Jerrie Cobb at the controls of the MASTIF at a NASA test center, I960.
After that fateful meeting on the Florida beach in September, Jerrie Cobb could not get thoughts of space out of her head. She would lie in the backyard at night and look at the stars and imagine what it would be like to be flying up there. She was tantalized by the thought that there might be a way for her to get there, and she was eager to start. She waited for a call from General Flickinger or Dr. Lovelace.
Courtesy of the National Aeornautics and Space Administration
Flickinger, an air force general and flight surgeon, was best known for a series of jumps he made in the Pacific theater in World War II, when he was parachuted in to tend to survivors from plane crashes and then lead them out to safety. In 1951, his friend Randy Lovelace recommended him for the job of chief of Human Factors (official speak for pilots) in the Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), the experimental branch of the air force. “Flick,” as the doctor was known, was an innovator in aerospace medicine, and he rose rapidly through the ranks at ARDC. He was particularly interested in the emerging field of space medicine and how his human factors were going to survive in this new environment. He was also a big supporter of NASA. When the air force lost the fight to lead Americas space program, Flickinger was one of the few “men in blue” who advocated total cooperation with the new agency. This in turn led to appointments on advisory boards within NASA. He was running the show in bioastronautics at ARDC by 1959, and he and Lovelace had together developed the idea of testing women, a logical step in the study of human survival in space.
The United States knew the Russians were close to launching a human, but NASA designers could not come up with a capsule big enough to hold a pilot and still light enough to be boosted by the best rockets the air force or the navy could produce. And nobody knew what it was going to be like in space, but they were sure it was going to be tough. Lovelace and Flickinger suspected that female pilots would be smaller, lighter, use less oxygen, less food and less water, so they would be far easier to launch. Studies had proven that women were more tolerant of pain, heat, cold and isolation. Certainly they did not have the same degree of physical strength as men, but then strength was not a job requirement for a pilot who was going to be strapped into a Mercury capsule. Women might be the answers to all of Americas astronaut problems.
Discovering Jerrie Cobb on a Miami beach was just the spur they needed. Her pilot ratings checked out with the records of
the Civilian Aeronautics Authority (the precursor to the Federal Aviation Authority), and so did those of the women she suggested. Flickinger and Lovelace gathered eight more names from their own flying sources and were set to begin testing. Jerrie was itchy with anticipation.
And then in November 1959, ARDC brass quashed what Flickinger called his u girl astronaut program.” Jerrie could not know it, but the abrupt reversal was a grim harbinger of problems that lay ahead. For now, she was startled, and she wrote to Flickinger asking what had happened. They hadn’t even started, so what could the objections possibly be? On December 7, 1959, he replied: “please realize that I am even sorrier than you on the unfavorable turn of events in my original plans. The unfortunate ‘Nichols’ release did much to ‘turn the tide’ against Air Force Medical Sponsorship of the program, and to this day I cannot find out the individual responsible for approving the release.”
The infamous Nichols release: it doesn’t survive, but one can guess what it said. In the autumn of 1959, Ruth Rowland Nichols went to the air force’s Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, and underwent a series of astronaut tests. (After NASA’s creation, the air force did not get out of the space game entirely, and researchers at Wright were considering the defense applications of launching humans.) Ruth Nichols was fifty-eight, and she was one of the great female pilots, a trailblazer from the earliest days of flying. Born in 1901, she was a “society girl,” as the papers called her, who learned to fly as a student at Wellesley College in 1923. Six years later she set a record as the first woman to land a plane in all forty-eight states. After the historic Lindbergh flight, she set out to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo—it was Ruth who smashed five vertebrae crashing into a field in New Brunswick; Amelia Earhart had made the flight by the time she recovered. Ruth flew in the first Powder Puff Derby in 1929, and she was one of the first two women, with Jackie Cochran, to enter the legendary Bendix race in 1933.
She kept up a glamour girl image, but like Earhart she also wrote widely about the safety and promise of aviation. In 1940, Ruth, who was a devout Quaker, started an organization called Relief Wings to transport humanitarian assistance to civilians affected by war and to use airplanes as ambulances; during World War II she merged Relief Wings with the Civil Air Patrol.
Ruth had air force connections through her brother, and in 1958 she set a womens record by flying an air force TF102-A jet faster than one thousand miles an hour at fifty-one thousand feet at Suffolk County Air Force Base in Fong Island, New York. It may have been through those connections that she was invited to do some astronaut tests. There is no surviving record in air force archives to explain how it came about, and Flickinger made no further mention of it. Ruth killed herself less than a year later. But she definitely went to Dayton and took part in isolation, centrifuge and weightlessness experiments. She did well—and she urged the air force scientists to incorporate women in their spaceflight plans. “They thought of this with horror, and they said under no circumstances,” Ruth later recalled to an oral historian. The scientists at Wright told her they “knew nothing about a woman, physiologically, which I thought was an extraordinary statement. ... I suggested a crash program to find out how a female reacted.” Women are tough, Ruth argued—their bodies were “meant to withstand a crisis in childbirth.” And a woman was also “more passive than a man, and could therefore endure long isolations. From every viewpoint, she could hold her own in a space situation and be of tremendous service. ”
The air force scientists, apparently, did not agree. Someone made the Nichols tests public, and the publicity was enough to scare off ARDC. The differences between men and women had rarely been more sharply defined in American society than they were in this postwar period. Women were defined by a domestic role, as wives and mothers and consumers whose lives in new suburban tract houses embodied the American dream. Womens
moves into the war-era labor force, and into the military services, had reversed by the early 1950s, and the deepening Cold War was a strictly male battleground. The air force could only open itself up to condemnation by involving a woman in its most innovative defense program: testing Ruth Nichols had freak value at best; the underlying implication was of weakness, the suggestion that Wright couldn’t find a way to make its most advanced technology work with men.
“The concensus [sic] of opinion . . . was that there was too little to learn of value to Air Force Medical interests and too big a chance of adverse publicity to warrant continuation of the project,’’ Flickinger wrote to Lovelace in late December. One of the major objections from researchers, he explained, was that the air force could not afford the price of remodeling the partial pressure suits (tight coveralls that put pressure on a pilot’s torso, upper legs and arms to keep blood flow to the head during maneuvers that pulled against gravity) for female bodies. “Since there was such great unanimity of opposition I did not see fit to overrule it and do not plan on re-opening the issue with anyone at [the School of Aviation Medicine] or at Air Force level. ”
And so Flickinger reluctantly turned his “girl astronaut” file over to Lovelace and his private institution. “I continue to have a keen personal interest in it and believe it should be done on as scientifically sound a basis as possible, ” he wrote to Lovelace. “I feel (by instinct perhaps) that if carefully done with a large enough series, there would be some interesting differences between male and female responses noted.”
Lovelace, too, was intensely curious about this question of women and their capacity for endurance. Randy Lovelace and his wife, Mary, had five children—but the first two, boys, died of polio within days of each other in 1946. That left Lovelace with three daughters. Like their mother, they were hardy girls. They hunted, fished and hiked with their father in the mountains outside Albuquerque. And then, of course, Jackie Cochran was
one of his closest friends. Lovelace was used to tough, capable women who did the things men did. He had followed Jackies experience with the WASP closely, and the limited research from that program hinting that women were in fact hardier than men intrigued him—Jackie herself certainly bore out the idea.
Lovelace was not a social reformer, seeking to alter the position of women in society, not at all. But he was a curious researcher who did not think politics should get in the way of genuine scientific inquiry. “Randy was a futurist; he was always one hundred years ahead of everyone else, ” says Donald Kilgore, who was then an otolaryngologist with the clinic and who knew Lovelace well. Kilgore says Lovelace was largely unconcerned by contemporary ideas of gender roles and simply saw in women a potential solution to a grave national problem. Kilgore notes that the pioneering doctor was likely also motivated by his personal curiosity and his fondness for assuming a leadership role. He had no interfering bureaucrats to deal with, so he took Flickinger’s files, talked to Jerrie about the list of women to examine and arranged to start the tests. Just before Christmas 1959, Jerrie got a letter from the clinic: finally, things were starting to happen. She was told to report to the clinic in New Mexico in February. In the meantime, there was advice: “start training.” She was to run and swim and cycle and get plenty of sleep.
Jerrie didn’t know how long the tests were going to take, but she knew she needed time off—from an already shorthanded aviation company where her boss regularly muttered, “My job does not include philanthropy.” Tom Harris listened to Jerries request a little stunned. The guys at Aero teased Jerrie about her dreams of going to the moon, but as she made her pitch from across his desk, one look at her told Harris she was completely serious. He asked if she realized that this might not go as she planned, that it could even damage her career. Was she willing to risk her job as one of the few women in a senior position in aviation? How much did this mean to her?
“Everything,” Jerrie replied simply.
So Harris told her to go. “If it means so much to you, and if this is a way our company can help toward American space achievements I’m for it.”
Jerrie launched herself into her new regimen, running a couple of miles around and around the vacant lot next to her house each morning, and a couple more each night. She worked up to cycling twenty miles a day on an exercise bike in the house, and she lived on “man-sized steaks.” She fell into bed each night—no trouble getting the Lovelace-recommended nine hours of sleep. She had orders to keep her plans quiet, and so she could only smile weakly at colleagues who puzzled over her weariness.
Then on February 2, Look magazine put out an issue with an extraordinary cover. It showed Betty Skelton, a three-time national aerobatic champion turned auto racer, posing in a silver space suit in front of an Atlas rocket. “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” the cover line demanded. Inside were four pages of pictures of Betty spinning in a centrifuge, sitting in a jet cockpit and splashing in the neutral buoyancy tank. Beside her, in all the pictures, were the Mercury 7, laughing it up with the petite redhead in an oversized flight suit.
The article explained that there was “at this writing, no announced program to put women in space,” and that Skelton, thirty-three, had done the Mercury tests at Looks behest. In her four months of researching the Mercury program, however, she had heard some extraordinary ideas, the magazine said. “Both American and Soviet experts agreed that women would respond as well as men (some thought possibly better) to the physical and psychological stresses of space travel. No conclusive data is available, but the requirements as now conceived are so specialized that specific individual qualifications far outweigh any difference based on sex.” In the end, however, Look made it clear that while the Mercury 7 astronauts called her “No. 7/7,” the aerobatic champ wasn’t going into space. “Though Betty Skelton would
love to orbit, she does not believe she or any American woman her age has a chance. Even if she could qualify, a very large ‘if,’ she thinks she will be too old by the time the program gets around to using women.”
The Look piece was a public relations exercise designed to get NASA some good press. Jerrie Cobb’s assignment was rather different. On Valentine’s Day, 1960, a crisp cold night, she arrived in Albuquerque. There was nothing romantic about the instructions that awaited her: have nothing to eat or drink—not even chewing gum. Do an enema at night, another in the morning and report to the lab at 8:00 a.m.
She was “unit one, female.” That first morning, as she waited for her instructions, she felt a heavy weight of responsibility: this wasn’t just about how good her eyes were or how strong her heart was. If she wasn’t up to this, Lovelace might never test another woman. He would have no reason to suggest it to the NASA committee he chaired. “Here was the chance, perhaps the only one, to prove a female space-worthy.” Jerrie says she prayed.
The first hour of the first day brought a complete blood count, a hematology smear, a blood sugar test, a nonprotein nitrogen test, serology, sedimentation rate, cholesterol test, Rh factor test and urinalysis. It continued from there. There were X rays—more than a hundred pictures of every bone Jerrie had. She blew into tubes while doctors listened for the smooth flow of blood between the chambers of her heart (tiny defects could explode in a rapidly decompressing space capsule). They strapped her to a table and hung her tilted at sixty-five degrees while every five minutes an electrocardiogram recorded the function of her cardiovascular system. And when she sat back in an innocuous-looking chair in the otolaryngologist’s office, he used a huge syringe to inject supercooled ten-degree Fahrenheit water deep into her ear. The water froze her inner ear bone, destroying her sense of balance and inducing vertigo. “I felt the water hit my inner ear and almost immediately the ceiling began
to whirl and became a multiple of spinning blobs. My right hand fell off the chair and I couldn’t lift it back. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t focus my eyes or control my equilibrium.” A nurse with a stopwatch stood by, waiting for her eyes to stop spinning.
Next they put her on an exercise bicycle, covered her in electrodes and had her pedal in time to a metronome—and every minute, they added drag to the rear wheel, so that it felt as if she was going up an ever steeper incline. She puffed into a gauge that read the amount of oxygen she took in and of carbon dioxide she expelled, while a ring of doctors stood around watching. The metronome kept ticking, and she kept pedaling. And pedaling. Sweat poured off her and her vision narrowed. The wheel got heavier. She kept pedaling. Finally, as her pulse rate hit 180 (the point just before unconsciousness), they told her she could stop. Her legs were numb. The test determined how far a person could continue once the point of exhaustion was reached—that extra “push,” as Jerrie describes it. She found it, deep within herself, knowing the Mercury men had beaten this bike.
Toward the end of the week they took Jerrie out of the clinic and put her on a government plane for a quick flight up into the mountains to Los Alamos, a destination shrouded in slightly sinister secrecy, home of the United States nuclear research effort. Her papers were checked, and then she was led into a fenced-off laboratory that housed a “total body counter,” one of just two or three in the United States at the time. The test would calculate her radiation count, then determine the amount of potassium in her body: that told the doctors how much of her was muscle in relation to fat and total weight. She was led through a series of basement hallways to a room containing a machine that reminded her of an iron lung—a big tank with a tube protruding from one end. She was sent to an adjoining room to scrub (removing “the top layer of skin, if possible”), then dressed in big white pajamas and helped up on to a long tray that was then slid
into the tube—like a cookie tray into an oven, except with so little room she had to fold her arms over her chest. Before the door was closed, sealing her in the dark, she was handed the “chicken switch,” a button to push should claustrophobia set in before the count was done and she needed to be pulled out. Jerrie decided she wasn’t going to use it. (Anyone who hit the switch, of course, would immediately be out of the running for astronaut training: the space capsules were certain to be small, tight and dark.) The count showed Jerries body mass to be much more muscle than the average female: the trips around and around the vacant lot had paid off.
On Saturday morning, at the end of a week of tests, Jerrie had one more appointment, this one with Dr. Robert Secrest, a flight surgeon who supervised the medical examination. That meeting, she says, made her more nervous than any of the tests.
Secrest greeted her with a smile. “Let me sum this up quickly, Miss Cobb. You’re a remarkable physical specimen. I wish there were more women like you ...” Here he stopped and looked down at papers on his desk, and Jerrie could hear her heart pounding in her ears.
“You’ve passed the Mercury astronaut tests, Miss Cobb. And we’ve gained valuable firsthand information on a woman’s performance in the tests. Thank you.”
So she’d passed. What did that mean?
Dr. Albert Schwichtenberg, the head of the aerospace department, had written an assessment. “She is a very highly motivated, intelligent and stable adult female who created a very good impression throughout the clinic.” Jerrie had had astonishingly few accidents or ailments in her life, he added. Jerrie says she was later told that she tested in the top 2 percent of all the people, men and women, who took the exam.
“It is considered that from all information available and tests done here that she would qualify for special missions,” Schwichtenberg concluded. “It is recommended that she proceed
on to the aeromedical laboratory for stress tests followed by a final evaluation based upon all available test information.”
Dr. Lovelace, it seemed, did not intend to stop with the medical screening. Jerries performance thus far had fueled his curiosity about how women would perform in the stress of space: now he envisioned this process in three stages, just like those through which the Mercury 7 were selected. He wanted to test additional women—and he had plenty more in store for Jerrie.
Next Lovelace arranged for her to “fly” the Multi-Axis Spin Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF), built for NASA and housed at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. It was a huge gyroscope, the size of a two-story house, with three separate steel frames nested one inside another so that each could spin independently. It was designed to test a pilots ability to control roll, pitch and yaw, the three axes on which a plane or spacecraft turns. Yaw is side to side, like a car fishtailing. Pitch is up and down (as in extreme turbulence) and roll is the horizontal wallow. A pilot sometimes fights against one or maybe two, and the ability to gently stabilize a plane is the sign of a gifted flier. Spinning in space, a capsule could oscillate on all three axes, and the pilot would have to fire rocket thrusters burning hydrogen to still the spinning.
Jerrie reported to the lab that housed the monster, christened the Vomit Comet by the Mercury 7 (Alan Shepard, they say, hit the chicken switch on his first flight). She was outfitted in an orange flight suit and a helmet. She climbed up into a rig about the same size as the Mercury capsule and slid on the contoured seat, facing an instrument panel. NASA technicians strapped her to the seat with a chest harness, then tied down her legs, waist and helmet. She put one hand on the control, and the men fired up the MASTIF. The machine began to move, faster and faster, until it was spinning on all three axes at once, thirty revolutions a minute.
“First the thing started to pitch, and if I hadn’t been fastened in, I would have been tossed right off the couch,” Jerrie recalled. “Then as the pitch reached peak speed, I felt the roll start. I was
twisting, twisting like a toy, and going head-over-heels at the same time.” When yaw set in, all she could see was a “dizzying blur. ” Her stomach churned, as if she were on a combination of a dozen of the amusement park rides she avoided.
She forced her eyes to focus on the instruments. Using her hand control, Jerrie had to guide the capsule out of each spin— but if she pushed too far or too fast, or didn’t push enough, the spinning became wilder. One by one, she stopped the gyrations, until suddenly the machine was tamed. “Want to try some more?” the technicians asked over her headset. “Why not?” she replied, waiting for her stomach to climb back up from her feet.
She rode it for forty-five minutes. At the end, the MASTIF handlers told her, “Your response was exceptionally quick. And don’t worry—the space capsule won’t be nearly as bad as the ride you just took.”
And then she went back to work, determined to start earning her keep again for Aero. Tom Harris wanted her to go show off (and sell) the Commander in Africa, where it would be popular for its ability to take off on short runways and survive with little service. She flew 13,170 miles that summer, from Oklahoma to Brazil, then across the ocean to Liberia, South Africa, Kenya and Zanzibar. It was her favorite kind of flying—a chance to show off her plane, and even better, endless hours alone over the seas and the vast African plains.
Lovelace, on the other hand, had a very public plan for that summer. He decided to reveal the results of Jerries tests at the Space and Naval Medicine Congress, an international convention of aerospace scientists held in Stockholm in August. He gave a cautious presentation. In tests done under his own auspices, he said, he had found that the preliminary results for one female candidate showed she would hold up well in space. And, he explained, there was reason to consider using women: his female subject had used less oxygen per minute than the men tested, so less oxygen would have to be carried for female crew members.
She tolerated heat as well as men, and pain better. Her reproductive organs were internal, obviously, and so that lowered her risks from radiation. “We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague. ” He told the audience that the tests to date were purely research, but that they would continue.
It is unlikely that Lovelace made Jerries results public without first talking to the Space Task Group at NASA. With Jerrie, he was already using terms such as “woman-in-space program,” and describing a broad testing process. She believed he was talking to NASA about the formal inclusion of women in the Mercury program. But he was cautious in Stockholm. He might have been at odds with his colleagues on the Life Sciences Committee about his thoughts on women in space. Perhaps, in going public, he was playing politics. “Nobody else was doing it, except maybe the Russians,” says the clinics Donald Kilgore. “He wanted to be on the record about there being something special about female candidates.”
WTatever his reasons, Lovelace gave an understated presentation. Jerrie wondered if there would be any reaction at all. There was a polite reception from the other conference goers, and a bland little item went out on the Associated Press news wire. Written from the conference press release, it said a scientist had tested one female pilot and found she might hold up in space. It wasn’t press-stopping material.
But in 1960, the words “female astronaut” had an irresistible allure. The story was picked up by newspapers all over the world. Randy Lovelace was a name instantly associated with the astronaut program, and look at what he had said—that women weren’t just as good as men in space; in some ways, they were better! “Woman Qualifies for Space Training,” The Washington Post reported on August 19.
Lovelace had sworn Jerrie to secrecy until he made this speech. And she had told only her boss at Aero about the tests. But
somehow Life magazine had caught wind of her trip to Albuquerque. The magazine had signed a controversial deal with the Mercury 7 in August 1959 for $500,000 split among them, giving Life exclusive access to their stories. The astronauts, who earned only a comparatively paltry military salary, were relieved to have the money—and to have a reason to avoid the media mob, whose interest hadn’t abated much since the men were first introduced. But the result of the deal was that scarcely a single issue of the magazine came out between 1959 and 1962 that didn’t include at least a page or two of pictures and a few lines on how John Glenn kept fit or the Schirra family spent their weekends. Life was very big on astronauts.
And now the magazine wanted the scoop on Jerrie. The editors told Lovelace they would hold off making known that he was testing women—or at least, a woman—if they could have an exclusive on her, too. She agreed, she says, because she knew that any publicity about the tests done without the doctor’s approval would be sensational. This was deadly serious for her, and she didn’t want it to look like some silly stunt.
As part of that deal, she had to be “unavailable” if anybody picked up the news of Lovelace’s speech in Stockholm, until Life had introduced her at a press conference. So she was in Manhattan the night of the Stockholm news release, staying with a friend. The story went out on the AP wire at 6:00 p.m. EST, and in the dead of night the phone began to ring. And ring. Somehow, reporters had tracked her down there. The friend kept telling callers that she didn’t know where Jerrie was (“driving back to Oklahoma, I think”) while Jerrie, clad in her bathrobe, stood and listened with disbelief and growing apprehension. The phone was ringing at her parents’ house in Ponca City, too, and the next day her office got hundreds of calls, from as far away as Japan and Australia. Jerrie couldn’t believe the intensity of the press interest: she was about to take her first steps into the spotlight, and the glare would become ferociously bright in the year to come.
Bound by the pledge to Life, Jerrie spent three days hiding while the team at Aero fought off increasingly hostile reporters. A British reporter threatened to write that the Russians had kidnapped Jerrie unless Aero produced her. The media wanted this story: space was big news. And this wasn’t a complicated story about rocket boosters or communications satellites. This was about an astronaut, and America loved astronauts. This was about a twenty-eight-year-old female astronaut, a pretty astronaut, and that made for juicy headlines. In truth, all Jerrie had done was some tests, and she had done them for Lovelace, not NASA— but to the media, that didn’t matter. Lovelace’s post as head of a key NASA committee was enough to make her an astronaut.
Finally, on August 21, Life was on the newsstands—complete with pictures, shot earlier in the summer, of Jerrie tilting on tables and puffing on bicycles. Now other reporters got to meet their female astronaut. For Jerrie, as shy at twenty-eight as she was at six, this was an ordeal more painful than anything at the Lovelace Clinic. She stood trembling outside the meeting room, listening to the bustle as the television and radio crews set up inside, and she thought, I can’t. “Its not space that scares me. It’s the lack of it.”
The interviews went okay, at first. ‘Aren’t you afraid of space- flight, a total unknown?” She answered frankly that no, she wasn’t. “Aren’t you afraid of anything?” a reporter asked.
She thought fast. “Grasshoppers,” she replied. In truth, bugs didn’t bother her, but the reporters were satisfied.
Jerrie answered all the reporters’ questions about why women were suited for space, in her grave low voice. But that was dry stuff—and so the personal questions started, questions she didn’t expect. Was she married? Could she cook? Well, what did she cook? Chickasaw Indian dishes, she said. She liked to bake yonkapins. That stumped them. “It’s a water lily root growing in the mud bottoms of lakes and ponds. Best way to pick them is with bare toes,” she said. “They taste kind of like sweet potatoes.”
jerrie the space woman was a headline writers dream. “Moon Maids Ready!” said one. “Astronette!” said another, and “Woman Astronaut Down to Earth about Space Flight.” The fact that she had long blond hair made the first paragraph of every story. Time helpfully put her measurements in the second: “The First astronautrix (measurements: 36—27—34) eats hamburgers for breakfast, is an old hand at airplanes, with more air time—over 7,300 hours—than any of the male astronauts.” A wisecracking male reporter asked if she would object to sharing a space capsule with a male astronaut; she said no, and that made plenty of headlines too. “ ‘Spacewoman Would Let Man Come Along on Trip,” trumpeted The Sun in Baltimore.
When it was over, she flew home to Oklahoma, hoping to relax with her parents. Instead she arrived to celebrity status. Governor Howard Edmondson and just about every other dignitary in the state were there to meet her at the airport; she was given a sash proclaiming her Oklahoma’s “Ambassador to the Moon” and armloads of flowers. When she got into the office at Aero, there were stacks of letters and telegrams from well-wishers all over the world. She tried to plow through them, sending an earnest thank-you to each. But to a flood of endorsement offers and pitches for billboards, magazine and television commercials— that would sell mattresses and cigarettes, among other things— she sent a resounding no. This was serious business for her.
In late September, NASA sent out a sign that it wasn’t pleased with the flurry of publicity Jerrie had earned: a short story moved on the United Press International wire. “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says it never had a plan to put a woman in space, it doesn’t have one today and it doesn’t expect to have one in the foreseeable future,” the story ran. “Any story that you may have read or heard to the effect that NASA is selecting and training girl astronauts just isn’t true, a spokesman said.” The article noted that there had been a couple of “girl astronaut” reports in recent years (apparently a reference also
to the Betty Skelton Look cover). “In each case, NASA officials quietly denied the story, sometimes at first with a trace of irritation. ‘Now we must shrug them off,’ a spokesman said. . . . A national magazine called [Cobb] the first U.S. lady astronaut. It said she might ride a rocket into space in late 1962. If she does, it won’t be a NASA rocket, and NASA is the only U.S. agency that has scheduled any rocket riding in the next few years.”
But Jerrie didn’t see the article, and if Dr. Lovelace saw it, she says, he didn’t tell her. She had a great many other things on her mind: in September another summons from Dr. Lovelace arrived. He wanted to duplicate the stress tests the astronauts had done at Wright-Patterson, and he wanted to know everything there was to know about Jerries brain. The psychologists working on the space project were focused on the effects of isolation. They knew that people deprived of stimulation, communication and movement were prone to greater suggestibility, depression, loss of organized thinking, possibly delusions or hallucinations. Weightlessness might further add to the disorientation. A space voyage would be isolation on a scale humans had never before experienced. An astronaut who cracked in space might panic— start pushing the buttons, vent all the oxygen, fire the rockets too soon, spin off into the abyss. With that kind of stress, the doctors said, an astronaut would have to be an excellent psychological as well as physical specimen.
Phase II, the psychological testing, was close to home. For a week, Jerrie took afternoons off, and reported to Dr. Jay Shurley behind the heavy, locked doors of the psychiatric wing of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City. Shurley and his team gave her ink blots to stare at and sentences to complete, then asked her to talk aloud for five minutes about a personal experience. (Jerrie fumbled and hesitated, awkward as always when called upon to speak about herself.) They took electroencephalograms of her brain when she was awake, and
then lulled her to sleep and took more. There were pages and pages of intelligence tests and personality quizzes.
And at the end of the week, they told her she was deemed sufficiently psychologically healthy to go on to an “isolation run.” The Mercury astronauts were tested for three hours in an empty room, but the military facilities where the men were examined did not have the test that Shurley pioneered in his studies of patients and research subjects. The psychologist had concluded that the best way to mimic the experience of being alone in space would be to suspend the subject in water (which would be the nearest thing possible to weightlessness) and remove all other sensory stimulation. The water was calculated to the exact temperature of the subject’s body, and the tank had thick walls that blocked out all sound, vibration and smell. Many subjects who held up to all the physical tests would crumble on this one: with hours alone, they would hallucinate, lose touch with reality or be insupportably uncomfortable without stimulation.
Jerrie arrived that Saturday morning feeling a certain trepidation: she had read about this test, and she knew it could produce unexpected, surprising and often quite embarrassing results for the people who took it. She had spent plenty of time alone— she preferred it—and she had faith in her sound mind, but she wondered what kind of secrets it might reveal in Shurley s big steel tank. But she put on her bathing suit, let the doctors wire on their sensors and climbed in. “If my confidence was unfounded, if the results were dire, better to find out now than someday in the isolation of outer space.”
They put an inflated rubber collar under her head and another piece of rubber around her waist to keep her face above the water. They told her to talk whenever she liked—no one would answer, but it would all be recorded. Microphones would pick up her every breath, in fact. And she was simply to tell them when she wanted to come out. Then they closed the eight-inch-thick doors, and she was alone in the pitch-black and the silence.
Her mind wandered. Is this what it was like to be blind? How was she going to get all that mail at the office answered? She began to wonder if she was falling asleep, if she’d already been asleep. If she had snored into the microphone. She grew accustomed to the tank and the peaceful feeling. Every so often she reported in that she was fine. She thought about flying, about what it would be like to fly in space, and she let her mind drift. Finally, she told them she would get out. Shurley’s voice came over the speaker: why did she want out now?
“I don’t have any particular reasons for coming out or staying in, I’m so used to it in here—I don’t know,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t think my feelings are going to change by staying in here any longer, so I don’t see any need in doing so—but I’m perfectly happy and willing to and I just feel calm and relaxed.”
Shurley greeted her outside the tank. “What time do you think it is?” She guessed two o’clock, but it was seven in the evening— she had been in the tank for nine hours and forty minutes.
The doctor told Jerrie she “excelled in loneliness.” She later added that it came as little surprise since she had been practicing all her life. None of Shurley’s previous female subjects had lasted more than six hours, and no men, more than six and a half. “Probably not one in 1,000 persons would be capable of making such a lengthy isolation run,” he wrote later. “We have had extraordinary people as subjects. Among them she still stands out. . . . She would be in the top 1 per cent or 2 per cent to adapt,” he added, noting that she had not even gone to the limit of her endurance. All in all, the Phase II assessment Shurley gave Jerrie was as glowing as that from the first phase:
It is our opinion that Miss Jerrie Cobb not only possesses no significant liabilities, but also possesses several exceptional, if not unique, qualities and capabilities for serving on special missions in astronautics, viewed from the standpoint of her personality makeup and
functioning. Among these are: a ready acceptance of direction or a ready assumption of responsibility, as circumstances dictate. An exceptional ability to remain passive and relaxed when action is unavailable or unwise.
An unusually smooth integration of psychophysiological functioning, a stable ego, and a strong, healthy motivation. Her pleasant personality would lend itself as well to nonsolitary missions. I believe she has very much to recommend her for selection as an astronaut candidate.
That same week, just to round things out, Jerrie set another world record: in altitude this time, taking a stripped-down Commander 680F up to 37,010 feet, wired to an oxygen mask and wearing a set of military-issue arctic long underwear under four layers of clothes. To practice, she took test runs in an altitude pressure chamber that shot up to the equivalent of forty thousand feet. Then the technicians took away her oxygen mask and had her write her name repeatedly, the test for anoxia. Jerrie says she more than tripled the time it normally took for a pilot to get drowsy and confused.
That winter she set out on the “chicken and peas” circuit, much in demand as a public speaker. She didn’t like it much, she says, but she made the speeches, figuring all of it was good for the space program, and maybe even good for women in the space program.
Lovelace, meanwhile, had surveyed the thick file of her results with satisfaction. Jerrie had proved him right: she had phenomenal endurance, she had lightning-quick reactions and she had set a record in isolation. Her scores were so good that members of his team were quietly asking if she was not, perhaps, an aberration. Maybe he had some sort of superwoman on his hands.
Jerrie was clearly an extraordinary pilot—her world records attested to that. But Lovelace was eager to get his instruments on other women: maybe it wasn’t just Jerrie. Maybe all women had
her tolerance of pain, her ability to resist the delusions induced by isolation. And if they did, the scientist in Lovelace, who knew all about the struggles in the Mercury design lab, saw immediate possibilities. That capsule, already too heavy for the rocket— imagine if it had a hundred pounds less of astronaut in it.
He went back to the list that he and Flickinger had first compiled with Jerrie, and the one with the names of the dozen women from their search of the 99s records. (Among them was Betty Skelton, who had graced the Look cover in the silver space suit.) He double-checked the Federal Aviation Authority ratings and narrowed the list to fourteen names.
His first batch of queries went out in September, brief but official letters on clinic letterhead sent to fourteen female pilots. “Will you volunteer for the initial examinations for woman astronaut candidates? The examinations will take one week and are done on a purely voluntary basis. They do not commit you to any further part in the Women in Space Program unless you so desire. . . . We should like to hear from you if you are interested.” He enclosed a detailed questionnaire, and his qualifications were stringent—he wanted at least fifteen hundred hours of flying time, perfect health, age under forty, a commercial rating and experience in pressurized flight. Seven of the women he initially contacted did not make this first cut.
Right about then, Randy Lovelace had a fateful conversation: he told his friend Jackie Cochran about his women-in-space program.
Jackie, by then, was the most famous female pilot in the world. She had kept right on flying at the end of the war. She bought a surplus P-51 Mustang and flew it ninety thousand miles a year on business for her cosmetics company. She went back to racing, coming second in the 1947 Bendix. She set more world records. She spent a year on a public relations campaign with Gen. Hap Arnold to have the air force recognized as a separate branch of the armed forces. She was voted the national
Business Woman of the Year in 1952, and again the next year, by the Associated Press.
But she felt the jet age was passing her by, and Floyd watched her get increasingly wistful. He bought her a surplus Canadair F-86, and then Jackie lobbied everyone she knew in the air force and the government to let her friend Chuck Yeager teach her how to fly it. Yeager started her in a T-33 jet trainer, and then moved her up to the F-86. They began with short courses and dives. Finally, on a hot, clear morning in May 1953, Jackie dove the F-86 through the sound barrier above Edwards Air Force Base in California, the first woman in the world to fly past Mach 1.
“You’re part of the plane on a flight like that,” Jackie wrote later. “Attached to it in ten different ways, strapped into your seat, to your parachute, to the oxygen system, to your radio for listening, talking, reading the Mach meter aloud.” Yeager’s voice on the radio asked what she was feeling as she put the jet into a steep dive and the Mach meter climbed. “Shock waves look like rain,” she told him, as the plane shook and blood rushed into her head and her body ached. Later, she added that she had wanted to say it was “like flying inside an explosion” but she couldn’t find the words.
Jackie and Yeager received the Harmon trophies that year from the president, her friend Dwight Eisenhower. She had set eight world records in 1953, but the sound barrier was the one that mattered. “The greatest thrill of my life,” she called it.
After that, Canadair, Northrop and Lockheed all hired Jackie to test fly their prototype jets. In 1956 she decided to run for Congress as a Republican from Indio, California. She flew herself around the district, trying to meet everyone, but she wasn’t a natural politician. Folks in her district didn’t know what to make of a woman as driven as Jackie, one who lectured far more than she listened and jabbed her elbows into the ribs of people standing near her to make a point. At a rally, a teetotaler asked her if she drank (and she did, prodigiously). “Well, sir,” she replied.
“Yes, I drink, but just two years ago I flew an airplane faster than the speed of sound, so I guess I don’t drink too much.” She campaigned hard for nine months, but lost by fifteen hundred votes. It was a rare defeat, and she took it hard.
But it didn’t slow her for long. Eisenhower sent her to South Korea, heading a mission to bring food and supplies to the American partner against Communism. But when, over tea, the South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, began to criticize the United States, Jackie called him a “nasty-minded, dirty old man” and said she was leaving before she gave him “a knock right on the nose.” In 1958, and again the next year, she was elected president of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), and she was the first woman to hold the post. She traveled into the Soviet Union for the FAI’s annual convention and while there, she used several unorthodox methods, including demanding pee breaks by the side of the road near military bases, to spy on Russian air power. She debriefed Eisenhower and his advisers on her return.
Jackie was by then a powerful woman—in business and politics, and in particular in aviation. In 1953 she published her autobiography, Stars at Noon. The list of people she drew up who were to receive an autographed copy reads like the Who's Who. Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Cartier in Geneva, Gen. James Doolittle in New York, Mr. Howard Hughes in Eos Angeles, the Hon. and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson in Washington, plus a dozen generals and ambassadors. By then Jackie believed, with some justification, that she belonged at the center of every new development for women in aviation. And that included any moves toward putting women into space.
Jackie and Randy Lovelace, of course, were old friends. Their friendship had been cemented in 1940, when Jackie had made sure her choice (Lovelace and two of his colleagues) won the Collier Trophy. She had not only demonstrated to Lovelace the extent of her Washington muscle, but also won his loyalty.
When he established a foundation to support his clinic and research, he asked Floyd Odium to chair the board, and Floyd gave the clinic millions over the years. Jackies husband was by now a central figure in the aviation industry—his interest was fueled by Jackie’s convictions about how air transport would grow and by her fascination with high-performance aircraft. And the three of them shared a keen interest in the newest technologies. By the mid-1940s, Lovelace was Jackie and Floyd’s personal physician: he managed the care of Floyd’s crippling arthritis and Jackie’s often precarious health. The doctor named his youngest daughter Jacqueline, and Jackie showered her goddaughter and Lovelace’s other two surviving children with presents and pampered them on visits to the ranch. She and Lovelace’s wife, Mary, were also extremely close; Mary was one of the few female friends Jackie had. Don Kilgore, who later treated Jackie for almost fifteen years, says, “She had an unstinting admiration for Randy and for Floyd Odium—those were the two most important people in her life.”
Some time in the autumn of 1960, Randy told Jackie that he was testing women for space. Jackie, as she was wont to do, later said the whole thing was her idea from the start—and she repeated this idea so loudly and so often that to this day many people involved still believe it. “I had every intention of following my high performance aircraft adventures with a trip into space,” she wrote in her autobiography. “So I got myself teamed up with my good friend Randy Lovelace, M.D., working at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to test women for astronaut abilities.” In truth, the documentary record shows that Flickinger and Lovelace had been at work on this project for at least a year before Jackie got involved. They met Jerrie in September 1959, and she started the tests more than six months before Jackie ever knew of it. But Jackie was to spend the next three years making sure that this venture became hers.
She wanted, of course, to be the woman who went into space herself. But Jackie was in her late fifties by 1960, and her health
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was poor—she was frequently troubled by abdominal pains, the result of a botched surgery for appendicitis as a child, and she had aches in her legs from blocked arteries. She later said on some occasions that she took the tests and on others that she didn’t: “I did not try to become one of the candidates, partly because my age barred me under the ground rules laid down by Dr. Lovelace but mostly because I was consulting with respect to what Dr. Lovelace was doing and did not consider it proper under the circumstances to become a candidate and therefore in a sense a competitor with the others.” She might have taken at least some of the tests. In a letter to Lovelace in late December 1960 she discusses a schedule (“I’ll take that bicycle test Monday”), but on that visit Randy likely gently delivered the news that she was too old, and she was not going to pass.
Jackie Cochran was not accustomed to being told she could not do something. If she couldn’t be part of this program, then she was going to run it. She told Lovelace that she would help him find his female pilots, and furthermore that she and Floyd would pay all the expenses of the candidates. She was used to leading things, and she assumed (not without reason, given her experience with the WASP) that if Randy was getting her involved, it was so that she would run the operation. In November 1960, she wrote to him as his “special consultant” about his “women in space program . . . still in its formative stages” (although in fact it was well under way). Jackie, of course, had suggestions. Lots of suggestions. For one thing, Lovelace should broaden his search pool. “Some of the remainder [of the initial candidates] will not pass the physical tests and still others, for one reason or another, will drop out. The consequence is likely to be that the group carried on into succeeding phases will be too small to reach adequate conclusions as to women as astronauts’, per se or compared with men. ...” And in this letter, Jackie gave the first hint of what would be a vicious enmity toward Jerrie Cobb. Her comments made it clear that she didn’t
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like one bit the kind of attention Jerrie was getting as the first “astronaut candidate.” Emphasizing that she sought to avoid the criticism that would accompany an appearance of favoritism, Jackie wrote, “there should be care taken to see that no one gets what might be considered priorities or publicity breaks.” A month later, she wrote to Randy to say she was on her way to take the tests herself and returned to this subject. “As you know I think it important to have a group operation with each participant individually anonymous until the whole group can be talked about without priorities or precedence.” Jackie was reading the coverage of Jerries testing closely: “What is the ‘isolation chamber’ that Jerry [sic] Cobb talks about?” she asked Lovelace. “Has she been advanced to Wright Field or was this one of the routines of the medical tests which took place at Los Alamos?”
Once she knew she stood no chance of being the first female astronaut herself, Jackie began maneuvering to put a rival lead candidate in place of Jerrie. She knew a pair of pilots in California, identical twins named Jan and Marion Dietrich. Marion was a hobby pilot, but Jan had eight thousand hours of flying time—more than Jerrie. Jackie wrote a bossy letter to the clinic asking why Marion had been invited for testing when Jan had more hours. “On September 14, 1960, letters were sent out to the women suggested by Miss Cobb,” replied Lovelace’s long- suffering secretary, Jeanne Williams. “At that time a letter was sent out to Miss Marion Dietrich and since Miss Jan Dietrich had telephoned us and already had the information required, we did not write her a letter as it would have been repetitious. Their applications are both being considered and Doctor Lovelace was quite interested when he realized that they were twins and they will be given the utmost consideration.” In January, Jackie made a first donation of five hundred dollars to the clinic to cover the cost of astronaut testing. And she brought Jan out to stay at the ranch with her and Floyd for a few days, and then flew her to Albuquerque in her Lodestar.
Lovelace was used to dealing with his domineering friend. “Dear Jackie,” he wrote to her on January 31, 1961. “Several of us here have gone over your letter about broadening the test program for the potential woman in space pilots. We would like very much to have the names of some additional girls that we could contact. We are enclosing a list of the girls that have met the preliminary requirements and will be going through the Clinic beginning within the next 2!4 months.”
There were fourteen names on his list; Jackie supplied eleven more. Nineteen of the women took the gamble and turned up at the clinic for the tests, and twelve, plus Jerrie, emerged as candidates for the final phase of the women-in-space program.