Country most active: United States
Also known as: Woman in Space Program, First Lady Astronaut Trainees
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Even when women as a group are proven to be capable, they are still often excluded. One of the more egregious instances can be found in the story of the Mercury 13 astronauts that never were. In the 1960s, American women were explicitly excluded from candidacy for astronaut training, even as the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova up on June 16, 1963.
In 1960, the privately funded Women in Space Program had thirteen women, all experienced pilots, undergo the same medical testing as NASA conducted on the Mercury 7—the first American astronauts. The project was spearheaded by Dr. Randolph Lovelace, who had helped devise America’s first astronaut tests and served as chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee for Project Mercury. The eighty-seven tests intentionally pushed candidates to extremes, but the women didn’t baulk. In fact, Wally Funk—the youngest at age twenty-two—participated in additional testing. During the isolation test, she did better than any other candidate, male or female, floating in a dark soundproof room for more than 10.5 hours until they ended the test—not her.
There was also the weight consideration—every gram matters in space flight, and women on average weigh less and consume less food and oxygen than men. In fact, one of NASA’s requirements for the men was that they had to be less than 5 feet 11 inches (1.8 m) tall, because the craft could not accommodate anyone taller.
Even though the women passed all the same tests, and often out-performed the men, the report was disregarded and women were not accepted for astronaut training until 1978. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, broke that barrier in 1983—more than twenty years after the Mercury 13 proved themselves.
Officially, it was not a “no women” rule—the requirements included that all candidates must have military experience as fighter pilots. Not just pilots, as many women had flown for the military during World War II, but test pilots, a role women had been denied. It’s a roundabout form of sexism seen elsewhere in history—placing unnecessary barriers that just happen to exclude women.
IW note: The 13 women were:
Myrtle Cagle (1925–2019)
Jerrie Cobb (1931–2019)
Janet Dietrich (1926–2008)
Marion Dietrich (1926–1974)
Wally Funk (1939–2026)
Sarah Gorelick (later Ratley) (1933–2020)
Jane “Janey” Briggs Hart (1921–2015)
Jean Hixson (1922–1984)
Rhea Woltman (1928–2021)
Gene Nora Stumbough (later Jessen) (1937–2024)
Irene Leverton (1927–2017)
Jerri Sloan (later Truhill) (1929–2013)
Bernice Steadman (1925–2015)
The following is republished from NASA. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Although never a NASA program, a group of women had been chosen and tested by William Randolph Lovelace, the man who originally helped to develop the tests for NASA’s Mercury Program in the early 1960s. Since the women were never officially recognized as an astronaut training group by NASA at the time, Lovelace conducted the tests in his private clinic. The first of these selected personally by Lovelace, Geraldyn (Jerrie) Cobb, coined the term “FLAT” – First Lady Astronaut Trainees. After Cobb, 12 other women were selected: Wally Funk, Irene Leverton, Myrtle “K” Cagle, Janey Hart, Gene Nora Stumbough, Jerri Sloan, Rhea Hurrle, Sarah Gorelick, Bernice “B” Trimble Steadman, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, and Jean Hixson.
The women all had to be under 35 years of age and in good health, hold a second class medical certificate, have a bachelor’s degree, hold an FAA commercial pilot rating or better, and have over 2,000 hours of flying time. The early phases of testing were extremely rigorous, since no human being had yet flown in space. For example, to test how quickly the women could recover from vertigo, ice water was shot into their ears. They were also, among other things, put on a tilt table to test their circulation and subjected to a four-hour eye exam.
Even though the women passed the tests with flying colors, FLAT testing ended abruptly after the Navy refused to grant Lovelace and his women trainees further access to the testing facilities at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida, citing the lack of an official NASA request as the reason. The FLATs fought this termination of their unofficial program, and their plight eventually became the subject of a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in July 1962. This subcommittee was created after Cobb met with Representative George Miller of California, chair of the House Space Committee. Miller, unlike many before him, offered to help, and called for the creation of the subcommittee to investigate. Representative Victor Anfuso of New York acted as chairman for the subcommittee, but due in part to negative testimony from Congressmen and NASA officials, including George Low, Scott Carpenter, and John Glenn, no action resulted from the hearings. Though this was expected, the defection of early female aviator Jackie Cochran was not. Cochran was intimately involved with Lovelace’s training program for women from the beginning since much of the funding for the FLAT medical testing came from Cochran and her husband. In fact, her husband was chairman of the Lovelace Foundation’s board of trustees. It remains somewhat unclear as to why she decided to speak out against the program during the subcommittee hearing; however, there is some evidence to suggest that Cochran was displeased both with the media attention given specifically to Cobb and with Lovelace for ignoring her requests to be one of the test candidates due to her age and prior health conditions. Regardless of the outcome, the hearing was a monumental moment, as it marked an investigation about sex discrimination two years before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The FLATs were never granted the opportunity to fly in space. Until the Astronaut Class of 1978 was selected NASA insisted that all astronauts have military jet test pilot experience, thereby eliminating all women until that time. (The military test pilot requirement was originally established by President Eisenhower himself in December 1958.) Nevertheless, many of the FLATs have since been recognized throughout the years for helping to – eventually – pave the way for future women in America’s space program. Many years after having been shut out of the Mercury program, astronaut Eileen Collins invited the surviving women to her first launch in 1995. The FLATs have a special bond with Collins, who, with her 1995 flight, represented the fulfillment of their 30-year dream of seeing an American woman pilot astronaut.