many awards, including honorary degrees from Russell Sage College, Hood College, Bates College, and Swarthmore College. She also had an asteroid named in her honor: 2516 Roman.³⁹

By no means was Dr. Roman alone as a woman of consequence at NASA. More apparent in the public face of NASA was Dr. Carolyn Leach Huntoon, who came to work at NASA in 1968, following graduation from the Baylor University College of Medicine, to work on the medical team responsible for the health and well-being of the astronauts.

At Baylor, Huntoon had done pioneering research on astronaut metabolisms under the supervision of a professor under contract to NASA studying the levels of stress being experienced by astronauts as they prepared for and following spaceflight missions.⁴⁰ With funding from a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, and as the principal investigator, Dr. Huntoon set up a lab at MSC for pathology and metabolism studies on the Apollo astronauts.⁴¹ When asked about the environment for a woman in this laboratory setting, she relates today, “The interesting thing at the time was I felt nothing was holding me back. And I would add that nothing was holding anyone back who wanted to work. The work was there to be done, the money was there to fund the equipment, and no one was saying don’t do it. So it was a wonderful environment.”⁴²

Although recognizing that the number of women working in science and engineering in Houston or elsewhere was small, Huntoon feels today, as she did at the time, that “it wasn’t because no one wanted to hire women. It was because there weren’t [many to hire]…. So you just hired the next [good] person that was [available]. If it happened to be a woman, fine. But most of the time it didn’t.”⁴³ Prior to the 1972 EEO Amendment, there was no federal mandate requiring universities to provide equal opportunity for women students in the classroom. Public universities only seriously initiated recruitment programs for women interested in science and engineering after Congress passed the amendment. Until then, the flow of women in or out of science and engineering education was too minor to even merit calling it a pipeline. Huntoon’s perceptions suggest, at a minimum, that MSC held no bias against hiring qualified women, or, beyond that, that the leadership at MSC was trying hard to follow through on Administrator Webb’s policy against sexual discrimination in the workplace.

While Nancy Grace Roman and Carolyn Leach Huntoon worked largely behind the scenes, two women promoted and highlighted by NASA for their contributions operated much closer to the public center of America’s space program. Frances Marian “Poppy” Northcutt (b. 1943) and Margorie Rhodes Townsend (b. 1930) were the subjects of several news articles published in 1970 featuring how women were contributing more and more to U.S. space efforts. Northcutt worked at TRW as a computer consultant for NASA. Seated in Mission Control during the nearly tragic flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970, Northcutt was responsible for the computer programs used to calculate the limping command module’s trajectory back to Earth.⁴⁴ On December 12, 1970, Townsend, an engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center, became the first woman to oversee a satellite launch when serving as the project director for the launch of Explorer 42, a 315-pound satellite that used X-rays to map sections of the universe.⁴⁵

A marked difference between these two women’s experiences surfaced in the articles. Although the article on Poppy Northcutt described her as a woman with all the feminine charms of a popular—and wholesome looking and behaving—American television actress of the era, Donna Reed, North-cutt indicated that her working relationships with men operated more times than not on rather level ground: “Sometimes they treat me like a girl and sometimes like an engineer, but always with friendliness and consideration.”⁴⁶ Margorie Townsend met greater challenges from the men in her workplace. The launch of Explorer 42 that she directed in 1970 took place on a converted oil platform 3 miles off the coast of Kenya in the Indian Ocean and involved a team of forty Americans and one hundred Italians, essentially all of them men. One Italian crew member remarked on having a female director for the launch, “They’ll never understand this at home.” “They don’t like it,” Townsend acknowledged at the time, “but they tolerate me.”⁴⁷ The published profiles of Northcutt and Townsend offered readers conflicting images of working womanhood at NASA, indeed, but they also revealed—at least in retrospect—the value the space agency was coming to place on the contributions of professional women.

That the space agency hallmarked the work of a handful of outstanding women hardly proves that NASA as an organization was progressive in its thinking about women in the workplace. The experiences of some women, and even some aspects of the careers of the women mentioned above, strongly suggest otherwise. Carolyn Huntoon recalls that sometimes she was left out by the men she worked with: “Throughout the Apollo and Skylab era, the big thing that everyone always laughed about was that all the guys that were investigators at my level or lower were all taken out to the recovery ship when the astronauts landed in the ocean, but they never let me go.” Some women were on board those ships, but NASA would never let her go. “Women news people were permitted on board, but not me. I had to send my technicians.”⁴⁸

In other words, no matter what NASA’s official positions were on equal employment for women, and no matter what directives came from on high, the men who worked at NASA continued to hold the same notions about rights, privileges, duties, and gender as did the rest of the American public. Whether they were engineers, scientists, technicians, managers, or astronauts, NASA’s personnel, still predominantly male, nonetheless grew up under mothers who mostly stayed at home while their fathers went out to earn a living, and they married wives from whom they anticipated—rather, expected—the same. The culture at NASA could only fundamentally change at a rate consistent with that taking place in society as a whole, which in most quarters was taking its time to adjust to the new era of women’s liberation.

Until Congress passed the EEO Amendment, the opportunities for women as astronauts seemed to many people to be just talk. NASA’s Group VI scientist-astronauts, selected in September 1967, could have included women, from a purely bureaucratic perspective, if women had qualified and talented enough women had applied.⁴⁹ In truth, NASA did not do much, either publically or privately, to encourage women to apply for the astronaut corps, at least not until the agency released its call for applications in July 1976.⁵⁰ With the future of its budgets in doubt because of heightening public concern over the war in Vietnam and social problems at home, along with a generally growing disinterest in the activities of the space program, pushing to make spaceflight available for women seemed politically risky. Even though the Space Act of 1958 had established NASA as a source of scientific and technical research, the politics of space had always played a major part in almost everything the agency ever did or said.

As a federal agency dependent—as all federal agencies were—on tax dollars, NASA very often was forced to make policy decisions based not on its own goals and priorities, but on the actions and attitudes of others. The development of the Space Shuttle provides a good case in point. In 1970, a year after Richard M. Nixon entered the White House, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) made it clear to NASA that there would not be enough money to support the Space Station and the Shuttle simultaneously.⁵¹ According to political scientist John Logsdon’s 1986 article, “The Decision to Develop the Space Shuttle,” NASA understood that the agency was more likely to get congressional and presidential approval for the Shuttle but not for the Space Station as well.⁵² At lower cost, and as a reusable system, the Shuttle not only offered a launch vehicle for NASA, the Department of Defense, commercial users, foreign clients, and U.S. intelligence agencies, but it could also serve as a platform for scientific research, which was a major argument for the establishment of a space station.

But Nixon’s goals as president had very little to do with space. Barely five months after the historic Apollo 11 moon landing, he asked his advisor John Ehrlichman in a budget meeting on December 26, 1969, whether they should “close Kennedy [Space Center]” in 1972.⁵³ Nixon was not even a lukewarm advocate of spaceflight unless it could help him politically. NASA leadership understood that and were forced to play a compromising political game to get at least one program supported by the president.

When NASA administrator Dr. James Fletcher boarded his flight to Los Angeles on January 3, 1972, he carried with him a copy of a statement he was planning to deliver following President Nixon’s announcement of his support for the Space Shuttle program. (Jim Webb had left NASA in October 1968. Dr. Thomas O. Paine succeeded him, staying in the job until September 1970. Fletcher then succeeded Paine.) On that flight, Fletcher handwrote his changes to the statement so it could be retyped once he reached the Western White House.

This statement is historically significant for many reasons—some of them involving the troubled political and technological design history of what became the Space Shuttle. But the statement, and what was attached to it, is also highly important as a landmark document in the history of NASA’s treatment of women and their possible inclusion into its elite corps of astronauts. Stapled to the statement was a brief Space Shuttle “fact sheet,” a primer composed so that the administrator would be ready to deliver succinct answers to basic questions about the Shuttle’s design, performance capabilities, and crew that Nixon, his people, or the press might ask. On this fact sheet was an answer to one question that contained a highly noteworthy admission: “No special flight training would be required for passengers, making it possible to send scientists, doctors, artists, photographers—both men and women—into space.”⁵⁴

For the first time ever, a NASA document meant for presentation by a top space program official stated outright that NASA planned to put women in space. But the final document was not entirely progressive. In the answer to another question on the fact sheet—the question being “What is the complement of the space shuttle crew?” meaning, who would fly the Shuttle?—Fletcher scratched out one word. The original answer read, “The orbiter will be piloted by women” (emphasis mine). Reading that sentence, Fletcher marked through the word “women” and replaced it with “a crew of two.”⁵⁵

Figuring out what Fletcher had in his head when he changed the document is highly problematic, as he seems never to have commented or reflected back on it. But clearly, whatever Fletcher was thinking when he drew a dark line through the word “women,” his rationale must have related to the political risk of even suggesting to President Nixon the idea of putting a woman at the controls of NASA’s new space vehicle. What is also clear is that someone at NASA headquarters strongly supported the idea of women pilot-astronauts, or else the phrase would not have made it into the penultimate draft of Fletcher’s fact sheet. The historical record does not identify who composed these answers for Fletcher, but the statement still pushed political boundaries, as it was still more than two months before the EEO Amendment was passed. Unquestionably, there existed at least one person in an elevated position inside NASA (perhaps NASA associate administrator George Low) who believed in fuller participation by women in the space program—and as pilot-astronauts, not just scientist-astronauts.

To the front of the document he had revised, presumably Fletcher (although it may have been Low, who accompanied Fletcher to California for Nixon’s announcement) wrote a note to his assistant that read, “Here are the marked up versions used to make the final ones at the Western W[hite] H[ouse]. Any point in keeping these? See second line on p. 12!! [the crossed-out word].”⁵⁶ Unquestionably, the NASA administrator felt that suggesting that women would pilot the Shuttle was not a notion worth the risk of sharing at that time with President Nixon. As a Mormon from the highly conservative and Republican state of Utah, Fletcher was likely personally uncomfortable with the idea of women commanding the Shuttle. Yet, the very fact that he asked whether the marked-up copy should be preserved intimates that he understood the significance of what he had deleted from the fact sheet.⁵⁷ Despite Fletcher’s change, the document provides clear evidence that some of the members of NASA’s leadership were developing a vision of women and the space program that pushed the limits of what the country—certainly the president—expected for women in the workplace.

There is another, although highly remote, possibility that the word Fletcher crossed out was only a typographical error. Maybe the word “women” should have read “two men,” but the typist left out the “t” and closed up the space between the “o” and the “m,” thereby negating some of the historical significance of this particular document. The most sensible conclusion was that its author meant it to be stated just so, with the word “women,” and that Fletcher, already anxious and uncertain about Nixon’s support for the Shuttle without adding a social agenda, deleted the word. It seems highly unlikely that Fletcher would have saved the document because of a typographical error and more likely that he replaced “women” because of his unwillingness to make that announcement.

As NASA moved forward in the early 1970s to establish a new astronaut selection program for the Shuttle, the American public again debated the idea of a sexually integrated astronaut corps. The San Jose Mercury ran an article in July 1972 based on an interview conducted by the paper with former astronaut Frank Borman, commander of the famous Apollo 8 flight of December 1968 that first circumnavigated the Moon. One of the questions for Borman was, in light of the fact that “women in space is moving closer to reality” and “now that America’s space program is climbing out of the experimental and test stages and nearer to more or less routine space transportation modes,” how long will it be before there are women astronauts? Borman answered, “I can see a role for women in space before long, if they can qualify. However, using women astronauts during the experimental stages of the space program, when we were testing all sorts of systems and the risks were high, would have been silly. They could have caused more problems than they would have been worth.”⁵⁸ An “old school” fighter pilot, test pilot, and astronaut, Borman, by the time he made this statement in 1972, had retired from NASA and the air force and had become a special advisor to Eastern Air Lines (in 1975, he became Eastern’s CEO). Replacing him was a younger generation of NASA managers with somewhat different social and cultural attitudes and a greater commitment to making the concept of women in space genuinely work. It was these men in control of NASA in the 1970s and 1980s who pushed forward with plans to make women astronauts possible.

In the fall of 1973, the staff at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California conducted the first in a series of physiological tests on female volunteers as a way to help construct the physical selection criteria for the first class of women astronauts. Dr. Charles Berry, the director of life sciences at NASA headquarters and former chief physician of the astronaut corps, headed the overall project. Dr. David Winter undertook the daily leadership of the tests on twelve nurse volunteers aged 23 to 35 to find out how weightlessness and reentry forces might affect the female body.

From flight data, NASA doctors knew that men suffered measurable cardiovascular deconditioning as a consequence of their time spent in micro-gravity. Dr. Winter and his primary investigator, Dr. Harold Sandler, wrote in their final report on this first in a series of bed-rest studies, “Women will play an increasing role in future space programs. They will be included as passengers in the upcoming Space Shuttle Program and will very likely participate in the Space Station Program envisioned for the distant future. The prospect of sending women into space, however, has raised a number of questions concerning the physiological capability of the female to withstand the deconditioning that has been observed consistently in both U.S. and Russian space crews after exposure to weightlessness.”⁵⁹

The tests lasted thirty-seven days, including a fourteen-day control period, seventeen days of absolute bed rest, then six days of recovery.⁶⁰ During the control period, all twelve women were put through a series of tolerance runs on a centrifuge, with analysis of lower body negative pressure and the effects of exercise. Then eight test subjects entered the bed-rest cycle while four control subjects remained ambulatory. During the period of bed rest, the researchers required the eight women to avoid any excessive movement, furnished them with one pillow, and allowed them to raise themselves on only one elbow to eat their meals. During the final six days, all twelve of the volunteers repeated the tolerance runs from the control period. If women were going to fly—and by late 1973 NASA was dedicated to that agenda—then doctors needed to know how the female body might react differently. Given that doctors suspected the loss of total body fluid as a major reason behind the physical deconditioning, as well as the fact that through menstruation women on average lost a greater percentage of their body fluid than men, such studies were viewed as an important step toward getting women into space.⁶¹

One of the central problems that NASA faced in “making space” for women had always lay in the attitude of the American public. In the 1960s NASA had been the target of criticism by some for not having selected any women for spaceflight, while many more people would have condemned NASA if women astronauts had been selected. One might imagine that a limited science-based research program such as the bed-rest studies led by Dr. Winter would have created no major controversy and that those who had been advocating for women in space would have responded, “It’s about time!” To the contrary, Dr. Winter found himself under attack. Argumentative letters came to him in the mail decrying the use of public money for such a study, pronouncing, “Women have no business in space.” Some of the complaints came from women who lamented that “there are no mothers among the test group and that the results of the study on the nurses should not be compared with a similar study last summer on a group of younger male athletes.”⁶² Winter responded thoughtfully and with vigor, “This isn’t a contest. Everyone seems to forget that this is the first of a series of studies. I don’t see any reason to suppose that women are not capable of space missions, as the Russians have shown. And I personally believe women have as much right in space as men.”⁶³ So, even as NASA’s scientists and doctors endeavored to learn the basics of what was needed to qualify women for spaceflight, the culture clash arguments over mixing the sexes in what had been a totally male-dominated space lingered on.⁶⁴

Dr. Winter continued his tests throughout the 1970s, testing both men and women up to the age of 65.⁶⁵ About the tests he said in May 1974, “By the end of this decade, we hope to have a Space Shuttle in service which will operate like a bus. There are going to be other people aboard the rockets apart from the pilots, and scientists come in all sizes, shapes and sexes. So we want to find out how far and wide we can open up the field.”⁶⁶

The seventies was a far different decade for NASA than the sixties. Funding had been drying up as the public questioned more and more pointedly whether money spent on human spaceflight made sense in comparison to other human needs.⁶⁷ A March 1971 media poll, which compiled responses from hometown newspapers in assorted congressional districts around the country, asked what people believed were the most vital issues facing America in order of importance. The responses listed, in order of highest priority, the Vietnam War, environmental protection, education and welfare, urban improvement, declining morality, minority problems, and national defense. Space exploration sat very low on the list. When asked about how the U.S.S.R. prioritized its ambition, the American people who were polled felt that the Soviets put only one priority higher than their space program, and that was national defense.⁶⁸ NASA found itself facing a public affairs dilemma.

With the glory days of the Apollo program burning out like a supernova and dreams of space travel quickly receding into the fringes of the American psyche, NASA tried to mold its agenda for spaceflight into something that would continue to hold the public’s attention, if not excite it. Memorandum after memorandum circulated inside and out of NASA’s Office of Public Affairs, desperate to find any way for the agency to rekindle public interest in the space program.⁶⁹ To build and operate a worthwhile Space Shuttle, NASA could not afford a steady drop in its budget. But to win back public and congressional support, NASA required a bold new emphasis.

NASA leaders had struggled to redefine the nation’s space agenda. In a letter to Edgar M. Cortright, the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, George Low wrote back in June 1971, “It has been suggested that NASA’s role should be broadened—that NASA should undertake the solution of technological problems that face the Nation, in addition to its responsibilities in aeronautics and space.”⁷⁰ Low asked his old fraternity brother from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to lead an in-house NASA study to determine what kinds of “non-aerospace technological problems” could realistically be addressed by the space agency for which practical solutions could be found and applied.⁷¹ Cortright accepted and went to work to find more specific Earth-related applications for NASA R&D.

Six months later, on January 10, 1972 (just five days after President Nixon announced his support for Space Shuttle development), Low sent out a similar appeal, this time to Brian O’Brien, chairman of NASA’s Advisory Council. In reply, O’Brien offered, “To make the program of the 1970s most effective and fruitful, it would be helpful to have some insight into what the space program should be and is likely to be in the 1980s.”⁷² As political scientist Mark Byrnes demonstrated in his 1994 book Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA, space advocates of the late 1950s and 1960s had benefitted from a Kennedy-inspired political culture rich in “new frontier” symbolism and Camelot-style romanticism, which enabled NASA to foster a heroic mythology, really without too much effort on its own.⁷³ The more cynical and pragmatic political culture of the 1970s posed a far greater public relations challenge to NASA—one in which direct image creation by the agency was more important than previously, and one in which NASA, as Administrator Fletcher expressed it, “looked ahead to several decades of a highly rational use of space” and “a period of space exploration for practical purposes.”⁷⁴

Low, as NASA’s deputy administrator from December 1969 to his retirement in 1976, found himself entrenched in figuring out public affairs issues. Concerned with the effectiveness of NASA’s publicity, Low admitted that improvements had to be made: “Even though I am certainly not content with the NASA image, I do feel that our public affairs program is extensive in scope, and by no means static.”⁷⁵ In his earnest attempts to improve the agency’s public image, Low exchanged letters and shared conversations with astronomer Carl Sagan, later renowned for his PBS television series Cosmos. Dr. Sagan shared his thoughts with Low about how NASA could improve its public image.⁷⁶ Low also looked to acclaimed marine biologist Jacques Cousteau for help. Not only did Cousteau possess his own personal ambitions to fly in space, but his skill and success with filming and producing documentaries of his underwater oceanic exploration offered Low a model for its own public presentations.⁷⁷ Candidly, Cousteau condemned the quality of NASA’s television spots, declaring that “they are worse than commercials and people are more likely to leave their TV sets when these come on than they are even for commercials.” As for the NASA seal that appeared at the beginning of all its documentary “shorts” and the strong parade-like music that accompanied most of them, Cousteau told Low that they smelled “of the worst kind of publicity or advertisement” and were “counterproductive.”⁷⁸ NASA’s space efforts in the 1960s may have been able to sell themselves, but, in Cousteau’s estimation, the agency’s attempts to reinvigorate the public’s interest in spaceflight, up to this point, were doing more harm than good.

A NASA assistant executive officer by the name of Harvey Herring took Cousteau’s written comments to heart. In a memo back to George Low, Herring lamented, “NASA presentations too often focus on the agency and its people as primary subjects. An atmosphere of arrogance is clearly discernible, especially where manned space flight is concerned. The people whom we choose to front for the agency are seldom content to be narrators in the background. Instead they tend immaturely to draw attention to themselves, to their roles, and to the superior capabilities they and the agency have for performing them. The public has an easy escape from such nonsense. They switch channels and watch Cousteau.”⁷⁹ Low himself concluded that the public would relate better to NASA if the agency’s efforts at outreach emphasized “the down to earth benefits” like those based on data being collected from the Earth Resource Technology Satellite (ERTS), which monitored the Earth’s surface and environmental situation.⁸⁰ As mentioned, Low had asked his friend Ed Cortright, Langley’s center director, to identify various scientific and technological challenges that NASA could address and apply to solving other national problems. By emphasizing the contributions that NASA could make to society through R&D—particularly those contributions that could be based on Space Shuttle (as well as Spacelab) operations—NASA public relations could forge an entirely new message for the marketing of spaceflight. Greater involvement in space missions by scientist-astronauts and the inclusion of the new “mission specialists” specifically for the Shuttle would be a linchpin in NASA’s new approach to public affairs.

In September 1975, the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on the Scientist-Astronaut in NASA’s Advisory Council submitted a report to George Low. For the Moon missions, NASA had selected two classes of scientist-astronauts so as to achieve the best possible collection of geological samples from the few lunar landings that Americans would make. When Apollo ended, the ad hoc subcommittee got the task of evaluating the efficacy of including those scientists (like Apollo 17’s Dr. Harrison Schmitt) in the astronaut corps for the new Shuttle program.

The panel report asserted that by “bridging the sometimes wide gap between scientific and flight operations points of view,” the scientist-astronaut “can contribute to a productive Space Shuttle science program.”⁸¹ The record of achievement compiled by Apollo scientist-astronauts like Harrison Schmitt (who was the only one of them actually to fly a Moon mission—three others had flown on Skylab before the committee completed its report) also justified NASA’s plans to select “mission specialists” specifically for the contributions they could make as researchers.

Following up on this conclusion, and in order to maintain the highest possible quality of scientific and engineering knowledge in the astronaut corps, NASA went on to establish the “Life Sciences” and the “Space and Applications” Astronaut Offices at Johnson Space Center, mainly as a way to keep the scientist-astronauts engaged actively with their core disciplines.⁸² This new scientific emphasis within the human spaceflight program significantly bolstered NASA’s new agenda and public profile as it moved deeper into Shuttle development.

There was another element of NASA’s redefinition of its image in the mid-1970s that focused explicitly on the pursuit of equality for women. Not long after the twelve nurse volunteers participated in Dr. Winter’s bed-rest study at NASA Ames, four women who were scientists or engineers took part in a Spacelab simulation at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. For five days in December 1974, Doris Chandler, Carolyn Griner, Ann Whitaker, and Mary Helen Johnston spent their eight-hour workday in MSFC’s General Purpose Laboratory (GPL), where they participated in a series of experiments similar to those anticipated to fly aboard Spacelab, the European-built science module for the Space Shuttle.⁸³ Unlike the bed-rest experiments in California, what the women did during the GPL simulation had nothing to do with proving whether women could work as mission specialists. The goal was rather to establish a working understanding of the kinds of experiments that any astronaut could be expected to perform in space: “what can and cannot be done in weightlessness and what handholds, foot restraints and other devices are necessary.”⁸⁴ Media coverage of the test program featured more than the mere presence of women employees at NASA Marshall; it showed women working as scientists and engineers and as vital contributors to the human space program. Although differences in size and physical strength among the astronauts, demonstrated in these tests, would eventually require more analysis into how such experiments should be designed, the work of these four women at Marshall not only set a precedent for science in human spaceflight but also improved understanding that the sex of a scientist or engineer fundamentally made no difference in how well a physical or mental job in space could be done.

Not every NASA office excelled in its efforts to improve equal employment opportunities within the agency. Plenty of memos and other documents from throughout the 1970s demonstrate inertia on equal rights and how important it was for NASA as an agency to pursue centralized efforts for advancing qualified women and ethnic minorities into upper-level positions.⁸⁵ George Low sent out progress reports to each of the NASA centers evaluating their EEO performances, indicating either his pleasure or disappointment.⁸⁶ Although concern for the agency’s public image fueled some of Low’s interest in equal rights, personally Low seems to have been highly committed to giving women equal opportunity—even as astronauts.

NASA’s decision to move toward sexually integrating its astronaut corps stemmed largely from the agency’s changing agenda, one that focused throughout the 1970s more on scientific developments and a long-term and incremental movement of humankind out into space than a “crash” program designed to beat the Soviets or anyone else to any particular goal. That momentum for sexual integration also derived, naturally, from slowly changing attitudes about what constituted discrimination within American society as a whole.

Although the final design of what became the Space Shuttle did not create much more room for astronauts on board—or thus more privacy for crew members (as early speculation by the media predicted), NASA’s vision for its new space vehicle and that vehicle’s multifaceted mission nicely paralleled the growing national commitment to equal opportunities for women in education and the workplace. In doing so, a “hatch” opened through which America’s first female astronauts could finally move into a spacecraft and head for orbit.

In the next chapters we will see, through detailed analysis of the actual training and spaceflights of the first six U.S. women astronauts, just how difficult sexual integration of the astronaut corps really was.

Female Urinal Funnels.
NASA engineers designed these funnels for women astronauts to use aboard the Space Shuttle. The funnels attached to the Space Shuttle toilet’s urine collection tube and allowed the women astronauts to use the toilet with minimal clean-up. NASA, Johnson Space Center.

Crotch Support Panty Brief.
An early design for a female urine collection device for use during launch, landing, and spacewalks. Since the launch of Gus Grissom in July 1961, male astronauts have used an external sheath attached to a collection bag, but that system did not work for women astronauts. This design attempted to mimic the external collection system used by the men. Although the women astronauts experimented with this system initially, NASA human factors engineers settled on a diaper. “Women in Space,” 1974–1979, Box 18, Poindexter Files, Center Series. Johnson Space Center History Collection, University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Dr. Nancy Roman.
Dr. Nancy Grace Roman joined NASA in 1959 and became the chief of the astronomy and relativity program in 1960. Dr. Roman represented one of the earliest success stories for women at NASA and inspired girls and young women to enter the sciences. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2002-000212.

First Class of Women Astronauts.
Selected in 1978 as part of Group VIII, six women joined NASA’s astronaut corps. Left to right, Shannon W. Lucid, Margaret Rhea Seddon, Kathryn D. Sullivan, Judith A. Resnik, Anna L. Fisher, and Sally K. Ride. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2004-00025.

Kathryn Sullivan Sets Altitude Record.
In 1979, while still an Astronaut Candidate, Kathryn Sullivan set an unofficial sustained altitude record for American women by flying in a NASA WB-57F reconnaissance aircraft with NASA research pilot Jim Korkowski to an altitude of 63,300 feet. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2002-000199.

First Six Women Astronauts with “Rescue Ball.”
Taken in 1980, the first six women astronauts pose with the “rescue ball,” a personal rescue enclosure designed for use by the astronauts in case of emergency. By 1980, the Group VIII astronaut candidates had completed their training and were awaiting flight assignments. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2002-000207.

First Female Astronaut Candidates.
Five of the six women astronaut candidates during their water survival training at Homestead Air Force Base, Florida. Within the astronaut class of thirty-five people, the six women functioned as an internal group, discussing best practices, knowing that their efforts set precedents and expectations for women astronauts to follow. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2002-000214.

Ride on the Flight Deck.
Sally K. Ride became the first American woman to fly in space on STS-7. Launched on June 18, 1983, Challenger’s five-person crew completed a six-day mission, delivering two communication satellites into orbit. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2000-001083.

Sullivan and Ride Show Sleep Restraint.
Astronauts Kathryn Sullivan and Sally Ride (left to right) show a sleep restraint system, known as “a bag of worms.” The restraint consists of clasps, bungee cords and Velcro strips that allow the astronaut to attach herself or himself to a bulkhead wall to keep from free-floating through the cabin. This flight of Challenger, STS-41G, marked the first time two women astronauts flew together, the first time an American woman flew in space twice, and the first time a woman astronaut (Sullivan) performed a spacewalk. Challenger launched on October 5, 1984 and returned to Kennedy Space Center on October 13, after eight days in orbit. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2000-001032.

Kathy Sullivan Dons her Suit.
On STS-31, the crew of Space Shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope. Now-veteran spacewalker Kathy Sullivan trained to conduct an EVA (extravehicular activity) in case problems developed during the deployment. Sullivan was the only woman among the Group VIII astronauts to conduct a spacewalk. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2006-000014.

STS-41D Crew Enjoying Space.
Judith Resnik became the second American woman to fly in space aboard Discovery’s flight of STS-41D, which launched on August 30, 1984. Crewmembers are (counterclockwise from top left) payload specialist Charles D. Walker, mission specialist Richard M. Mullane, crew commander Henry W. Harsfield, Jr., pilot Michael L. Coats, mission specialist Steven A. Hawley, and mission specialist Resnik. The flight of STS-41D was cut short by a day when the toilet shut down prematurely, mostly affecting Resnik since the male crew members were able to work around the failure using excess plastic bags and dirty socks as an absorbent material. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2004-00024.

Lucid on Treadmill in Russian Mir.
At 53 years old, Shannon Lucid spent 6 months aboard the Russian Space Station Mir in 1996, setting the duration record for a woman, 188 days. She spent 2 hours a day on the treadmill to make sure she would have the muscle strength to walk off the Shuttle under her own power when she returned to earth. As the oldest woman in the class of 1978, her success as an astronaut has been viewed as “heroic” to both women and the Baby Boomer generation. NASA Headquarters, GPN-2000-001034.