Where are the Ladies

On this episode we try and answer the question of why there were no female Astronauts during the Best Aerospace Era?  The question is more complex than you may think.

Transcript

Paula 0:00

For the Best Aerospace Era this is the mansplaining podcast. Here is your host Anthony L. Sealey

0:09

Welcome aerospace enthusiasts. I have mentioned the first space mission of a female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, on Vostok 6 on June 16th, 1963 on a few Mansplaneing episodes. This is a highly publicized achievement by the Soviet space program. It was pushed greatly by Nikita Khrushchev and the Kremlin as another space first and another prize of propaganda to show the aerospace superiority of the USSR during the Cold War back in the 1960s. But why didn't NASA launch a woman into space during the best aerospace era? Let's talk about that. First, let's look at the space program landscape of the late 1950s. The Soviets have launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4th, 1957. With this, they had the first ICBM, or intercontinental ballistic missile, with the potential to launch a much bigger payload into space, including atomic warheads or humans. The Semyorka, or R-7 rocket. Here in the U.S., we had capable missiles like the Jupiter-C that launched our first satellite, Explorer 1, on February 1st, 1958. However, we did not yet have any rocket on the same scale as the R-7. Put into simpler terms, the Russians had the bigger rocket, which in their mind they needed to level the playing field against the U.S. and its NATO allies. This was their answer to our air superiority with the B-58 Husker, the B-52 Stratofortress, and the B-36 Peacemaker. These were the best bombers on Earth at the time. By the way, I did not truly appreciate the B-36 until I first saw one in person at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. It is massive and a very complex example of aerospace engineering. I suggest you go find one and check it out in person. Now here in the US, we had bigger, more capable rockets in development like the Atlas and the Titan. However, they were years from being ready This did not discourage NASA from presenting the Mercury 7 as being the first men or astronauts that would travel into space. You know their names. Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and Gordon Cooper. You know them and why they were selected. If you know my episode, we are putting together a team from Series 2. Now two major parameters for their selection was their height and weight. Every inch and every pound mattered for weight and balance in rocketry. Keep in mind that the Mercury capsule is Cone-shaped and was only nine feet long and six feet wide at its base. If you have seen one in person and looked inside, then you know it's a tight fit. Chief designer Sergei Korolev and the Soviets had a secret pool of 20 men or cosmonauts selected with similar parameters. The race was on and everyone was listening to see if the first words from space would be hello or Privyet. This was an exciting time for the possibilities of this space age. With ideas of spaceships, space stations, and moon bases in the minds of 1950s society. Many people already had these ideas from sci-fi books and comics and movies. There was a real fear however including Those involved with NASA, that the Soviets were ahead and would accomplish these things while here in America we were still blowing up rockets on the launch pad like with the Navy's Project Vanguard. What if our rocket developments fell behind and we were left without a rocket capable of launching a full-grown man into space? The fear was that the Soviets would conquer space first and forever. Could we be left behind to only launch small satellites using our smaller rockets? One man involved with the selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts named Dr. William Randolph Lovelace had this anxiety. He was an expert on aerospace medicine, and he oversaw the medical testing to determine who could physically handle a launch into space and re-entry back to Earth. These medical tests took place under his watch at his clinic, the Lovelace Foundation, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before testing future astronauts, this clinic tested pilots for the U-2 spy plane, so they had the expertise, and most importantly, they had the ability to keep state secrets. I do want to stress this here and now, neither Dr. Lovelace nor his clinic were officially a part of NASA, rather just contracted out for the medical testing of astronauts. After these tests, Dr. Lovelace pondered another option. Now one sunny day on a beach in Miami, Florida in 1959, a curiosity of Dr. Loveless and a possible solution to our space launch capability stood right in front of him with blonde hair at a height of 5 foot 7 inches with a slender athletic build and a weight of 110 pounds. Her name was Geraldine Cobb. Maybe the first words from space could sound like this.

Paula 7:03

Hello Earth! It's beautiful up here.

7:06

An intriguing idea, right? Let's talk about it. Dr. Randy Lovelace, as he's more commonly called, along with an Air Force general named Flickinger, commander of the Air Force Research and Development Command, were curious to know if a woman could pass the same medical test that the Mercury Seven had. Another curiosity was that if a female who were traditionally smaller and weighed less could be sent into space on a smaller rocket aboard a smaller capsule. Now this is an interesting idea and possibly a way to beat the Soviets. Women were smaller, weighed less, and could fit in a smaller space. Women also breathed less oxygen. With our rocket capability of the 1950s, smaller was better. Now here, almost as if she was standing on a silver platter in front of Dr. Lovelace and General Flickinger, stood a five foot, seven inch, one hundred and ten pound, twenty-eight-year-old blonde with an even confident demeanor. Geraldine Cobb was arguably the most accomplished female commercial pilot in the US at the time. If you have listened to my episode, Blonde Dame in a Plane, from series three, then you already know about her. Cobb was intrigued by the idea and the challenging adventure space promised. Honestly, though, Cobb loved any challenge involving aerospace, and once she had her mind made up to overcome a challenge, she never let go. Let's get into this. General Flickinger was set to conduct girl astronaut test with the Air Force. However, his efforts were shut down. More on that later. So it was up to Dr. Lovelace and his private foundation that had no government bureaucracy to answer to. Let's get into these tests. The same tests that cleared the Mercury seven astronauts for space travel. The medical tests Cobb underwent at Dr. Lovelace's clinic sound like human torture to me. There was the usual blood, cholesterol, and blood sugar test, along with many X-rays. They tested her heart, lungs, stamina, and her eyesight. On one test, Cobb was strapped on a table and tilted at a sixty-five-degree angle to test her cardiovascular system. On another test, super cooled water was injected into her inner ear. Cobb said this, "I felt the water hit my inner ear and almost immediately the ceiling began to spin. My right arm fell off the chair, and I couldn't lift it back. I couldn't focus my eyes or control my equilibrium." This was a test to see how fast she would recover her equilibrium. There were other more gruesome tests where they stuck a needle between her knuckles. The next test was a bike test where she pedaled while the examiners added resistance every minute until her heart raced to a rate of a hundred and eighty beats per minute. Cobb pushed herself as her sight began to turn dark. At another testing site, her muscle to fat ratio was tested in a machine Cobb said she was slid into a very tight dark tube that she said reminded her of an old iron lung. Next, she traveled to the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Which is now named the NASA Glenn Research Center for a very interesting but physically alarming test. Cobb was strapped into a giant gyroscopic contraption called the MASTIF, which stood for Multi-Axis Test Inertia Facility. This menacing contraption was made to spin an astronaut trainee on all three axes to see how they would respond and stabilize the tumbling system. Remember, there is no up and down in space and nothing to stop a craft's motion. Here's how that went. Cobb said, "First, the thing started to pitch, and if I hadn't been fastened in, I would have been tossed right off the couch. Then the pitch reached peak speed. I felt the roll start. I was twisting like a toy and going head over heels." She was able to stabilize the tumbling contraption. Afterward, a technician asked her if she wanted to go again. Cobb said, "Why not?" She spent forty-five minutes in this spinning, tumbling contraption. Does this sound like fun to you? This thing sounds like a nightmare to me and is much more extreme than anything you rode at Epcot. One other test I will mention here was a sensory deprivation tank, where a subject is observed and tested on how long they can tolerate being alone in total darkness without sound, except for your own heartbeat. Here, Cobb exceeded all the Mercury Seven astronauts. If you remember my profile of Jerrie Cobb, then you know she was very independent, and she preferred to be by herself. So spending more than 10 hours inside a sensory deprivation tank was almost relaxing to her. What is known as a chicken switch was always available to Cobb during these tests, but she never touched any such switch throughout the testing. Also, her temperament and attitude was observed greatly throughout these tests, just as our male astronauts were tested. Cobb knew she needed to meet and exceed the men in these tests to merit more tests for other female subjects. Not only did she pass these medical tests, but apparently she exceeded some of our revered male astronauts. Cobb was not the only woman tested in this program, though. There were twelve other women who came from different walks of life and status that were tested in this program. Some of them were rich with some political connections. Others were borderline poor and unemployed. Some of them were mothers, and two of them were actually twins. But all of them had some aviation background. They were known as the FLAT, which stood for Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees, and they completed the same test as our famed Mercury Seven. They were tested at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, under the watchful eye of Dr. Randy Lovelace himself and his team. They stayed at a hotel just across the street from the foundation. A few of the women would sit out on the balconies of their hotel in between their tests and watch a few people coming in and out of the hotel. Some of them with different partners each time. Tinder didn't exist back then, but cheaters always have. I thought that was an interesting story. Oddly enough, there was one other woman who was tested in a completely separate program for space flight. In the fall of nineteen fifty-nine, a pioneering female aviator named Ruth Rowland Nichols, at the age of fifty-eight, underwent astronaut testing at Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio. This testing may have played a role in shutting down General Flickinger's girl astronaut examinations that I mentioned earlier So let's get back to the question. Why didn't the U.S. send a woman into space like the Soviet space program did with Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6 on June 16th, 1963? Especially when we had women like Jerrie Cobb and the 12 others who were more qualified with aviation backgrounds than Tereshkova was because she was only a factory worker and a skydiver at the time when she was selected with the Soviets. NASA seemed to be testing the waters with some magazine articles around 1960 that included pictures of female celebrities in spacesuits along with the Mercury 7. So there was some propaganda, if you will, that was supporting this idea, and some separate but not officially sanctioned female astronaut tests that were going on. For one reason or another, though, the FLAT tests were halted. Now, most will say it was sexism that kept American women out of NASA and space in the nineteen sixties and seventies. There was a highly publicized hearing in Washington where Geraldine Cobb and another member of the FLAT, Jan Hart, testified along with female aviation pioneer Jackie Cochran, who helped fund this entire project. Astronaut John Glenn and Scott Carpenter also testified here. I won't get into those hearings here because there's a lot to get to. But if you want to know more about the FLAT, then find the book Promise the Moon by Stephanie Nolen. This source does not paint Jackie Cochran in a positive light, by the way. But I do recommend you check it out. I found it at a bookstore that was moving locations, so I grabbed a few books on the cheap, and this was one awesome find. Now, here are my thoughts about why there were no female astronauts for what it's worth. Let's say NASA, a taxpayer-funded civilian organization, attempted a launch of a female astronaut in, let's say, 1962 on a Mercury Redstone. The same kind of flight that Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew on their 15-minute lofts up into outer space and straight back down. Keep this in mind. Our launches are in view of millions of people on TV and the many people who travel to Cape Canaveral area just to watch these launches with the press and video cameras. This is unlike the Soviets, whose launch site was far away from prying eyes in Kazakhstan. Let's say on the launch pad, something catastrophic happens. Like if it blew up on the launch pad, killing its female occupant. It would be a public bloodbath for NASA and anyone involved. Men and women of the 1960s society would grill the Space Administration and every politician in Washington would be pointing their fingers. Who knows what the degree of backlash could have been for NASA? Maybe something in the realm of backlash that NASA faced after the Challenger tragedy from January 28, 1968, with the loss of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was selected by NASA for this flight. But this would have happened in the first few years of this new space administration that had not yet established itself as the premier space authority. Could something like this have shut down the entire Civilian Space Administration? What would happen then? Maybe the Air Force or the CIA would have taken over any and all American space endeavors. I'm sure the Soviets had a press release ready for just this occasion, if indeed it did happen. With a headline that said, In Soviet Russia, we launch our women up into space. In America, they blow their women up. Now I have profiled the men chosen for Mercury, Gemini, and the Apollo programs here on Mansplaneing. Almost all of them were jet fighter pilots and test pilots. Men like them were known to get killed in dogfights or test flights of prototype aircraft to the point that it was almost expected or a part of the plan, if you will. So the public's shock and backlash would not be nearly as severe as a loss of a woman. The loss of a female astronaut would have far greater implications. The risks were just too high for NASA and Washington on the national stage and the international stage. Speaking of Project Mercury, NASA technically had a spot open. Only 6 of the Mercury 7 Astronauts flew in the Mercury program before NASA moved on to the Gemini program. Deke Slayton was grounded for medical reasons. So NASA could have launched a third Mercury Redstone Similar to Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom's 15-minute loft into space with one of the FLATs. Then we could have proclaimed the first female in space is a red-blooded American woman. But this was not apart of NASA's existing plan. This, along with the risk of backlash, is why I believe an American woman was not launched into space until the 1980s, after NASA achieved its goal of the moon landings and proved itself on the national and world stage. Had the space age arrived about a decade earlier, maybe Jackie Cochran, who helped procure funding for this program, would have had a real shot with her aviation credentials and more importantly, her political connections. She was, however, aged out of the running, if you will, by the 1960s. This story is really about the curiosity of Dr. Randy Lovelace to see how women would perform in the same test as the Mercury seven, and the women themselves known as the fellow lady astronaut trainees who ran through the gauntlet of physical and mental tests. Keep in mind here that this program was never officially a part of NASA. After President Kennedy said we were going to the moon, that was the goal, and NASA wanted the best jet pilots for this mission. There were no seasoned female jet pilots in the 1960s, either in the military or commercially. Now, there may have been some talk behind closed doors at NASA But nothing written down or concrete plans for a female astronaut during the best aerospace era that I know of. Even though sending an American female astronaut was never in NASA's plans, These remarkable women, who became known as a Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees, set the stage for these awesome female astronauts. Like Sally Ride, Judith Resnik, Mae Jemison, Ellen Collins, Catherine Sullivan, and Christina Cook, just to name a few. As I said before, I came across this story in the book Promise the Moon by Stephanie Nolan. It was published back in 2003, which is somehow more than 20 years ago. After I read this about a year or so ago, my brain dusted off a memory from 2021. Does anyone remember the first Blue Origins manned suborbital launch? Now 2021 was a crazy and Stressful year for me personally, but I do remember reading a short paragraph about one of the passengers selected for the first Blue Origins manned launch on July 20th, 2021. I remember reading a brief article that gave basic information about his crew and why they were chosen. One of his crew was a woman who was turned away from NASA decades ago, and now she was finally getting her chance to go into space on Blue Origins New Shepard. I had to look up her name. And checked It against the list of the FLATs, and there her name was. Wally Funk, whose real name is Mary Wallace. One of the first women to complete and pass the same grueling physical and mental test as the Mercury 7 astronauts back in around 1960. I believe she briefly held the record for the oldest person in space. That is until William Shatner was launched. How amazing is this though? And at the time of this recording, she is still with us and alive today. What an amazing story she has to tell. I suggest you go look her up along with the rest of the fellow lady astronaut trainees Thank you so much for listening, and remember there's always a light at the end of the runway.

Paula 27:00

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