Jerrie Cobb was in the heart of the Amazon jungle. It was a summer night and the air was thick and dense and hot. She lay in a rough woven hammock strung between a wingtip and a door of her twin-engine Islander. She looked up and tried, as she had a thousand times before, to count the stars. Then there was a crackle on the radio. She scrambled into the

cockpit and fiddled with the tiny dials, trying to bring in the voice. It was a priest at a missionary station a couple of hundred miles away, calling with news he thought Jerrie would want to hear. It was July 20, 1969. A few hours earlier, two American men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had walked on the moon.

Jerrie leaned out of the cockpit and pulled herself up onto the wing. Arms in the air, she did a little dance of joy, from the tip of one wing to the end of the other.

“Vaya con Dios , ” she whispered, looking at the night sky.

And then she looked down at the ground around her, and she spoke again.

“It should have been me.”

That story made me shiver. Jerrie Cobb was a pilot, a world- record-setting pilot, when she was recruited to take the astronaut tests at the dawn of the space race. The United States was losing to the Soviets, who were clearly much closer to the goal of putting a person in space. The Americans had smaller rockets than the Russians, and they couldn’t launch a man. Then engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began to think women—smaller, lighter women—might be the answer to their problems. They tested Jerrie, and she excelled. So they recruited more female pilots, and found a dozen who were prime astronaut material. Those women were all set for space when NASA abandoned them. Dumped them, sent them home, and they never knew why.

It was a gripping story. But as I would come to learn, it wasn’t quite a true story.

I first heard it from an author I interviewed in my work as a reporter for the Globe and Mail. She mentioned, in passing, u those first female astronauts in the early sixties.” I was startled. Female astronauts before Sally Ride? I know women’s stories

frequently don’t make the history books, but how could I possibly have missed the first female astronauts?

I looked for a book. There wasn’t one. I looked for magazine articles, newspaper interviews. The files were painfully slim. If America once had secret female astronauts, they were still unknown.

But I couldn’t get their story out of my head. Over and over I heard Jerrie Cobb’s voice. It should have been me.

So I went hunting. I tracked down Jerrie, and she agreed to tell me her story—but Jerrie, as I would come to learn, still keeps secrets of her own. One by one I found the other women. Feeling a little awkward, and very young, I told them I was a Canadian newspaper reporter curious about an event that happened almost half a century before. I wanted to hear their story—and I wanted to tell it.

What unfolded in the months that followed was not one story, but many. There were more versions of the events than there were would-be astronauts. And by the time I had knit the various threads together I realized that even the women themselves did not know what really happened in 1961. In the end, they learned that from me.

The story I first heard wasn’t quite true, but the real events are every bit as dramatic: a bitter clash of personalities between powerful women; masterful public performances by American heroes with an agenda of their own; a hush-hush experiment by a pioneering scientist who trammeled social conventions to satisfy a curious mind; and a vicious emotional outburst at the highest level of government.

In telling this story, it is important to summon the shape of American society in the 1960s—a landscape so different from the one in which we now live that is hard to believe it existed only forty years ago. Talking to the Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees (as they once were known), I was continuously amazed. For someone who grew up in the era when a space shuttle launch

barely made the evening news, the womens stories of the early space race were intoxicating. They described the way they watched each rocket launch, holding their breath and willing it to fly, willing their country to pull this off. To survive: because that’s what the space race was about then, the very survival of the country. I came to see that their story was a fascinating example of the subtle interplay between technological achievement and political propaganda.

It was only forty years ago, and yet the world these women described was almost impossible for a woman my age to imagine. Needing your husband’s signature to buy a car. (Needing a husband.) Having the boss chase you round the desk each afternoon. Being turned down, job after job, because it wouldn’t “look right to have a girl” in the manager’s office or at the front desk. And no discrimination laws to turn to.

When we look back at the pictures of women in the fifties and sixties, it all looks a bit quaint—the beehive hairdos and the sweater sets. And it is tempting to see the story of these “first women astronauts” as a curious historical footnote: as The Right Stuffvery nearly cast with female players. But above all else, the story of these extraordinary women, who ignored traditional roles, defied convention and broke through barriers, is a tale of the painful, destructive experience of being caught on the cusp of social change.

These women were able to see the future but could not, despite their ambition, their passion and their talent, make it present.

Jerrie Cobb is still in the jungle. I don’t know if it should have been she who stepped out on the moon that July night—but I now know she never got the chance to prove it.

Stephanie Nolen Toronto, June 2002

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Jerrie Cobb prepares to pilot a TF-102 “Delta Dagger” in 1959.

ih ere were no clouds. Just empty sky, still brushed pink by the sunrise. She scanned the horizon absently, the way a pilot always checks the sky: no ceiling. Unlimited visibility. She had plenty of flying to do today. It would be fine.

It was early September 1959, and Geraldyn—Jerrie—Cobb was walking on the beach in Miami. She would have liked to have this quiet hour to herself, to walk just above the waters edge and have

the waves lick her bare feet. She was happiest by herself But she had company that morning—the beach stroll was the suggestion of her boss, Tom Harris. They were attending the annual convention of the Air Force Association, and they had plans to make.

At twenty-eight, Jerrie was a pilot and manager for Aero Design and Engineering Company in Oklahoma City, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the United States. That made her one of just two or three women in the country with a senior job at an aeronautic company—a distinction of which she was acutely aware at gatherings such as this. There weren’t many women around, and those there were tended to be wives brought along for the trip, or secretaries, or sales assistants, at best. There would be some raised eyebrows when Jerrie pulled herself up into the cockpit of her twin-engine Aero Commander later. But she had long since stopped noticing those.

By that September morning, Jerrie had logged more than seven thousand hours in the air. She had set three world records—for altitude, distance and speed—in the Commander. Just that summer, she was awarded the Gold Wings of Achievement of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in Paris, one of aviation’s highest honors.

Flying at conventions like this was a regular part of her job, attracting publicity for the company and showing off the Commander to potential buyers—she would fly with one engine deliberately cut out, then come in low, just fifty feet above the ground. And make it all look easy, so easy a girl with a ponytail could do it.

Her boss, Tom Harris, had plenty of admiration for Jerries flying. But he also liked the way the record holder with the freckles and the spectator pumps sold his airplanes. He told her the plan for the day: where she would be flying, who was interested in the plane and what the customers wanted to see.

Just as they turned back toward their hotel, they passed two men emerging from the surf, flushed from an early morning

swim. Harris knew the pair, and he introduced Jerrie to them: Donald Flickinger and Randy Lovelace.

Every pilot in the country in 1959 probably knew those names—these were two of the most important men in aerospace medicine. Jerrie certainly knew them. She knew Lovelace ran a research clinic in New Mexico and held a top post at NASA: he had helped select the Mercury 7, the United States’ first astronauts. And she knew Flickinger was an air force brigadier general, a pioneer in aviation medicine who had led the tests that told the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that a human might survive spaceflight.

The two men didn’t know Jerrie Cobb.

But Jerrie and Tom joined them as they strolled along the shore. Lovelace and Flickinger had just flown in from Moscow where they had attended a conference of space scientists. They told Harris how it had buzzed with rumors that the Soviets were trying to put a man into space. They were musing about developments in Soviet aeronautics when Jerrie quietly commented on the problems that a particular plane caused Russian pilots. Lovelace and Flickinger turned to look at her in surprise.

“Are you a pilot?” Lovelace asked.

At that moment, Jerrie says, “I met destiny in one tiny question.”

Oh yes, she told them. “I’ve been flying for sixteen years.”

Flickinger was startled. “Sixteen years! You don’t look old enough to have a license.”

Jerrie began to blush and stuttered about how she’d started flying at twelve.

Harris jumped in to brag a little, telling them about the records Jerrie had set for Aero, and her Gold Wings. “She’s got more than seven thousand hours in her logbook,” he told them.

Flickinger said he was always interested in what women were doing in aviation and mentioned that the air force had just designed a pressure suit for the French aviatrix Jacqueline Auriol to use for her jet record attempts.

“You better make one of those pressure suits for Jerrie,” Harris replied with a laugh. “She’s liable to try for a record in space next!”

But Lovelace didn’t laugh.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, suddenly quite serious, “we had indications at the Moscow meeting that the Russians are planning to put women on spaceflights.”

There was, Jerrie recalls, a pause in the conversation. “The two scientists were obviously mulling something over.” They asked Jerrie if she could meet with them again later in the day.

And so that afternoon, Jerrie joined Flickinger and Lovelace in an ornate room off the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel. Lovelace asked her about the other female commercial pilots in the United States: could she estimate their average age? What kind of physical shape were they in?

Then he explained why he was asking: “Medical and psychological investigations have long shown that women are better than men at withstanding pain, heat, cold, loneliness and monotony,” he began, and all those were sure to be factors in spaceflight. But there was no research on how women held up in space stress tests. Jerrie was startled to hear it. The space race was consuming America, and the nation knew all about the elaborate tests used to select the Mercury 7 and to see how they might fare in the challenges of this new environment. But nobody had looked at women?

Lovelace told her the last testing of female pilots was done on the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II, a corps of eleven hundred female ferry pilots. Research on their flying hours showed they were better able to tolerate isolation and extremes of temperature than male pilots. But there had been no further study in the past fifteen years. Flickinger and Lovelace had decided it was high time someone got back to the question. The general envisioned a “girl astronaut” program for the Air Research and Development Command, the experimental wing of the air force trying to get America into space. Lovelace, who

was Flickinger’s mentor in the emerging field of bioastronautics, had been pushing a program for women. And so they had a question for Jerrie: “Would you be willing to be a test subject for the first research on women as astronauts?”

It was a fateful invitation.

Donald Flickinger was a risk taker (best known for parachuting into cannibal-populated islands in the South Pacific to treat victims of plane crashes) consumed by the desire to put an American in space. Randy Lovelace was a pioneering research scientist, a man who loved a puzzle. When they asked Jerrie to volunteer, they had big plans.

They made their offer to a woman who had been flying since she was twelve, flying at the cost of all else, flying faster and higher, pushing planes so far up into the darkening blue that her hands froze to the controls. Would she volunteer for astronaut testing? Oh, yes.

On October 4, 1957, the United States heard the crack of the starters gun in the race for space. “Soviets Fire Earth Satellite Into Space . . . Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings Over U.S.,” said a banner headline on the front page of the normally circumspect New York Times.

The story seemed too fantastic to be true, like something out of one of those creepy science fiction movies playing at the drive- in. A Soviet rocket had taken a little machine and put it into orbit around the earth. The newspapers called it a “Red Moon.” It was up there, impossibly high—so high it was in space —but you could see it going overhead. In the late evening or early morning, when the sun was near enough to the horizon to reflect off its polished surface, you could see Sputnik making its steady, unfathomably fast trek across the sky.

The Soviets had been promising they would launch an earth satellite for some time. In fact, they had even invited U.S.

scientists to include measurement equipment on the craft. But the Americans dismissed their talk as empty bragging. Everyone knew the Russians were backward peasants who could not match American technical innovation. The U.S. science establishment was so sure that it would be first with a human-made object in space that the Americans did not even have the equipment to monitor Sputnik, and could not pick up its radio signal until the third ninety-six-minute orbit.

In 1946 military engineers had told U.S. president Harry Truman that the first rockets could possibly be modified to carry a small payload—basic communications equipment, for example—into orbit, but he saw no value in the plan. His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, understood that an earth satellite would give a country access to the airspace of its enemies, but he proved as deaf to the political value of the satellite as Truman was to its strategic value.

Eisenhower approved a plan to launch a satellite sometime in the International Geophysical Year, an innovative international collaboration to study the upper atmosphere that began on July 1, 1957. Eisenhower was told that Russians were also working on a satellite, but he wasn’t bothered by the idea that the Soviet Union might be first—that, the president felt, would establish an international “open skies” policy, allowing monitoring of enemy countries from the reaches of space. If the United States did it first, on the other hand, the Soviets could make angry charges about American spying; Eisenhower pictured the Russians getting a twisted public relations advantage from an American satellite.

The man behind the Soviet space program, however, saw the U.S. plans for the IGY as a challenge. Sergei Korolev, the rocket scientist whom the Soviets identified only as the Chief Designer, was determined to launch a satellite before the confident Americans.

The idea of the race was not new: it had been building since the end of World War II. But until Sputnik, the contest had centered

on weapons. In 1945, the United States was supplying the ill- equipped Russians with technology and hardware in their joint war with Germany. Just four years later, the two nations were in a competition of their own over arsenals. By the early 1950s, both countries had ten-megaton thermonuclear weapons—bombs so big that planes could not carry them. Now the race moved to ballistic missiles: bombs carried farther and faster by rockets.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Russian school teacher named Konstantin Tsiliovsky had devised an equation to launch a rocket past the pull of earths gravity, and he suggested the liquid fuel mix of liquid oxygen and hydrogen that is the basis for modern rocketry. But it was an American physicist named Robert Goddard who was the first to make it work. In 1926, he fired a small rocket 184 feet into the air—this first shot in the American bid for space landed ignominiously in a cabbage patch.

While Goddard was making his homemade rockets, a German engineer had arrived at the same technological breakthrough. Wernher von Braun was a brilliant and charismatic aristocrat. As a teenager, he became convinced that liquid-fueled rockets could be made big enough to carry people into space, and he developed a crude rocket. His talents were soon enlisted by the military because the Treaty of Versailles, which strictly curbed German military expansion, did not ban rockets. The Nazi general Walter Dornberger set up von Braun in a rocket research center on the Baltic peninsula of Peenemiinde, and by October 1943 he had produced a guideable rocket. Hitler ordered mass production of this new weapon, the V2, by concentration camp labor. The V2 could carry more than a ton of explosives 150 miles in less than five minutes, and the Nazis’ “vengeance rocket” wreaked havoc on Britain and Western Europe in the last years of the war, killing seven thousand people. That legacy of destruction was to shape the American space program.

In January 1945, von Braun realized Germany was losing the war and decided to take his pioneering technology to the

Americans. Most of his team and much of their huge trove of engineering documents were brought to the United States in a secret project called Operation Paperclip. The German engineers were installed on a base in Fort Bliss, Texas. Their first assignments were mostly low priority, such as upper-atmosphere probes. But in 1949, after the Soviets exploded a nuclear bomb, the Germans in Texas were given orders to upgrade the V2 into a tactical nuclear missile for the army. The next year, the Americans brought them to a newly established army base in Fiuntsville, Alabama, and put the Germans to work on what would become the Redstone rocket. But it was some time before von Braun got to show what he thought rockets should be doing.

When it became obvious in the mid-1950s that the launch of a satellite could be part of the International Geophysical Year, Eisenhower gave responsibility for the project to the Pentagon. The military chiefs in turn chose the navy, which proposed to upgrade its small Viking research rocket. Wernher von Braun had heard the Soviets talk about the satellites, and he ground his teeth in frustration: he knew his rocket was capable of launching a small satellite, that with his rocket America could be first, yet the grapevine told him the navy was months or years away from being able to do it. Von Braun, famous in the United States for writing about the imminent settlement of Mars, began to develop Project Orbiter, a plan to launch a satellite on his rocket.

But von Brauns rocket was military, a direct descendant of the V2 that had terrorized Britain, and Eisenhower was determined to keep the optics peaceful. In truth, the president had put a high priority on space spying, and the Defense Department was secretly at work on satellites that would give the U.S. military a way to look behind the iron curtain. But the Viking rocket had no military history, and the navy project would look, as much as possible, like a civilian research effort. Von Braun was told to keep working on missiles, but Orbiter was scrapped. Nonetheless, von Braun and his team quietly continued work on

the follow-up to the Redstone, a four-stage rocket called Jupiter C, which he was sure could launch a satellite.

Then came Sputnik—properly called Iskustvennyi Sputnik Zemlyi , Russian for “traveling companion of the world.” It is difficult today to understand the fear Sputnik created in 1957. Through the lens of history, the satellite looks like a shiny steel beach ball. All it could do was take temperature readings and emit a regular, monotone radio signal, which reached earth as a chirp somewhere between newly hatched chick and alarm clock. The technology of the first satellite was less sophisticated than that found in a typical blender today. But Americans were stunned, humiliated and, most of all, frightened. If the Communists could send something racing over the backyard, then surely it was a matter of weeks until they were, in Senator Lyndon Johnsons phrase, “dropping bombs on us like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.” The Senate majority leader, already an unannounced candidate for the 1960 presidential race, proclaimed Sputnik a national emergency that required a full mobilization of U.S. resources. Opinion polls showed most people thought Sputnik was a serious blow to American prestige, that the country was lagging behind the Soviets—not just in missiles, but also in education and overall development of science and technology. Editorials savaged America as fat, lazy and complacent, a nation more interested in suburban patios and tail fins on cars than in the discipline and hard work required of a world leader.

And here Eisenhower totally misread the public. Presidential historians say he sincerely believed the political and psychological impact of Sputnik would be limited. Two days after the launch, the president said he didn’t know what all the fuss was about: “The Russians have only put one small ball in the air . . . that does not raise my apprehensions one iota.” He refused to concede that there was a race with the Soviets, saying the United States would proceed in space at its own pace. In his memoirs,

Eisenhower said he thought Sputnik had kicked off a public relations war, not a space race, and he was seeking to “relieve the current wave of near hysteria.” The historians give the position some credit: had he acknowledged that the Soviets had just clearly shown they had long-range missile technology, Eisenhower might well have driven the level of national anxiety even higher. But the president did not understand how important the contest in space would be in the next few years.

The American humiliation didn’t stop. A month later the Soviets launched Sputnik II, and this satellite carried a female dog, Laika, who lived for six days in orbit, the first living creature in space. Two more satellites followed in quick succession. The nuclear threat was at its height by then: most communities had a fallout shelter, and plenty of people had built their own in the backyard. Children had practice drills in school for nuclear war, climbing beneath their desks with their heads covered. Clearly the Soviets had access to American air space, and now the threat of destruction seemed that much closer.

Sputnik brought Wernher von Braun in from the cold. He read the news of the Soviet launch and fumed, knowing—and telling anyone in Washington who would listen—that he could have beaten them. The Pentagon authorized him to resume work on his satellite project. Meanwhile, the navy tried its Vanguard launch on December 6, 1957. Unlike the Soviet launch, which had been shrouded in secrecy, Americans could watch this one on their little black-and-white television screens. For the first time, the country heard an announcer in Cocoa Beach, Florida, count down “ten . . . nine . . . eight ...” and at zero there was a mighty burst of flame. The rocket rose into the air for a moment, stopped, wobbled, fell sideways, then exploded. The tiny satellite at its tip was thrown off, rolled into the grass and lay there, chirping obediently.

The Soviets had plenty of failures too, but they were veiled by the iron curtain, and American scientists would not learn about

them until decades later. As it was, the Soviets seemed to succeed effortlessly in every launch they attempted. American failure, though, was terribly public. It fell to the former Nazi rocket engineer to salvage American pride. The United States finally launched a satellite on January 31, 1938: Explorer I, a thirty-one- pound bullet-shaped satellite carrying a Geiger counter to detect radiation belts in space. The satellite was carried into orbit on von Brauns Jupiter C rocket. It was something—the Soviets had been answered—but it did little to quiet the sense of American unease.

An attempted Vanguard launch went wrong in early February, when the rockets control system failed halfway to orbit. A Jupiter C launched a month later fell back to earth when its fourth-stage rockets failed to ignite. Finally, the navy got Vanguard to work, and a three-pound satellite was launched March 17. Von Braun got Explorer III into orbit on March 26. Then in April another Vanguard malfunctioned before it hit orbit. And just to rub it in, the Soviets Sputnik III reached orbit on May 15 and began to return a wealth of data from its instruments. Two weeks later, another Vanguard went awry at third stage and dumped its satellite in the Atlantic Ocean. On June 26, a Vanguard lost power at second stage and crashed into the sea. While the Soviets racked up what appeared to be an effortless string of space successes, the American disasters were front page news. “How do kids in Cocoa Beach learn to count?” ran a popular if slightly bitter joke. “Four! Three! Two! Damn!”

Then came reports the Soviets intended to launch a man. Eisenhower, battered in the press, asked for proposals on a human space flight to match the Soviets. And he got a half dozen: the army suggested, for example, Project Man In Space Soonest (MISS), a plan that would replace the nuclear warhead on a missile with a man in a little capsule. The air force favored the X-20, a plane to be launched on a rocket and shot through gravity. (It would fly too fast to bring it in to land, so the pilot

would have to eject at about ten thousand feet and let the million-dollar aircraft smash into the desert.) The flurry of proposals was enough to convince Eisenhower that America needed a centralized space program. That led to a new problem: who would run it? The Department of Defense was the frontrunner, but the Atomic Energy Commission, working with nuclear warheads and propulsion, had supporters in Congress, and so did the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the worlds most advanced aeronautical research organization. There was a split, in fact: players such as the National Sciences Academy (which also had backers in the Senate) said space exploration was about scientific advancement and national prestige. The armed forces, however, thought it was perfectly clear that space was about missile delivery, access to air space and defense.

Finally, someone (often said to be Vice President Richard Nixon) suggested a political solution: create a new civilian agency with responsibility for science missions and any other peaceful aspect of spaceflight, and let the military do its own defense-related research. The compromise had political support. So Eisenhower gave the job to NACA—an organization with close ties to the military but a history of peaceful civilian application of technology. The agency was founded in 1915 to provide federal supervision for aviation research in the United States, which was then lagging behind progress in other countries. During World War I, NACA quadrupled in size and forged close ties with the military. After the war it continued its key role in research as the focus shifted to jet and then supersonic flight. By the mid-1950s, the agency had state-of-the-art research facilities, and as the space race heated up, NACA was drawn into the military rocketry projects.

In July 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, turning NACA into the space administration. The new space agency was given a $100 million

budget; three research centers; sections of Edwards Air Force Base in California designated for high-speed atmospheric flight; a rocket-sounding facility in Virginia; eight thousand employees, and instant responsibility for a host of space-related projects (including Vanguard and Explore r). Keith Glennan, former commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, was named chairman, and NACA’s director Hugh Dryden was his deputy.

NACA had a rocket division, under the direction of a brilliant engineer called Robert Gilruth. He had been with the agency since 1937 and had quickly risen through the NACA ranks, doing innovative research first in flight-testing, and later in rocketry In the spring of 1938, while Congress was still debating the form of this new civilian space agency, Dryden asked Gilruth to put together a plan. He gathered his best designers, and by April they were drafting the blueprint for a blunt-ended capsule that could carry one man and be launched on the top of an air force Atlas rocket.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration officially came into being in October 1958. And a week later, Glennan created the Space Task Group. He and Gilruth decided that their first project would be called Mercury, after the winged messenger of the Greek gods. They already had the plans for a capsule to hold a man. Now they needed men to fly it.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

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