Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  * * *

  Just in time for Christmas, Jerrie got the letter she’d been waiting for. The Lovelace Clinic had looked into her professional and medical backgrounds and determined that she was fit for testing. The last thing she needed was Tom Harris’s approval. She’d need to take a leave of absence from Aero for the tests, and if she passed, she thought she might be away even longer for more tests. It was up to Tom whether she could take time off from her job or if she would have to leave the company. Either way, she would be taking the astronaut medical tests.

  Somewhat apprehensively, she walked into Tom’s office.

  “What’s cooking this morning?” he asked. “Still thinking of flying to the Moon?”

  “Yes,” she answered, then told him about the letter.

  “How much does trying to qualify for the space program mean to you? Have you thought how you’d feel if you failed, or if nothing came of this?” Jerrie knew he wasn’t trying to dissuade her, he was being realistic. She had thought about it; she’d thought of little else while waiting for the Lovelace Clinic’s verdict on her candidacy. The idea of flying in space had gripped her so completely that even the faintest possibility of these tests leading to a mission meant she couldn’t not try. Even if she made only the smallest contribution, it would still be worthwhile. This wasn’t some girlish lark, she told him, and Tom knew it. “All right, Jerrie, all right.”

  With Tom’s blessing to arrange her work schedule around her Lovelace Clinic testing, Jerrie began a strict, self-administered fitness regime. She got a stationary bicycle and pedaled every night. Her diet consisted of steak, chops, and other lean meats with a side of fresh fruit and vegetables. As her endurance improved, she started running every morning before work, sweating so much that her hair would be wet and stringy when she arrived at the office. Bewildered coworkers questioned whether she was swimming in the middle of winter, and her hairdresser shuddered over her ratty ponytail, fixing it up only to see it completely destroyed by their next appointment. Jerrie didn’t care.

  The February 2 edition of Look magazine hit newsstands with Betty Skelton on the cover dressed in a silver spacesuit and standing next to a Mercury capsule against a blue sky. The tantalizing headline asked, “Should a girl be first in space?” The article featured images of Betty on a tilt table, Betty sitting in the cockpit of a jet talking to astronaut Wally Schirra, Betty laughing over a coin toss with six of the seven Mercury astronauts. The photos suggested she was training alongside her male counterparts, but the accompanying text was far from a scientific look at the relative merits of putting a man or woman into space. Though Betty was a pilot, the article told readers, she had only been invited to look at the spaceflight from a woman’s perspective at Look’s invitation. For the moment, “there is no announced program to put women into space.”

  America didn’t know that Jerrie was hoping to change that.

  Chapter 16

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sunday, February 14, 1960

  Jerrie checked in to the Bird of Paradise Motel on Sunday night and found it left much to be desired. The room was the very definition of spartan. The staff only changed the sheets on Wednesdays, so she would be sleeping on the previous guest’s—or guests’—dirty linens for the next three nights. There were certainly nicer options for lodging in Albuquerque, but what the functional roadside motel lacked in charm and cleanliness it made up for in location: it sat right across the street from the Lovelace Clinic. Jerrie looked out the window at the distant mountains on the fringes of the city, tinged purple from the haze. Her mind wandered to what those mountains would look like from space, wondering if she’d be the first woman to see them from that orbital vantage point.

  The phone rang, pulling her from her reverie.

  “Miss Cobb, this is Dr. Secrest. How do you feel?”

  “Never better,” she assured him.

  In a quick conversation, Dr. Robert Secrest confirmed their meeting in the morning, then told her to abstain from eating, drinking, or smoking until she was given permission to do so the following day. He urged her to get a good night’s rest and hung up. Abstaining from cigarettes was easy for a nonsmoker, but her stomach was growling. She’d hoped to catch up with Randy Lovelace that night over a hot meal since he was the only person she knew in Albuquerque, but he was out of town. Feeling suddenly very alone, Jerrie reminded herself there were no restaurants in space and went to bed.

  The next morning, Jerrie skipped breakfast as per her instructions and presented herself to Vivian at the front desk of the Lassetter Laboratory Building promptly at eight o’clock. She felt a heavy weight on her shoulders. She daydreamed that her performance over the next five days would determine her eligibility for further testing. Lost in thoughts of what it would mean to open space for her sex, she imagined how it would feel if her success triggered the start of a real women’s astronaut program. Knowing every pilot tested at the clinic was given a number to protect their anonymity, Jerrie privately gave herself the only number she thought was appropriate: unit one, female.

  “Good luck,” Vivian said as she handed Jerrie a schedule, “and I mean it.”

  No one could say for sure what would happen to a human body in space, what kind of havoc weightlessness would wreak on the body’s vestibular and digestive systems, or whether muscle loss would render astronauts immobile. It might be impossible to swallow without gravity, or eyeballs might distort so badly astronauts wouldn’t be able to see. To give the first space voyagers the best chance of surviving whatever damage the mission brought, NASA figured it should send up the most physically fit individuals. It had tasked Randy with developing the medical tests to help find those individuals. Now Jerrie was willingly submitting to the same tests.

  Doctors at the Lovelace Clinic began with a series of lab tests to get a baseline on Jerrie’s vitals. This was the easy part, drawing blood for a complete blood count, blood smear, blood sugar test, nonprotein nitrogen test, serology, sedimentation rate, cholesterol test, Rhesus factor test, and a urine sample for a complete urinalysis. Then the demanding work began.

  For five days, Jerrie was poked and prodded by a rotating cast of doctors.

  She blew into a tube to see how high she could raise a metal disk while doctors listened to the changing pressures in her heart chambers, checking for any otherwise undetectable murmurs. Strapped to a slablike board with a footrest, she was wired for an electrocardiogram and had a blood pressure cuff fixed around her arm before the table tilted from supine to nearly upright and back again; this was a sneaky way of checking for circulation and cardiovascular issues that could make an astronaut black out in orbit. Ear, nose, and throat specialists tested everything from her hearing to how clear her speech was over a radio. Ophthalmologists shone a bright light in her eyes, plunged her into darkness, then measured how long it took her eyes to adjust enough to see a horseshoe shape on the wall. Dr. Kilgore seated her in a chair with her head tilted all the way back and injected supercooled water into her ear to freeze her inner ear bone and induce nystagmus; the light on the ceiling began to spin and her hand fell off the armrest as vertigo set in. A nurse timed how long it took for her to regain her equilibrium. One test had her fly to Los Alamos for a human radioactivity counter to measure total body radiation. Stool samples were collected. Everything that could be x-rayed was x-rayed. Across the board, the physical tests were the same as those the Mercury astronauts had done except that in the place of a semen sample for motility testing, Jerrie was given a full gynecological exam.

  On Friday, her final day of tests, Jerrie was led into a brightly lit room in the physiology department. In the center of the room sat a stationary bicycle. It was covered in wires that led to a bank of instruments and had a big green plastic bag attached to the front end.

  “Miss Cobb, this test is to see how your body reacts to hard physical work,” the attending physician, Dr. Luft, said. “When we tell you to start, Miss Cobb, keep time with the metronome. Just keep pedaling to it
s beat until I tell you to stop.”

  It seemed simple enough. Jerrie hopped up on the seat, and almost as soon as she sat down, the technicians descended. They wrapped another blood pressure cuff around her arm, put sensors on her head and torso, closed a clamp over her nose, and fitted an oxygen tube in her mouth that connected to the green bag. Wired and ready, she nodded as best she could, and on Dr. Luft’s signal started to pedal.

  Jerrie dimly registered the sensation of resistance being added to her back wheel, but she remained focused on the metronome. The resistance kept increasing, she kept pedaling, and soon, her heart rate rose to 180 beats per minute. Vaguely aware of the doctors talking off to the side, Jerrie tried to blink the sweat dripping down her face out of her eyes. Her eyes burned, her legs burned, her lungs burned, but she kept going as Dr. Luft nodded his encouragement in her peripheral vision. Jerrie said a silent prayer as she bit down on the mouthpiece and willed her legs to keep pedaling. Then, finally, the metronome’s relentless ticking ceased.

  “All right, Jerrie, you can stop,” Dr. Luft said.

  The wall in front of her was blurry as Jerrie slumped over the handlebars. She had absolutely nothing left. One of the nurses dabbed the sweat off her forehead as her right foot slid to the floor.

  On Saturday morning, Jerrie followed the final instruction on her schedule and reported to Dr. Secrest’s office at nine o’clock. This was the appointment she had been most worried about, the meeting where she would find out how she’d done. With a mix of excitement and anxiety, Jerrie walked into his office to find the doctor smiling.

  “Let me sum this up quickly, Miss Cobb. You’re a remarkable physical specimen. I wish there were more women like you…” He paused to look over the papers on his desk before continuing. There were only two issues with her tests. Jerrie had some slight hearing loss in her left ear, which wasn’t unheard of for a pilot, and had poor circulation that led to a condition known as cold feet. But on the whole, he was satisfied. “We’ve gained valuable firsthand information on a woman’s performance. Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. Thank you very much.”

  Jerrie’s final instructions were to tell no one about her results. Randy wanted to present her data in a scientific paper at a medical conference. Until then, only the doctors at the clinic, Jerrie, and a handful of reporters from LIFE magazine who had an exclusive look at Jerrie’s testing could know what had happened that week in Albuquerque.

  Back in Oklahoma and her day job with Aero Design, Jerrie relished the feeling of holding on to a secret. She hoped that these medical tests would turn out to be the first steps on a path that would lead her to orbit.

  * * *

  LBJ’s supporters were desperate for the senator to declare his candidacy, but he refused to make a commitment. Watching the ongoing campaigning from afar, Lyndon felt nothing but disdain for Jack Kennedy, whom he regarded as little more than an inexperienced boy. Nonetheless, the majority leader refused to commit to running.

  He was still undeclared when thousands of people streamed into the Los Angeles Convention Center on the afternoon of July 13, among them the 1,520 delegates whose job it was to select the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. LBJ wasn’t there. He was at his home in Texas watching the proceedings on TV. He was watching when Minnesota governor Orville Freeman nominated John F. Kennedy. Then he watched House Speaker Sam Rayburn take the stage to nominate Lyndon Baines Johnson. “I have been a member of the Congress of the United States for nearly half a century. I have worked beside more than three thousand members of Congress from every nook and cranny of America. Every giant of the past half century I have known personally. I think I know a great leader when I see him. This is a man for all Americans.”

  The delegates, apparently, felt differently. JFK won on the first ballot, pulling nearly double the votes that LBJ brought in. Lyndon shut the TV off and spent the rest of the evening lounging around in his pajamas. Senate majority leader was a perfectly powerful position for a man with big political ambitions, he decided. He’d done a lot in this role, and he could continue to do more. But Jack Kennedy had other ideas.

  “The son of a bitch will do us a lot less harm as vice president than he will as majority leader,” was Jack’s refrain on LBJ that night. Jack was an Irish Catholic, liberal, and the darling of organized labor and civil rights organizations, which made him a lock in the north. But the south and southwest needed to find something equally likable about him if he wanted to turn voters away from Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, and he thought that something was Lyndon Johnson. Jack, the son of the wealthy Joseph P. Kennedy, could appeal to the upper classes while Lyndon’s poor roots made him an appealing candidate to the lower classes. While the Kennedy team wasn’t thrilled that Jack was eyeing Lyndon as his running mate, they all agreed it would be better to have a Kennedy in the White House with LBJ as vice president than a Nixon victory. So the Kennedy team reached out to the Johnson team, and everyone agreed Lyndon should accept the nomination if Jack made the offer.

  “Lyndon!” LBJ was shaken awake by Lady Bird the following morning, phone receiver in her hand. “It’s Senator Kennedy, and he wants to talk to you.”

  An hour later, Robert Kennedy and Lyndon sat in the Johnsons’ bedroom while the whole JFK team waited in LBJ’s suite. Bobby didn’t beat around the bush. In a ten-minute conversation, he told Lyndon that Jack wanted him to run as vice president. LBJ didn’t immediately accept, but he did advise that the most important issues should be organized labor, big-city bosses, and the needs of black voters.

  Around ten o’clock Jack Kennedy called and read to Lyndon over the phone the press release he had prepared, the one that listed Johnson as his running mate.

  “Do you really want me?” Lyndon asked.

  Jack assured him that he did, and that was it. Whatever the Kennedy team thought, they now had to deal with the gruff Texan if they wanted to win. For LBJ, it meant he could plan on campaigning as himself; he could be as liberal and progressive as he wanted in the north and northwest while still appealing to the southern constituents Jack needed him to carry. He would also be able to prove his detractors wrong; he could prove that he wasn’t just a provincial phenomenon, that he could appeal at a national level.

  In the days after the official announcement, congratulatory telegrams and letters poured in, but few meant as much to Lyndon as those from Floyd Odlum expressing his confidence in the senator’s vice presidential potential. Lyndon had long looked up to and admired Floyd, and facing the prospect of a new position in Washington he hoped he would continue to merit the confidence of his longtime friend.

  On August 18, as America geared up for another presidential election, half a world away in Stockholm, Sweden, Randy Lovelace presented his paper about the Mercury astronauts’ exams and the one woman who had taken the same medical tests to the delegates of the Space and Naval Medical Congress. He emphasized in his talk, and reiterated to the press, that there was no female astronaut training program as of yet and this was nothing more than a private medical program. But the words “woman” and “astronaut” in the same sentence were all anyone heard. Newswires stretching across continents and oceans started buzzing with the name Jerrie Cobb.

  Chapter 17

  New York City, Friday, August 19, 1960

  A little before four o’clock in the morning, a piercing ring cut through the relative quiet of Jerrie’s friend’s New York City apartment. From the guest room, Jerrie heard her host get up to answer.

  “Who? What? Say, do you know what time it is?” Jerrie’s friend’s grumpy voice said into the phone, then, after a pause, “Yes, she is a friend. Yes, she was here. No, she’s not here now.” Jerrie had an idea of who might be on the line. She knew Randy Lovelace had announced the results of her medical testing that day in Sweden and suspected a journalist was trying to track her down, but she was under strict orders not to speak to the press until the Time-Life press conference on Tuesday and so had to stay h
idden. After another pause, Jerrie heard her friend say, “No, I don’t know where she is. For all I know she could be driving back to Oklahoma.” Jerrie heard the receiver being placed back in its cradle then. She was pleased with her friend’s fast thinking; the two girls went back to bed.

  Within minutes, 1,400 miles away in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the phone rang in Harvey and Helena Cobb’s house. It was the same Associated Press reporter still in search of Jerrie.

  The next morning, the Associated Press’s three-paragraph story about Jerrie appeared in the New York Times under the headline “A Woman Passes Tests Given to 7 Astronauts.” The short piece, accompanied by an old publicity shot of Jerrie in a dress and pearls smiling as she turned back from the pilot’s seat to face the camera, gave little more than her name, age, and home state, but it was enough information for the press to start hunting her down in earnest. The phones in Aero Design’s Oklahoma offices and on the desks of the company’s representatives in New York started ringing in search of the elusive Miss Cobb. Coworkers lied, saying she was on a trip to South America, out of town vacationing with friends, or simply not in the office. In actuality, she had moved to a hotel for the weekend, waiting out the media storm feeling as though she had jumped to the top of the FBI’s most wanted list.