5. "The Strange Ones"

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

CHAPTER 5
“The Strange Ones”

On January 16, 1978, NASA introduced its first new class of astronauts in nine years. Designated as Group VIII, the class of 1978 represented not only the largest class of astronauts in agency history but also the first to have the appearance of “a NASA affirmative-action poster.”¹ For the first time, the class of fifteen pilot-astronaut candidates and twenty mission-specialist candidates included three African American men, one Japanese American man, and six women, all Caucasian.² Selecting such a heterogeneous class of potential American astronauts carried with it a host of social and logistical issues that NASA would have to address if the women were ever to fly in space. People at NASA’s Johnson Space Center hoped they were ready for the challenge, as they had been fighting to achieve effective sexual integration of its astronaut corps from the early planning for the selection of this class.

Even the tone of that first press conference in January 1978 signaled something significant. Presiding over the event, NASA’s director of public affairs Robert Newman began by introducing two key members of the selection panel: deputy administrator Alan Lovelace and Johnson Space Center director Christopher Kraft.³ NASA administrator Robert A. Frosch then delivered a short statement explaining that the selection committee had begun notifying the new class of thirty-five “Astronaut Candidates” beginning at seven o’clock that morning. In two weeks’ time, Frosch indicated, the “ASCANs” would arrive in Houston for orientation and then officially report for training in July. Frosch then turned the floor over to the reporters attending in Washington, D.C., the Houston reporters connected via telephone, and the NASA employees listening “live” from their respective field centers.

Although this was the first class of astronauts selected for the new Shuttle program, simply that the new class included women and racial minority men for the first time was what made it most newsworthy. The media was primed to ask questions about the women and racial minority men whom NASA had selected and little else. Journalist Mark Walton from the Independent Television Service (ITVS) asked a question that clearly suggested that the general public still saw the women selected as less prepared and perhaps less capable to serve as astronauts, even though women had been working in technical fields in growing numbers during the previous two decades. Walton queried, “My questions are to [NASA’s] experience with women in the selection process and what provisions are there for them in specific training, just a little bit about what has been interesting about them.”⁴ Veteran NASA flight director Chris Kraft responded, “I think the most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States who can make the qualifications that we set out for astronauts. We don’t propose that they [the women] get any kind of different training, in general [than] all the candidates, with the exception that we hope to maintain the proficiency they have in the fields in which they are trained, so that that allows us the skilled mix that we are looking for in the training of mission specialists.”⁵

When the “thirty-five new guys,” as the classmates dubbed themselves, arrived for their own press conference two weeks later, all eyes focused on the half-dozen women and the trio of African-American men.⁶ Astronaut candidate Kathy Sullivan recalled, the class was “twenty-six average white guys and nine strange people.”⁷ What began that day for the first American female astronauts was a teamwork approach to problem solving not unlike that used by all earlier classes of astronauts. In their case, the women were establishing precedents, not specifically for their class or the astronaut corps as a whole, but for their sex.⁸ The process of sexually integrating the astronaut corps, however, had started several years before these six pioneering women had heard about the call for new astronauts.

On September 11–12, 1972, NASA center directors met with Administrator Fletcher and Deputy Administrator Low at the Peaks of Otter Lodge in Bedford, Virginia. In a memorandum for the record following the gathering, Low identified the meeting’s top two priorities. The first was to make sure that the agency as a whole, but particularly at the center level, took “positive, deliberate steps to develop sound, affirmative action plans and to see to it that these plans are carried out.” Second, Low noted that Houston’s Chris Kraft needed to develop a plan to assure not only that NASA had enough astronauts trained and ready to fulfill the demands of the Shuttle program, but also that whatever plan developed took “into account present equal employment opportunity policies and practices.”⁹ Clearly, Fletcher and Low were both supporting the expectations of equality in hiring that Administrator Webb had set down in 1966—and that federal law now dictated.

The discussion at the Peaks of Otter Lodge paid more than lip service to the EEO law and the women’s movement. After reviewing the plan for the “Astronaut Selection Program” in December 1975, Low wrote back to John F. Yardley, the associate administrator for space flight, “The plan does not indicate a method for insuring application by minorities and/or women in the new astronaut group and mission specialists group. I am sure that you are aware of the importance to NASA that every opportunity be presented to these potential candidates to encourage application and, if qualified, selection.”¹⁰ In no uncertain terms, NASA’s upper management wanted women and minorities in the astronaut corps and was therefore insistent on solicitation of their applications. But a good number of the applications had to be successful. If women and minorities applied but none were selected, then the agency would be forced to backpedal and explain to the FLATs, journalists, and activists why no women were invited to join the astronaut corps, just as none had been selected in the astronaut classes of 1963, 1965, 1966, and 1967.

NASA released its call for the new class of astronauts on July 8, 1976, four days after the country’s bicentennial celebration. In their public statement, agency officials declared upfront, “NASA is committed to an affirmative action program with a goal of having qualified minorities and women among the newly selected astronaut candidates. Therefore, minority and women candidates are encouraged to apply.”¹¹ Along with the announcement, NASA sent out some of its own people to recruit. Never having undertaken an initiative quite like this before, a more aggressive and public approach to recruiting astronaut candidates was about to begin.

One might not think that NASA would face a hard time finding astronaut candidates, but that turned out to be the case. To convince Congress and President Nixon to support funding for the Shuttle fleet, NASA had created an image of spaceflight becoming “routine,” an exaggerated argument for keeping costs down.¹² Reinforcing this idea were comments like those made by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman that women would join the astronaut corps when spaceflight was no longer experimental and becoming more routine—which seemed to be happening with the Space Shuttle.¹³ But could “routine” spaceflight captivate the interest of a new generation of astronauts? Beginning with the Mercury Seven, the public regarded astronauts as American heroes. If their job became “routine,” fewer people might be interested in participating.

With its previous astronaut classes, NASA had little need to recruit new astronauts. The applicant pool was inherently small and usually came directly from the military, where much of the weeding-out process was handled before applications reached NASA’s selection committee. The scientist-astronaut classes from the mid-1960s on all came through a screening process handled by the National Academy of Sciences. While those who were pilot-astronaut candidates in the class of 1978 still hailed largely from the service branches, NASA now aimed to handle the entire selection process for the new mission specialists on its own. At the very least, the agency required an active recruiting effort to ensure the chances of obtaining a group of qualified applicants large enough to give the selection committee some good choices. NASA also focused on recruiting women and racial minorities to the astronaut corps, guaranteeing that the selection committee would have a strong body of qualified women and minorities from which to select. NASA wanted—and arguably needed, if only from a public relations standpoint—women and racial minorities to matriculate into Group VIII.

One person who played a significant role in the selection process of Group VIII was Dr. Carolyn Huntoon. Already recognized for her leadership role at NASA, after she turned down the opportunity of being an astronaut—JSC director Chris Kraft had asked her if she wanted to apply for Group VIII—Huntoon became the first woman ever to serve on an astronaut selection committee.¹⁴ She was also the only woman on the selection board for the class of 1978.

Huntoon’s presence on the selection committee was hardly mere tokenism, as her many contributions to the recruitment, selection, and training of the first women astronauts attest. Huntoon was one of the people NASA sent around the country to encourage young men and women to send in applications. She traveled to universities to meet with students in science and engineering departments, making sure to deliver special addresses to potential female applicants, such as members of the Society of Women Engineers. Years later, Huntoon clearly remembered being informed that there were still very few women in the pipeline who met the eligibility requirements as pilots or mission specialists.¹⁵ Whenever she gave her recruitment talks, Huntoon knew that her strong encouragement to those women who did possess the necessary credentials was crucial if high-quality women were to be selected as NASA’s first female astronauts.

The task proved troublesome. Huntoon recalled, “A lot of [potential applicants] didn’t believe NASA was going to select women and minorities. They saw it in the paperwork. But their questions led me to believe they were dubious of whether NASA was sincere or not.”¹⁶ Despite the changing federal laws and the efforts of the feminist movement, Americans remained skeptical of NASA’s policy statement about the employment of women and minorities as astronauts. Both to pacify doubters and to energize recruiting, NASA pulled out a big gun, teaming up in 1977 with Nichelle Nichols, the 44-year-old actress who played Lieutenant Uhura on the popular Star Trek television series, and the company Nichols cofounded, Women in Motion, Inc., with the aim of promoting technological careers particularly for females and racial minorities.¹⁷ Nichols toured the country giving talks and encouraging people to apply for astronaut selection. While the number of applications that NASA received as a direct result of Nichols’s efforts is unclear, after six months of touring and lecturing applications increased from 1,500 to over 8,000. Nichols said, “I like to think some were encouraged by me.”¹⁸

With over 8,000 applications in hand by the closing date (June 30, 1977), NASA’s selection committee narrowed its pool down to 187 men and 21 women, all of whom were to be brought to Houston for medical exams and interviews.¹⁹ The agency had spread its recruiting efforts to universities nationwide in hopes that the selection board would encourage a good number of highly qualified women and ethnic minorities to join the pool. Carolyn Huntoon does not remember the committee members ever being told they had to meet an affirmative action quota of any kind, but a document from NASA’s associate administrator to his assistant administrators dated February 15, 1977, did state, “Minority and female candidates will be among those selected” (emphasis mine).²⁰ Politically NASA knew it was important to select astronaut candidates from different constituencies. Interviewing women and minorities of extraordinary caliber was crucial to NASA’s integration plan. According to Huntoon, “We always said once they applied, they had to go through the same processes and we would only select them if we thought they would be outstanding, because it was going to be tough—hard on the men and women.”²¹ Both the training and the job would be time-consuming, physically challenging, stressful, intellectually rigorous, and would not come with any guarantees of a flight in space. Every astronaut, male or female, had to deal with those realities.

The constitution of Group VIII raised new kinds of questions for the selection board. The design of the Shuttle, given the size of its crews and the limited cabin space they shared, gave rise to its own type of compatibility issues. Beginning in the 1980s, Shuttle crews were to be made up by as many as seven astronauts who could be in orbit for up to thirty days.²² Astronauts would spend considerable time together both in space and on the ground. Unlike the Apollo crews of the 1960s and early 1970s, who learned who their crewmates would be no more than six months before a flight, Shuttle crews actively began training together a full year before the scheduled launch.²³ Rhea Seddon, who eventually flew on three flights and married pilot-astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson (who flew five times), said of her experiences of relating to crew members as both astronaut and spouse, “I got to be a part of eight crews instead of three crews. A lot of social activity revolved around the crew that you were assigned to. People socialize together, did a lot of things together, and with only three flights I would have only been involved with that in three crews. But since my husband flew five times, I really got involved in eight crews. There is a lot of camaraderie being a part of a crew.”²⁴ In contrast, the crew for the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969—Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin—related to each other, at best, as “amiable strangers.”²⁵ If a Shuttle crew could not relate to each other well, it could adversely influence the success of the mission. Kathy Sullivan noted, “You don’t necessarily want the guy who’s the hyper-brilliant lab bench or computer guy if he does not even have the social connective tissue in mind.”²⁶ In other words, Shuttle crews worked best together when their members had the skills to get along together amicably.

It was important, therefore, for the selection board to figure out how well each of the applicants who made the trip to Houston dealt with others. One concern over the selection of the Group VIII astronaut candidates, according to Associate Administrator John Naugle in a memo to NASA’s section heads, was how to measure such personal characteristics as “adaptability, self-discipline, confidence, poise, imagination, empathy, enthusiasm, and creativity,” which together indicated an astronaut’s ability to cope with his or her crewmates.²⁷ Getting at those traits of personality and character required asking the applicants many penetrating personal questions and pursuing much deeper insights from those listed as references.

The psychological exams taken by the 208 applicants invited to Houston did little to flesh out the personality characteristics of a “good astronaut.” Huntoon explained, “We have some psychiatric and psychological testing to screen out people who have mental disorders or pathology or borderline pathology. But as far as good-personality types of screening, there isn’t such a thing. There are no psychological tests for ‘screening in’ people; we have lots of ‘screen-out.’”²⁸ In her view, no psychiatrist or psychologist has ever designed a personality test that can determine “who is comfortable with themselves, is smart, knows it, but yet is willing to listen to others and be part of the team and be led or lead. Those are the kinds of characteristics you look for, and those are very difficult to talk about, to score, or to tell.”²⁹ Kathy Sullivan agreed, “It’s in the context and almost fragrance of the interview. It’s the other things that come across by how you carry yourself. How do you connect yourself to the other people? How do you handle ambiguity? How do you handle other groups of people?”³⁰ To uncover that kind of information, the selection committee had to ask many rich series of questions both inside and outside of formal interviews.

The potential ASCANs spent a week in Houston undergoing interviews and medical exams before the selection committee made its final recommendations to Center Director Chris Kraft. Typically, the 208 applicants arrived in groups of about twenty and were encouraged to spend their time together while in Houston. Kathy Sullivan remembered her week at Johnson Space Center: “We were encouraged to meet other people. It’s your chance to get a one-week look at this, too.”³¹ Of course, bringing the applicants to Houston in groups made the process more enjoyable for the interviewees and streamlined the process for the selection committee. But even more important than revealing the personalities of the applicants, having the applicants interact with one another over the course of the week gave the selection committee a chance to ask at least a dozen other people what they thought of the other candidates. Of uncovering information about an applicant’s personality, Huntoon said, “You get the feelings from talking to them, talking to people that know them, talking to their references, and talking to people that know them that they did not give as references. That is just as important because filling out forms does not do it.”³²

The selection committee spent the fall of 1977 conducting interviews and gathering information. The committee’s challenge was to cut the total number of interviewees down to fifteen pilots and fifteen mission specialists. Still not entirely sure what NASA would ultimately need for the Shuttle during the years of its life span, whatever that would turn out to be, the committee built in some flexibility by selecting more astronaut candidates than originally expected, particularly with respect to mission specialists. In December 1977, the committee finally submitted to Kraft the names of fifteen pilots and twenty mission specialists, which became “the thirty-five new guys.”

The selection of Group VIII was NASA’s first class of astronauts selected since 1967. Interest in the new Shuttle program alone would have made this newsworthy, but it was the class’s ethnic and gender diversity that provoked the most attention.³³ Kathy Sullivan remembered the first media appearance: “That was a huge wall-to-wall interview day. I think we were introduced at ten in the morning and then there was immediate availability [to the press] from eleven on. Of course, ‘the twenty-six average white guys’ were done at 11:15. Then it was our turn, ‘the nine strange people.’ The twenty-six standard White guys had the day off from about 10:30 on and the nine strange people were there till I don’t even remember how late … forever.”³⁴ From a public affairs standpoint, the presence of women and minorities in the new class was a truly positive achievement for NASA—something the whole class knew and accepted. But publicity only took the ASCANs so far. What they needed to take them the rest of the way was many months of extensive and solid training.

Since 1961 America’s astronauts had made their professional home at the Astronaut Office at Johnson Space Center (originally known as the Manned Spacecraft Center). The staff at JSC was primarily concerned with keeping its astronaut corps trained and ready to fly. NASA’s public affairs (PA) offices in Houston and Washington sometimes proposed media events and astronaut appearances that conflicted with the astronaut office’s primary mission. If the 1978 class of astronauts was to succeed as a whole, the objectives of the astronaut office and NASA’s public affairs offices needed to gel, giving the ASCANs sufficient time to work and train without too much distraction from public appearances and interviews. As soon as Chris Kraft had announced the names of the incoming class in January 1978, PA officers had gone to work setting up media time with the new ASCANs, particularly involving their hometown TV and radio stations and newspapers. But training requirements brought that to a rather quick halt. As soon as the candidates arrived in Houston in July to begin training, Kraft made sure that public affairs would enforce a media and press moratorium for the Group VIII astronaut candidates that would last for at least six months. This reprieve allowed “the thirty-five new guys” to establish their footing.³⁵

Still, throughout the spring of 1978, comments and photographs involving the six female ASCANS frequently appeared in papers around the country, from the Houston Chronicle to Florida Today to the Christian Science Monitor. The women answered questions about how their families were handling the news, what in their backgrounds had gotten them interested in becoming astronauts, and whether they were concerned about the risks they would be taking. In Shannon Lucid’s case, questions also concerned how her children felt about their mother being an astronaut, and in Anna Fisher’s case, how hard it must be on her husband, Bill, that she had been selected as part of Group VIII while he had not.³⁶ All of the women—as well as Bill Fisher—handled the attention with considerable patience. Compared to other astronaut classes, the media barrage directed toward the six women likely surpassed all but the coverage given to the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the historic Apollo 11 crew.

Even after their training started in Houston and despite the attempts by the astronaut office to make the ASCANs off-limits to the press, the attention did not cool. One of the early field trips made by sixteen of the ASCANs was to Homestead Air Force Base’s Water Survival School in Florida.³⁷ Despite the moratorium, the media besieged the women, snapping photographs and shouting questions.³⁸ The women’s frustrations with all the attention started to come through. Newsweek reported that when a television reporter shouted, “Hey, Miss” to gain Rhea Seddon’s attention, she shouted back, “It’s Doctor!”³⁹ When a photographer asked Sally Ride for “a happy face,” Time magazine wrote that she “screamed, ‘No!’”⁴⁰ At the same time, the media also scrutinized the male ASCANs, many of whom were being asked for the first time to work with women as equals. Time reported, “Not all the astronautical hopefuls felt such aversion to media coverage. Pouted one of 42 [sic] men in the program: ‘We’re mere commoners.’”⁴¹ And the job of training to become astronauts had only just begun.

When “the thirty-five new guys” showed up on the JSC campus as astronaut candidates, they faced training that was slated to last two years. Everyone in Group VIII was very bright, but not everyone necessarily knew a lot about NASA or even about spaceflight. Their training served to introduce them to what it meant to be an astronaut but additionally prepared them for their assignments to flights and ground support positions.

At their JSC orientation, the candidates received briefings on what the training program entailed and on plans for the Space Shuttle program. But the astronaut office also made sure that someone spoke to the candidates about the history of spaceflight, the folklore that could affect an astronaut’s job, their code of conduct, and the expectations of them with respect to public appearances.⁴² Human spaceflight had been NASA’s most public and marketable feature but also Congress’s first topic of debate when arguments flared over how NASA allotted its budget. Since 1959 when the Mercury Seven were selected, the astronauts had been the public face of NASA, and the “affirmative action poster” look of the 1978 class, along with the development of the new flight vehicle, promised to bring renewed interest in the space program. As astronauts, these pilots, scientists, physicians, and engineers—who otherwise would have gone through life without much fanfare—would become celebrities of a sort. Carolyn Huntoon compared the fame of astronauts to that of Nobel Prize winners:

When someone wins the Nobel Prize, they can win it for a very esoteric enzyme, and then people ask them, “Well, what do you think of nuclear war?” The same thing happened to astronauts. Today I just got my Ph.D. or my M.D. and I was doing an internship or I was doing research in the lab somewhere and tomorrow I’m an astronaut and I’m supposed to know who was the first astronaut in space or who landed on the Moon or what the Shuttle’s going to do and why we can’t go to Mars. All in one sentence, someone will ask something like that.⁴³

Similar to the earliest classes of astronauts, the class of 1978, particularly the women, became overnight celebrities. The astronaut office did what it could to protect them from public distractions, but meeting with the media, making appearances, and giving lectures were invaluable to public and political support for the agency. NASA wanted to ensure that the astronaut candidates were aware of their rights and responsibilities as individuals and as government employees and familiar with all the different resources available to help them do well in their roles as public figures. But NASA also definitely wanted to keep its astronauts front and center.

The bulk of the ASCANs’ training provided candidates with “the necessary background and indoctrination they must acquire before beginning preparations for their Shuttle flight assignments.”⁴⁴ Understandably, the training was time-consuming and demanding. Like airline pilots, who qualify on the specific aircraft they will be flying, the Group VIII ASCANs were training to fly on board the Space Shuttle. That entailed learning all the Shuttle’s systems, their function, how the systems worked, and how to work with them. The training approach was threefold: studying workbooks and manuals for each Shuttle system, attending lectures on the systems, and practicing on simulators and trainers. ASCANs spent their days split among classroom lectures, workbook study, T-38 flying (particularly for the pilot candidates), and (later on) simulator work.⁴⁵ But the work did not end on Friday. Weekends meant time to study.

While pilot and mission specialist candidates ultimately had different jobs during a mission, the class still trained largely as a whole. Although the selection committee picked the candidates for their individual skills and educational backgrounds, NASA benefitted more from an astronaut corps as a whole with broad experiences and capabilities. But the astronaut office also needed each astronaut to be competent in general fundamental areas. When Flight Crew Operations managers assigned astronauts to missions, they tried to select those who best complemented the flights’ scientific or military aims. But if the astronauts all shared an equal familiarity with life sciences and astronomy, then NASA could expand its mission profiles to include basic experimentation and studies even if the crew did not include a specialist in that field. To ensure that everyone was knowledgeable in the appropriate sciences, the Group VIII candidates participated in coursework on space science, astronomy, bioscience, and earth sciences and planetology.⁴⁶

Shuttle training specifically, which the ASCANs began only after they completed their coursework on fundamental concepts—such as life science, computers, flight dynamics, and orbital mechanics—covered all the basic theories and systems of the Shuttle. The ASCANs spent several months studying the Shuttle’s design and layout, the Shuttle systems, the liquid and solid fuel propulsion systems, the payload capabilities, flight control systems, environmental controls and life support, communications, the Shuttle’s EVA capability, navigational systems, and the Mission Control Center’s role in flight operations.⁴⁷ The classroom lectures instructed the ASCANs on how the systems worked and introduced them to the crew interfaces and controls. But it was the simulators and trainers at JSC that gave them the opportunity to practice and exhibit what they were learning before they moved to on-the-job assignments.

All the ASCANs went through the same basic program. Each had to successfully complete this level of training before their advanced work could begin. During that period of initial training, neither the astronaut office nor the women themselves attempted to separate the men from the women.⁴⁸ Essentially all the scheduled training activities were mixed-sex. The entire class attended classroom lectures together. In some cases the class was split up, but not by sex. Usually the class was divided into small groups because of the ASCANs’ individual training backgrounds, whether they were pilot or mission specialist candidates, or because of facility capacity and the need for more focused instruction as in the cases of space suit familiarization, water immersion training, and T-38 training.⁴⁹

Only some of the astronaut candidates of 1978 had piloting experience. A pilot’s license was not a prerequisite for mission specialists, but NASA still required some flight training for all of them. Even though their jobs had nothing to do with actually flying the Shuttle, mission specialists had to be qualified T-38 backseat-rated operators. Since NASA’s fleet of T-38s served as the astronauts’ primary mode of transportation between Houston and the launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, even mission specialists had to know what to do as a T-38 passenger. So the mission specialist candidates participated in ground school, training flights, and high-altitude training. The ASCANs’ instructors tweaked the number of training flights for each candidate based on his or her needs and experience. Although a larger percentage of the male ASCANs came out of the military and thus had already gone through some of this training, everyone’s schedule was adjusted so that each individual, regardless of sex, could meet the minimum requirements of the training program.⁵⁰

Not all astronaut training took place in Houston. The candidates had to go through the military’s version of water survival training, which took place at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In addition, the astronaut office took all the ASCANs on field trips to the other NASA centers and to Shuttle contractor facilities. All the trips required at least one night away from home. NASA made sure that the men and women were afforded privacy during these overnight trips. Of course, everybody wanted his or her privacy, but NASA was also aware that public suspicion about any impropriety could be highly unfortunate. Such a concern only grew after the thirty-five new guys got their flight assignments.

NASA worked to fend off any possible concerns about sexual impropriety or temptation with the agency’s own increased sense of awareness and attempts to be sensitive to those concerns. All the ASCANs typically stayed in hotels during the field trips. But the increasing number of female personnel throughout NASA was a factor that the agency had to face. In a November 1979 document from Deke Slayton, who was serving as the manager for the first orbital flight test of Space Shuttle Columbia, to M. E. Burke of the Dryden Flight Research Center in California, Slayton wrote that the staff traveling for the test would need accommodations because the site for the landing—Edwards AFB—was a considerable distance from any town with hotel space. But to accommodate everyone, Dryden needed to make some changes to adapt to the presence of women on the team. Slayton wrote, “Sleeping/ showering accommodations should include separate areas for approximately 20 women and 150 men.”⁵¹ When asked about privacy during training, Rhea Seddon offered this perspective: “We’re all adults,” suggesting not only that the women did not need to be chaperoned, but also that the ASCANs tried to respect each other’s personal feelings without direction from NASA.⁵²

But NASA had always been an organization of engineers, most of whom were men.⁵³ For most of these men, their working relationships with women essentially had been limited to secretaries; having to change their working environment to include women as equals and colleagues was a very new and awkward situation. The incorporation of women into the astronaut corps not only changed the public appearance of NASA; it also meant that NASA centers had to undergo physical and architectural modifications, and that the male scientists and engineers working for NASA had to adjust to working with women.

Very early in the 1970s NASA started designing the Space Shuttles to accommodate crews with both men and women. But design changes to the infrastructure of Johnson Space Center that were needed to accommodate women in the astronaut corps came more slowly, and often only following eye-opening experiences when people realized that no one had planned for all of the women’s needs. According to a 1981 Shuttle fact sheet, the Shuttle’s design and operation meant that its astronauts would no longer have to be limited to the “intensely trained, physically perfect astronauts” that NASA had required for its previous programs.⁵⁴ But they still needed to stay in good athletic shape. To provide for that, Johnson Space Center operated and maintained a gymnasium to which the astronauts and ASCANs had priority access.⁵⁵ The gym and its equipment were adequate for the incoming class, but it lacked locker rooms for the women. As the only woman on the Group VIII selection committee, Carolyn Huntoon, by her own admission, became the “mother hen.”⁵⁶ Often she was the one to step in and make sure those needs or accommodations got addressed.

Usually the changes came piecemeal. With respect to the gym, Huntoon noted, “There was one restroom, one dressing room, one bathroom. So we needed another one for the women.” Because NASA had failed to anticipate that need, renovations for the gym were not in the budget. Huntoon praised, “But got it. The point was once you pointed out [the deficiency,] you got it there.”⁵⁷ NASA issued every astronaut and candidate exercise clothes—meaning shorts and t-shirts. While men needed athletic supporters, women needed sports bras, which were not part of the inventory when the first six women entered the astronaut corps. It often took one of the women to point out the omission.⁵⁸ Sometimes it was just little things, at some level, silly things, recalled Huntoon: “Hair dryers, for instance—there were no facilities where the women would go do their T-38 training.” After a training flight, Huntoon explains, “[You] throw off your flight suit and hung it up, and took a shower, put on your regular clothes, and dry your hair, put on your make-up and leave. Except the women had no restrooms. They finally got a restroom. They had no shower. They finally got a shower. It was just because it wasn’t in anybody’s mind that [these facilities] needed to be separate.”⁵⁹ It still took time, money, and effort to make sure that the women had what they needed to do their jobs when on the ground. That included adequate exercise apparel and facilities. It would be a much greater challenge once the women went into space.

Carolyn Huntoon recalled, “We had to get things ready for women at the center. Attitude was the biggest thing we had to work on.”⁶⁰ When asked whose attitudes needed to change, she admitted, “Whose attitudes? Just about everybody.”⁶¹

When the six women of Group VIII reported to NASA, it had been over twelve years since Administrator James Webb first mandated agency policy against sexual discrimination, and nearly six years since James Fletcher and George Low made it clear to JSC’s Chris Kraft that the next selection committee needed to actively pursue applications from female candidates. But when the time came, Huntoon remembered that some people responded with “Oh, we’re going to have women astronauts!?”⁶² It begs the question how much “warning” and lead time people at a NASA center needed to prepare for women astronauts.

The changes that NASA veterans witnessed in the 1970s as a result of the introduction of women simply could not have been fully anticipated. Huntoon explained, “Some people were glad, and some people were not happy. But they had the good sense to keep their mouths shut about it.”⁶³ Prior to the federal legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s, a gender hierarchy dictated American society and American workplaces. Right or wrong, fair or unfair, it defined the lifestyles of many Americans. Given that many JSC scientists, engineers, and even secretaries in 1978 came from an older generation with different ideas about gender than the new class of astronauts, one should hardly be surprised that some ill feelings arose despite NASA administration’s attempts to send a clear message over several years that female astronauts would soon be a reality.

The generational ideas about women did create some issues that even Carolyn Huntoon, as the “mother hen,” struggled to accept and overcome. When the six women joined NASA, they wanted and expected to be held to the same standards as their male counterparts. But from Huntoon’s perspective, “That’s the sort of thing that we had to get over, that we have got to treat them the same. We’ve got to expect the same out of them. They’re going to train the same, we’re going to expect them to behave the same, and we’re not going to let the women by with something we don’t let the men by with or vice versa.”⁶⁴ On the surface, that made sense. But Huntoon was concerned about how the older generation at NASA would deal with the incoming women astronaut candidates. She warned them, “Don’t go start trying to make [the women] into something, some caricature of an astronaut because you’ve got in your mind what a female astronaut ought to look like.”⁶⁵

Huntoon went to the women’s defense more times than the women probably ever knew. One day someone asked her, “Did you see what [unnamed woman] had on today? She had on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt!” Huntoon replied, “Well, what did Tom, Dick, and Harry have on?” “Well, they had on jeans and a t-shirt, too.” Huntoon rested her case.⁶⁶ For integration to work, double standards had to disappear.

Kathy Sullivan generously acknowledged the interference that Huntoon ran for the first six:

She had been the voice of sanity on our behalf. The previously all-guy world said, “Well, what’s the dress code for women astronauts?” “Well, what’s the dress code for the guys?” “Oh, gosh, there isn’t one. You couldn’t ever tell a guy what to wear. But what if [the women] wear inappropriate things?” “Well, what if a guy wears inappropriate things?” “Well, I guess there’s not a dress code.” “Well, I guess that’s right.” “Well, what if their husband doesn’t want to move?” “Well, what if his wife doesn’t want to move?” “Oh, I think they’d just figure that out.” “Well, their marital business I guess is just their marital business.” She ran a bunch of this “manly jack” kind of thing with these guys.⁶⁷

Huntoon admitted that she, like others in middle management, noticed generational distinctions between herself and the new ASCANs. But despite the differences, Huntoon remained adamant that the disparate expectations for men and women must not continue at NASA.

The time that astronaut candidates spent learning and studying did not really give them the opportunity to show what they knew and could do. That only happened once the ASCANs began to take on job assignments. While Carolyn Huntoon fought little battles over the dress code and hair dryers for the women when they first arrived at JSC, her biggest concern was to make sure the women got a shot at the most sought-after assignments.

ASCANs began to take on technical assignments six months into the training process and continued in such jobs after they were promoted to full-fledged astronaut status but had yet to start training for a flight. Huntoon noted, “Not every job was a great job, but they had to be done. My point was to give them the chance at some of the good ones as well as the not-so-good ones.”⁶⁸ Huntoon advocated no special treatment but also insisted on no discrimination or holding the women to a different or higher standard. She received a call one day about the behavior of one of the female astronauts in a meeting. The call came from someone who complained, “She was just really hard on somebody.” Huntoon asked, “Was she right?” The caller answered, “Yes.” Huntoon had to explain that this very smart woman (as Huntoon argued was true for every member of the class of 1978) probably just thought she was as smart as the man with whom she had the argument.⁶⁹ Beginning on January 16, 1978, the day the names and profiles of the class members were revealed, Chris Kraft said that the women would get the same treatment and be held to the same standards as the men. In asking the women whether that was the case, they argued that it was.⁷⁰ But from time to time, those gender stereotypes and double standards did surface.

When the women started getting flight assignments and training for their missions, a new round of adjustment began. With each “female first,” people at NASA had to find new coping mechanisms. When Sally Ride was training for the first Shuttle flight to include an American female astronaut, Kathy Sullivan noted that Ride was careful about setting precedents and establishing procedures that others might view as the generally “female way.” Sullivan recalled, “The first time a woman does a spec[ifications] review, she [Sally] would grab one of us who happened to be around and say, ‘come on along,’ just to help make sure that it wasn’t too completely just wrapped around her, and would set any of us up the next time through to have to ask for or demand a change in something.”⁷¹ How Ride chose to handle the first flight could have had significant ramifications for the other women astronauts. She understood that her choices would be seen as a precedent that would be difficult to change. Sullivan lamented, “A guy coming in and making noise or throwing a tantrum to have a suit or a stowage adjusted the way he wanted it for his flight was kind of the norm. But the first time the next woman astronaut does that, you just kind of know somebody’s going to say, ‘See, I told you the girls were going to do this all the time!’”⁷²

Sullivan felt the same about the EVAs that affected her aboard STS-41G. She observed, “Story Musgrave is quite renowned as a ‘space walker par excellence,’ a spacesuit kind of guy from way back when, and he and Don Peterson did the first EVA in the Space Shuttle suit. Story thrashed and wrestled for a really long time to get the lock-down knob unloosened on the stupid old foot restraint. He came back and said, you know, we can’t tire out a whole guy’s arm getting the damn foot restraint loose when there’s seven more hours worth of stuff to do. Why are we tightening things down so hard?” Sullivan surmised, “It is probably to the net good of women doing space walks or in the space program that it happened to Story because it was unequivocally just a question of common sense. If it had been me or any other woman raising the question, someone would have been invited to question it. ‘See, told you, when the girls come, we’re going to have to do things their way.’”⁷³ Whatever the women did, good or bad, they understood that they were setting precedents, and they respected the responsibility that went along with their roles as the first women astronauts. Until the culture at NASA could see beyond their sex and acknowledge them as just astronauts, everything the first six did was open for scrutiny.

Besides the six women, those most influenced by the inclusion of women in Group VIII were the other twenty-nine class members. Some of the men were as young as the youngest women selected (Sally Ride and Kathy Sullivan were both 26 when they were selected); the oldest was four years older than the oldest woman (Shannon Lucid was 35 years old and was the ninth oldest in the class). Somehow they all seemed to accept that the women earned their positions, and that the class was only whole when everyone was treated as an equal member. Early on in training, the public emphasis on the women did create a little tension, as evidenced by the lament, “We’re mere commoners,” during water survival.⁷⁴ Further, the men of Group VIII were still products of American culture. John Creighton, one of the pilot-astronaut candidates, admitted, “As a military pilot, I never had to work with women, period. I had to adjust to viewing women not as social creatures, but as fellow workers.”⁷⁵ But when the class named itself the “thirty-five new guys,” the moniker suggesting that the men of the class considered the women to be one of the guys was true to the mark.

Initially the men desired the same attention the women were getting from the press, but before long they were publicly defending the argument that the women were making—that they had earned their places in the astronaut corps and did their jobs just like the men. Kathy Sullivan explained, “I remember John Fabian’s response at one point when there was some early discussion of journalists and other [people] flying. Somebody raised the question, ‘Would it make any difference whether some female journalist flew before some of these gals?’ I recall John saying, ‘Yeah, it would matter!’” She remembered Fabian explaining, “‘They earned their way here, built the road, and are marching down it. And yeah, it would matter to me if they don’t get to fly before some other women go to fly.’”⁷⁶

As was typical with each class, the thirty-five new guys bonded and supported one another professionally and personally. When the women started flying on Shuttle missions and the media once again focused its attention on the women, male crew members did what they could to emphasize to the media that the women did their jobs not as women astronauts, but simply as astronauts.⁷⁷ With respect to attitudes about women coworkers, the male astronauts had come around to see that the job was sexless—and proven by the first six women to be genderless as well.

While the 1960s was a decade of frenetic activity for NASA trying to get to the Moon and back, the 1970s, with the changing chemistry of the astronaut corps, brought different kinds of stresses to those working at JSC. As Carolyn Huntoon’s experiences and observations attested, the idea of bringing women into the astronaut corps was not something that many JSC people handled well. Although the nation’s laws had changed to prevent discrimination against women, the laws could not teach NASA as an agency how to adjust to those changes or how to retrain its employees to cope with a new social order. Most NASA employees grew more comfortable having women astronauts once they saw the women doing their jobs. Those doubters began to understand that very little really had to change. For a few others, as Huntoon said, they simply continued to do their jobs and worked toward retirement without ever really coming to terms with the new look of the workforce.

Generally, JSC adjusted well, but the engineering adaptations and accommodations that the NASA engineers faced to make it possible for women and men to fly together in space added an entirely new dimension to the sexual integration of the astronaut corps.