NASA'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET:
JERRIE COBB AND THE MERCURY 13
by Irene Stuber [excerpted from Women of Achievement and Herstory]
Event 02-21-1960: Jerrie Cobb started secret tests for astronaut training. Years later in a U.S. Congressional probe, NASA officials admitted they had "no intentions" of allowing women into space. Cobb testified that of the 25 women who applied to the space program in 1960, 13 had been found qualified.Episode 02-20/21-1994
Women of Achievement and Herstory
"We've never sent any woman into space because we haven't had a good reason to. We fully envision, however, that in the near future, we will fly women into space and use them the same way we use them on Earth -- and for the same purpose."
-- James Lovell, astronaut, 1973.
AND THEY WONDER WHY WOMEN DON'T THINK "THEY" TELL THE TRUTH: Beginning in 1959, Jerrie Cobb secretly underwent tests for the aerospace program, often outscoring men such as John Glenn. When other women in the secret project also tested very high, NASA cancelled the testing. Later NASA admitted under grueling questioning by Congress that it had no intentions of allowing women into space.
In 1963 a Soviet woman, Valentia Tereschkova became the first woman in space. It took NASA until 1978 to open the doors to female astronaut training. They were trained for everything EXCEPT piloting, but recently women have emerged as mission leaders.
By the way, most of the women involved in aerospace program hold Ph.D.s - something that was not all that common with the "RIGHT STUFF" men.
Episode 08-19-94
Women of Achievement Today's Quotes
Event 02-02-95: Wearing a scarf that belonged to Amelia Earhart and carrying the pilot's license of early endurance flight champion Bobbi Trout, as well as items belonging to members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who ferried military aircraft in the U.S. during WWII (and died), and from the women who applied and passed initial tests in NASA's Mercury program in the 1950's but were turned down because of their sex, Lt. Colonel Eileen Collins, 38, lifted off from Cape Canaveral in the co-pilot's seat, as the first woman to pilot an American space craft. An Air Force test pilot, she was selected for the NASA space program in 1990, the first woman chosen as a space shuttle pilot. In December 1994, two more women were chosen.
Eighteen of NASA's astronauts are women. Collins' main duties are to monitor the flight systems, but she will fly the shuttle at times. Personally invited by Collins (not NASA) to witness the blastoff were some of the women who tried out for the initial Mercury program, did exceptionally well, and then were turned away because -- shock! -- they were women!
In June 1963, Valentina Terreshkova, Soviet cosmonaut, became the first woman in space. She manually controlled Vostok-6 during parts of the 70.8-hour flight through 48 orbits of earth. Set to start in NASA pilots' training program in March 1995, are Air Force Maj. Pamela Melroy and Navy Lt. Susan Still.
The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, who used the shuttle robot arm to release and retrieve satellites. The first American woman to perform a spacewalk was Kathryn Sullivan, who practiced techniques for refueling satellites, and Kathryn Thorntorn went outside the shuttle to help repair the Hubble Space telescope. Almost all the non-pilot women trainees hold Ph.D.s in their fields of expertise.
Episode 02-08-95
Women of Achievement and Herstory
Event 01-16-1978: The newly created post of "Mission Specialists" was created by NASA and six women appointed to fill the posts. It marked the first time since the inception of the U.S. space program in 1959 that NASA had recognized women. Janet Guthrie, who would win fame as an Indianapolis 500 racer, was turned down because NASA decided to require that applicants have to have "Ph.D. degrees or 'equivalent experience.' " [ liznote: "equivalent experience" means what..? ]
NASA's dirty little secret:
"We've never sent any woman into space because we haven't had a good reason to. We fully envision, however, that in the near future, we will fly women into space and use them the same way we use them on Earth -- and for the same purpose."
-- James Lovell, astronaut, 1973.
LOVELL WAS NEVER REPRIMANDED FOR HIS REMARKS.
Episode 1-16-95
Women of Achievement and Herstory
Event 02-21-1960: Jerrie Cobb started secret tests for astronaut training. Years later in a U.S. Congressional probe, NASA officials admitted they had "no intentions" of allowing women into space. Cobb testified that of the 25 women who applied to the space program in 1960, 13 had been found qualified.
Episode 02-20-95
Women of Achievement and Herstory
Born March 5, 1931: Jerrie Cobb, pilot, first woman to qualify as an American astronaut.
Learned to fly at 12, earned her pilot's license at 16, and received her commercial and flight instructor's license at 18.
In 1952 she became the only female international ferry pilot in the United States.
As chief pilot for Fleetway, she flew over wild terrain and mountains, once being arrested as a spy after a forced landing in South America.
Passed the same 87 physical and psychological tests administered to military pilots for the selection of the seven male astronauts; in fact her results were considered "extraordinary."
No women were chosen although many, including Cobb, surpassed the "Right Stuff" guys who were chosen. NASA officials admitted later that they had no intentions of allowing women to pilot space craft.
J.C. is one of the four Americans to hold the Golden Wings of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale and was chosen pilot of the year for 1959 by the National Pilot's association.
She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her piloting of medical supplies in South America.
March 5, 1996 - Episode 586
Women of Achievement and Herstory
compiled and written by Irene Stuber
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,454478,00.html
TIME MAGAZINE
Monday, Jun. 02, 2003Barred from Heaven
In 1961 a group of women were recruited to go into space. The Mercury 13 tells why they never got there
By LEV GROSSMAN
In mid-January 1961, A handful of women began arriving by twos and threes at the tatty Bird of Paradise Motel in Albuquerque, N.M., for an unusual series of medical tests. The women were all pilots, drawn from groups like the Ninety-Nines (the female pilots' organization founded by Amelia Earhart) and the W.A.S.P.s (Women's Air Force Service Pilots) as well as the women's air-racing circuit, the Powder Puff Derby. The tests were to assess their fitness as potential astronauts. The remarkable story of how these women got to the Bird of Paradise Motel and what happened to them afterward is documented in Martha Ackmann's The Mercury 13 (Random House; 239 pages).
Many of them had quit their job or taken a leave to go to New Mexico. None were paid for their time. Jean Hixson was a former W.A.S.P. who taught third-graders in Akron, Ohio, under the sobriquet "the supersonic schoolmarm." Jan and Marion Dietrich were identical twins from California, dead ringers for Natalie Wood. Janey Hart was the wife of a U.S. Senator. Four of them had logged more flying hours than any of the seven men chosen two years earlier as Mercury astronauts. Jerrie Cobb, the first to be tested, was a shy, restless woman who had worked ferrying planes to obscure corners of South America. She held the world record for nonstop long-distance flying and the world altitude record for a lightweight aircraft.
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--hence Ackmann's title - and to everybody's surprise but their own, the women performed at the same level as the men.
LIFE magazine got hold of the story, and for a brief moment, a few of the women - the media dubbed them "astronettes"--sparkled as minor celebrities. 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. In the end the Soviets would be the first to put a woman in space - in 1963, 20 years before Sally Ride blasted off in Challenger.
As a writer, Ackmann is no Tom Wolfe. Her prose sometimes lapses into academic dryness (she's a lecturer in women's studies at Mount Holyoke), but the pathos of the stories she tells wins through. Mercury 13 is a revealing snapshot of a country simultaneously caught up in the romance of the future and snarled in the prejudice of the past.
A Giant Leap for Womankind
By MARCIA DUNN, AP
Aerospace Writer
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Oct20/0,4670,SpaceShuttleWomen,00.htmlSaturday, October 20, 2007
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A giant leap is about to be made for womankind.
When space shuttle Discovery blasts off Tuesday, a woman will be sitting in the commander's seat. And up at the international space station, a female skipper will be waiting to greet her.
It will be the first time in the 50-year history of spaceflight that two women are in charge of two spacecraft at the same time.
This is no public relations gimmick cooked up by NASA. It's coincidence, which pleases shuttle commander Pamela Melroy and station commander Peggy Whitson.
"To me, that's one of the best parts about it," said Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel who will be only the second woman to command a space shuttle flight. "This is not something that was planned or orchestrated in any way."
Indeed, Melroy's two-week space station construction mission was originally supposed to be done before Whitson's six-month expedition.
"This is a really special event for us," Melroy said. "... There are enough women in the program that coincidentally this can happen, and that is a wonderful thing. It says a lot about the first 50 years of spaceflight that this is where we're at."
[For rest of this story, see foxnews.]
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