Ladies in Spaaaaace

The news of Wally Fell being chosen by Jeff Bezos last week had me wanting to learn a little bit more about the ladies of NASA who trained to be astronauts but never went.

When the US government first started their race to space they believed that men were most physically suited to what they anticipated would be necessary in space. In addition to that, Dwight Eisenhower thought that military pilots would also have "the right stuff" due to the training they had already went through. The initial narrowing of the potential applicants came out of the desire to keep costs down because testing and preparing a lot of candidates would be very expensive.

William Lovelace was a flight surgeon and  chairman of the NASA Special Advisory Committee on Life Science who developed the testing standards for NASA's male candidates. He was also curious how women would do on the same tests. In 1960 he brought in Jerrie Cobb, an accomplished pilot, to be the first woman to be tested.

Lovelace was able to get private funding and invited up to 25 women who were already pilots, many of them from the ninety-nines group (13 of the women passed phase one). Cobb was the only woman to take and pass all 3 phases and named the group First Ladies Astronaut Trainees (FLATs).

The group was relatively unknown until the 90s when a film was made about the program and named them Mercury 13 to connect them to the male counterparts at NASA. It was also not until this time that the women met each other.

The tests in Phase 1 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. Phase 2 included isolation and psychology tests and only 3 of the women were administered this phase.

Once Cobb had passed the Phase III tests, in the top 2% of all candidates, (advanced aeromedical examinations using military equipment and jet aircraft), 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.

Despite the success of the Loveland clinic and the FLATs NASA excluded women from the astronaut program until 1983 when Sally Ride went to space on STS-7 despite the Russians sending Valentina Tereshkova solo in to space in 1963.

While the FLATs were never able to make it to space, at least until Funk flies with Bezos in July, they paved the way for the women who have been able to join the astronaut program. 

To this date there have been 65 women cosmonauts and astronauts who have completed space flight.

Source: Wikipedia