Mercury 13
The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who in 1959–60 took part in a privately funded research program run by physician William Randolph Lovelace II, a private contractor to NASA, which aimed to test and screen the women for spaceflight. The first participant, pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb helped Lovelace identify and recruit the others. The participants successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury. While Lovelace called the project the Woman in Space Program, the thirteen women later became known as the "Mercury 13" – a term coined in 1995 as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The Mercury 13 were not allowed into the astronaut program, never trained as a group, and did not fly into space.
In the 1960s some of the women were among those who lobbied the White House and Congress to include women in the astronaut program. In 1963, Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for Life magazine publicizing the women and criticizing NASA for its failure to include women in the astronaut program. One of the thirteen, Wally Funk, flew aboard the sub-orbital Blue Origin New Shepard 4 on the 20 July 2021 Flight 16, making her the oldest person to go into space at age 82.
The story of these women has been retold in books, exhibits, and movies, including the 2018 Netflix-produced documentary ''Mercury 13.''
History
When NASA first planned to put people in space, they believed that the best candidates would be pilots, submarine crews or members of expeditions to the Antarctic or Arctic areas. They also thought people with more extreme sports backgrounds, such as parachuting, climbing, deep sea diving, etc. would excel in the program.NASA knew that numerous people would apply for this opportunity and testing would be expensive. President Dwight Eisenhower believed that military test pilots would make the best astronauts and had already passed rigorous testing and training within the government. This greatly altered the testing requirements and shifted the history of who was chosen to go to space originally.
William Randolph Lovelace II, former Flight Surgeon and later, chairman of the NASA Special Advisory Committee on Life Science, helped develop the tests for NASA's male astronauts and became curious to know how women would do taking the same tests. In 1960, Lovelace and Air Force Brig. General Don Flickinger invited Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb, known as an accomplished pilot, to undergo the same rigorous challenges as the men.
Lovelace became interested in beginning this program because he was a medical doctor who had done the NASA physical testing for the official program. He was able to fund the unofficial program, the Woman in Space program, and invited 25 women to come and take the physical tests. Lovelace was interested in the way that women's bodies would react to being in space.
Cobb was the first American woman to undergo and pass all three phases of testing. Lovelace announced her success to the public at the second International Symposium on Submarine and Space Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden in August 1960. Cobb's testing was reported publicly via the Associated Press newswire and articles appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times as well as Life magazine. These tests were never secret, just little noticed.
Lovelace and Cobb recruited 24 more women to take the tests, financed by the husband of world-renowned aviator Jacqueline Cochran. In addition to Cobb, eighteen women traveled to Albuquerque for the examinations. All total, thirteen women, including Cobb, passed the same tests that had been used to vet the Project Mercury astronaut candidates for NASA. Some were disqualified due to minor brain or heart anomalies.
Candidate background
All of the candidates were accomplished pilots; Lovelace and Cobb reviewed the records of more than 700 women pilots in order to select candidates. They did not invite anyone with fewer than 1,000 hours of flight experience. Some of the women may have been recruited through the Ninety-Nines, a women pilot's organization of which Cobb was also a member. Some women responded after hearing about the opportunity through friends. This group of women, whom Jerrie Cobb called the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, accepted the challenge to be tested for a research program.Wally Funk wrote an article saying that, given the isolation of the testing, with each woman going through the examination alone or at most in a pair, not all of the women candidates knew each other throughout their years of preparation. It was not until 1994 that ten of the group met in person for the first time.
Phase I tests
Nineteen women took astronaut fitness examinations given by the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Unlike NASA's male candidates, who competed in groups, the women did their tests alone or in pairs. Because doctors did not know all the conditions which astronauts might encounter in space, they had to guess what tests might be required. These ranged from typical X-rays and general body physicals to the atypical; for instance, the women had to swallow a rubber tube in order to test the level of their stomach acids. Doctors tested the reflexes in the ulnar nerve of the woman's forearms by using electric shock. To induce vertigo, ice water was shot into their ears, freezing the inner ear so doctors could time how quickly they recovered. The women were pushed to exhaustion while riding specially weighted stationary bicycles, in order to test their respiration. They subjected themselves to many more invasive and uncomfortable tests.The 13
In the end, thirteen women passed the same Phase I physical examinations that the Lovelace Foundation had developed as part of NASA's astronaut selection process. Those thirteen women were:- Myrtle Cagle
- Jerrie Cobb
- Janet Dietrich
- Marion Dietrich
- Wally Funk
- Sarah Gorelick
- Jane "Janey" Briggs Hart
- Jean Hixson
- Rhea Woltman
- Gene Nora Stumbough
- Irene Leverton
- Jerri Sloan
- Bernice Steadman
Additional tests and termination of the program
A few women took additional tests. Jerrie Cobb, Rhea Hurrle, and Wally Funk went to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma for Phase II testing, consisting of an isolation tank test and psychological evaluations. Because of other family and job commitments, not all of the women were able to take these tests. Once Cobb had passed the Phase III tests, the group prepared to gather in Pensacola, Florida at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine to follow suit. Two of the women quit their jobs in order to be able to attend. A few days before they were to report, however, the women received telegrams abruptly canceling the Pensacola testing. Without an official NASA request to run the tests, the United States Navy would not allow the use of its facilities for such an unofficial project.Funk reportedly also completed the third phase of testing, but this claim is misleading. Following NASA's cancellation of the tests, she found ways to continue being tested. She did complete most of the Phase III tests, but only by individual actions, not as part of a specific program. Cobb passed all the training exercises, ranking in the top 2% of all astronaut candidates of both genders.
Regardless of the women's achievements in testing, NASA continued to exclude women as astronaut candidates for years. Despite the Soviet advancement to put the first woman in space in 1963 after Yuri Gagarin's orbit in 1961, the men who testified at the hearing were unmotivated. Any threat to the "patriotic chronology" of the American schedule would be considered an "impediment" or "interruption".
House Committee Hearing on Gender Discrimination
When the Pensacola testing was cancelled, Jerrie Cobb immediately flew to Washington, D.C. to try to have the testing program resumed. She and Janey Hart wrote to President John F. Kennedy and visited Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Finally, on 17 and 18 July 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso convened public hearings before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. Significantly, the hearings investigated the possibility of gender discrimination two years before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that made such actions illegal.Cobb and Hart testified about the benefits of Lovelace's private project. Jacqueline Cochran largely undermined their testimony, talking about her concerns that setting up a special program to train a woman astronaut could hurt the space program. She proposed a project with a large group of women, and expected a significant amount to drop out due to reasons like "marriage, childbirth, and other causes". Though Cochran initially supported the program, she was later responsible for delaying further phases of testing, and letters from her to members of the Navy and NASA expressing concern over whether the program was to be run properly and in accordance with NASA goals may have significantly contributed to the eventual cancellation of the program. It is generally accepted that Cochran turned against the program out of concern that she would no longer be the most prominent female aviator.
NASA representatives George Low and Astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified that under NASA's selection criteria women could not qualify as astronaut candidates. Glenn also believed that "The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order." They correctly stated that NASA required all astronauts to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs and have engineering degrees, although John Glenn conceded that he had been assigned to NASA's Mercury Project without having earned the required college degree. In 1962, women were still barred from Air Force training schools, so no American women could become test pilots of military jets. Despite the fact that several of the women had been employed as civilian test pilots, and many had considerably more propeller aircraft flying time than the male astronaut candidates, NASA refused to consider granting an equivalency for their hours in the more basic propeller aircraft, it was presumed at the time that training and experience in piloting jet and rocket aircraft, such as the X-15 then being developed, would be "most useful for transition to spacecraft." Jan Dietrich had accumulated 8,000 hours, Mary Wallace Funk 3,000 hours, Irene Leverton 9,000+, and Jerrie Cobb 10,000+. Although some members of the Subcommittee were sympathetic to the women's arguments because of this disparity in accepted experience, no action resulted.
Executive Assistant to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Liz Carpenter, drafted a letter to NASA administrator James E. Webb questioning these requirements, but Johnson did not send the letter, instead writing across it, "Let's stop this now!" Historian Margaret Weitekamp discovered the letter in the late 1990s in the handwriting file of Johnson's vice presidential papers held in Austin, Texas and revealed its existence in her dissertation and book on the Lovelace women.