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Blobrana


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The Mercury 13 Women - A political and not very pretty tale of women in space

This year, one book in particular grabbed me. It made me happy, it made me angry, and it made we wonder how we as a society could justify tossing half our talent pool out of the worlds of technology and exploration for so long.
The book is Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, by Tanya Lee Stone (publisher: Candlewick Press, 2009).
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Blobrana


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More than 40 years ago, 13 young American women came close to venturing into space, but their dreams were dashed just days before they were to have started spaceflight simulation tests.
Now, officials of the University of Wisconsin, at Oshkosh, hope they can soothe the women's burning what-ifs by awarding each an honorary doctorate at graduation ceremonies on Saturday.

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Blobrana


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Author discusses 'Mercury 13' with students
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Swallowing three feet of rubber hose for stomach testing. Sticking 18 wires into the head for brain wave recording. Drinking a pint of radioactive water.
It was all part of a battery of 87 tests completed during the initial Mercury Astronaut Candidate examinations in the late 50s and early 60s. It's the same series of tests the famed Mercury 7 astronauts performed.
Thirteen women completed the tests in secret as part of a Women In Space Program that promised the ladies a chance to go into space – a first for the United States at that time. But the women never got their chance, as NASA pulled the plug on the project at a time men when ruled the space program.
The story of the "Mercury 13" – as the women were come to be called - is told in a book by Martha Ackmann, called "The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of 13 American Women and the Dream of Space Flight."

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Blobrana


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The Mercury 13
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Thirteen woman pilots who were part of a NASA research program in the early 1960s to determine if women could qualify as astronauts are finally getting recognised in a place where some of the testing took place.

An new exhibit extending recognition to the "Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees," the "FLATs," as they were officially known, has opened at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland.

In 1960, in an often forgotten chapter in America’s space history, NASA invited 25 female pilots to undergo the same physical and psychological evaluations endured by male pilots. But the women who passed the same tests as the Mercury 7 — nicknamed the Mercury 13 -- Jerrie Cobb, Bernice Steadman, Janey Hart, Jerri Truhill, Rhea Woltman, Sarah Ratley, Jan and Marion Dietrich, Myrtle Cagle, Irene Leverton, Gene Nora Jessen, Jean Hixson, and Wally Funk — were never officially declared astronaut candidates

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963. The United States did not send a woman into space until 20 years later, when astronaut Sally Ride flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983.

The FLATs will be honoured again this summer at the International Women’s Air and Space Museum at Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport.

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