Martha Ackmann - The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight

Random House New York

CONTENTS

For my parents,
Florenze and Elizabeth Ackmann

AUTHORS NOTE

THE THIRTEEN AMERICAN WOMEN PILOTS WHO PASSED THE PHYSICAL tests for astronauts at the legendary Lovelace Foundation never identified themselves by a group name while they were undergoing the exams in 1960 and 1961. Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II, who earlier had administered the same physical tests to the Mercury 7 male astronauts, did not assign a project name to the womens secret testing program. The first woman to undergo the tests, Jerrie Cobb, later referred to the women as F.L.A.T.s (Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees), but the other women disliked the name, and it did not stick. The fact that the group never took on a collective name contributed to its historical invisibility. More than thirty years after their testing, media attentiontriggered largely by John Glenns second launch into spacerevived interest in the thirteen women and the role they played in the history of U.S. space flight. In editorials, a television documentary, NASA resources, library archive references, and citations from professional organizations such as Women in Aviation, International, the women began to be called the Mercury 13. It is the name most frequently used now to refer to the women and the one most of them prefer.

The Mercury 13

FOREWORD
BY LYNN SHERR

AT PRECISELY 7:33 A.M. ON JUNE 18, 1983, A BRIGHT FLORIDA MORNING with a radiant sun, the space shuttle Challenger was lifted off the launchpad on a white-hot surge of rocket power. Officially, it was STS-7, the seventh trip for the nations two-year-old space shuttle system, itself a pioneering program. But for most of the folks who were watching that day, Challengers mission represented something far more revolutionary: the first flight of an American woman into space. Sally K. Ride carried the dreams of her earthbound sisters with grace and good humor. As the shuttle shot skyward with a force far beyond that of any amusement park ride, she immediately connected to Americans everywhere by radioing her counterpart back in Houston: Have you ever been to Disneyland? This is definitely an E ticketin other words, the hottest ride of all.

As I anchored the launch for ABC News that morning, I, too, felt a special sense of pride. It wasnt just that one of us was up there, or that there were five more women astronauts in the wings. It was also my satisfaction that both the spirit and the substance of Americas manned space program had changed irrevocably. NASA had finally gotten it right.

Later, I felt even better. Eager to share the excitement, I had invited my sister and my mother to the Kennedy Space Center to see the launch, and when we finally hooked up after the days news had settled down, they were glowing. Fabulous, said my sister excitedly, having seen such things only on television up until then. My mother, who was about to be eighty, put it all together: Ive seen the horse and buggy. Ive seen the car and the train and the airplane. And now this. Perfect.

It was all perfectthe mission, the leap into equality, the giddy sense of accomplishment for the entire nation. As for the star of the showthe very private but very cool astronaut who had become a close friendSally told me in an interview before she left, I do feel under some pressure not to mess up. She did not. In fact, Sally became the most famous person in the world for the next few weeks, as little girls in droves decided to become astronauts.

Today, three decades later, thirty-six more women have flown on American shuttles, doing virtually everything their male counterparts have done in the vacuum of space. They have donned special suits for space walks, they have manipulated the robot arm, and they have launched satellites. Shannon Lucid set an endurance record on the space station, Mir. Eileen Collins became the first female shuttle pilot in 1995. Five years later, she slid over to the vaunted left-hand seat and became the shuttles first female commander. Commander. Thats the job that used to belong only to men with the right stuff, spiritual descendants of Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk whod challenged gravity as test pilots and defied the odds as fighter pilots. Now women were part of the club. As of this writing, thirty women are in the astronaut corps, nearly one fifth of the total.

A more sobering indication that women are achieving parity is a sad one: four women have given their lives for the programJudy Resnik and Christa McAuliffe on Challenger in 1986, and Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark on Columbia in 2003. Their deaths were no more and no less heartbreaking than those of their male colleagues, but I was especially touched after the Challenger explosion when Anna Fisher, a physician who had joined the program with Resnik and Ride as one of the original NASA women, told me, Im really going to miss Judy. Im going to miss getting to have a reunion when were all eighty years old.

That she could have even imagined a reunion illustrates the point about women in space today: we take it for granted that women will fly, and perhaps die, in space. And it didnt used to be that way at all.

Before I started covering NASA in 1980, there were few female reporters, fewer female NASA managers, and no female American astronauts. Space, like almost everything else in American society, was a mens clubrun by, for, and with men. The arguments that preserved that exclusivity were the same tired excuses that once kept us from practicing medicine, running corporations, playing tennis for big money, and casting a ballot. Women were too weak, too emotional, too, well, womanly, to participate. And, of course, they simply werent qualified.

As Martha Ackmann points out definitively in the pages that follow, that judgment was categorically wrong in this case, as in so many others. The Mercury 13 women were not only dedicated and determined, they were enormously talented. To read about their accomplishments and to discover their passion to fly is to recognize an incredible lost opportunity by the United States government. And they werent anomalies. There were plenty of qualified females out there, if anyone had taken the time to find and trust them. At the same time, it is both amusing and depressingly familiar to learn that these gifted pilots, charting the skies and scrounging their planes, had to keep their noses powdered and their hemlines straight to impress the world. Some things never change.

Equally astounding is to learn about the men. Not only that so many were so derisivesome might say threatenedat the thought of mere women on the frontier, but that so many took up the cause with such energy. By identifying these supporters and chronicling their activities, Ackmann has given us a new pantheon of heroes.

Every time we turn a page in social history, someone comments that the barriers have fallen for eternity, theres no turning back and that women (or whoever) have won, and the battle is over. Maybe. Whatever happens to the U.S. space programand I suspect there are some vast changes coming upI think the presence of women is assured. But theyre still a minority. And anyway, I think there are always new envelopes to push.