Gerrie Cobb, Astronette

Since the death of Walter Cronkite and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing have prompted Americans to reminisce about NASA, let’s include in our thoughts some of the women who have taken steps toward gender equality in space.

Record-setting commercial pilot Geraldyn “Gerrie” Cobb was the first of the “astronette” corps, a group of thirteen women who in 1959 passed the physical testing required of male astronauts.  Author Stephanie Nolan says:

Randy Lovelace, chair of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee and the doctor who supervised the selection of NASA’s Mercury astronauts, and Donald Flickinger, an air force brigadier general and pioneer in aviation medicine, came up with the plan for a woman-in-space program. They tested Jerrie Cobb, and she excelled on the same battery of tests her male counterparts took.

A Time magazine review of Martha Ackerman’s book on the subject relates that:

The tests were the same rigorous physical and psychological evaluations that the men of the Mercury program had undergone and that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Right Stuff: Exercycle workouts, X rays, enemas, body-mass calculations, a sensory-isolation tank, even an enunciation test. The trials narrowed the field of women to 13… and to everybody’s surprise but their own, the women performed at the same level as the men…

But the macho culture of the space program was too entrenched to accommodate them. Vice President Lyndon Johnson scribbled on a memo about the initiative, “Let’s stop this now!”–and without much fanfare, it was stopped. The quest to put an American woman in space devolved into bureaucratic infighting and congressional subcommittee meetings, complete with cameos by John Glenn and Scott Carpenter and predictable old-boy jokes about the need for women to populate alien planets.

John Glenn’s testimony, according to People magazine, included these lines:

Men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes.  The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. 

Even women weren’t ready to see women in space.  A Publisher’s Weekly review of Nolan’s book points out that one of the people to testify against the astronettes was female aviator Jackie Cochran.

…she didn’t want to antagonize powerful male friends, she didn’t want other women to overshadow her achievements and she felt that women weren’t physically capable of performing such activities.

Sally Ride

It wasn’t until 1983 that America first put a woman, Sally Ride, into space. (The Russians launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.)  Eileen Collins became the first female spacecraft commander in 2005, and became the first astronaut to pilot a shuttle through a 360-degree pitch maneuver.  As for the future, LBJ, we’re not gonna stop this now!