Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Jerrie emerged on Monday to prepare for her first press conference, starting with an appointment at the Savoy-Hilton’s salon. Sitting in the stylist’s chair, she watched in the mirror as he considered her blond locks. After a moment, he proposed he style her with a French twist.

  “No…no twist. I usually wear it with just a little softness in the front and a ponytail in back.”

  “A ponee-tail!” the stylist replied, apparently offended. “Oh, madam…” He implored her to consider something a little more sophisticated, rattling off names of celebrities whose hair he’d styled, hoping to change her mind. “A simple chignon? Very chic?”

  “Ponytail,” she insisted.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “Ponee-tail.”

  Jerrie watched in the mirror as the stylist flitted around behind her, his eyes jumping to the mirror occasionally to check how it looked from the front. On one of these mirror checks, her hair half finished, he looked at her face more closely. “You know, I think I know you from someplace.” Jerrie smiled at him in the mirror but said nothing, privately entertained that this man now had the dubious honor of having styled a celebrity with a pedestrian ponee-tail.

  * * *

  The following morning, with clean hair and frazzled nerves, Jerrie arrived at the towering Time-Life Building in Manhattan. She walked through the lobby and took the elevator up to the eighth-floor auditorium, but as soon as she saw the doorway, she froze. Every muscle in her body tensed up, and her feet felt glued to the floor. She had sudden visions of ravenous reporters, angry that she’d been hiding all weekend, expecting her to rattle off perfect answers like a teletype. But the rational voice in her head urged her forward. They’ll only expect you to answer their questions. Gathering her courage, she forced herself inside.

  The room was filled with news teams setting up bright lights and adjusting wires to give their cameras and microphones a clear shot of the stage. Journalists milled around waiting, some chatting happily with one another, all oblivious that the woman of the hour had just entered their midst. The one welcome element Jerrie noticed in the room was the smell of coffee and doughnuts.

  Before she had a chance to relax, Jerrie was ushered onto the stage where she sat with a camera trained on her face in the first of a series of one-on-one interviews. Then came the free-for-all. She sat on stage alone as journalists fired questions at her from every corner, hazarding guesses as best she could without any real experience in space.

  “Miss Cobb, aren’t you afraid of spaceflight as an unknown, unexplored quantity?”

  “No, not really,” she answered.

  “Are you afraid of anything?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said without offering any details.

  “Specifically what?”

  “Grasshoppers.” The room laughed, but it was true. Grasshoppers were the one insect she could never really get used to.

  “What advantages would a woman astronaut have?”

  “Well, by her physical makeup alone, she would require less oxygen and food. The weight factor—and high cost for each pound of space payload—is terribly critical in our space effort. Women have a built-in advantage being smaller and lighter.” Jerrie tried to explain the science from what Randy Lovelace had told her, but the press had other concerns.

  “Can you cook?” one woman asked. This seemed like an odd question when the issue at hand was space travel, but the room leaned forward to hear the answer.

  “Yes, I cook, when I have time.”

  “What do you cook?”

  Was it really that important? Or interesting? Jerrie thought for a minute. “Chickasaw Indian dishes are my favorites…steamed beef, dried corn, squaw bread, yonkapins.”

  “How do you spell that last—and what is it?” As Jerrie explained how to cook these water lily roots, the room fell silent save for the sounds of pencils scratching on paper. She hoped they were done talking about food.

  “Why do you want to beat a man into space?”

  Jerrie stared at the man who’d asked the question, stunned. No one had been in space yet, and here was a reporter challenging her intentions. “I don’t want to beat a man into space. I want to go into space for the same reasons men want to. Women can do a useful job in space.”

  “Will there be more women tested?”

  “There will, and now hopefully the government will set up a formal test program for women astronauts. Research on me is being done as a private, pilot project.” In truth she didn’t know what was coming next. Randy Lovelace wanted to add more female data points to his research, and Jerrie herself was starting to feel that if more women got involved, it could bring weight to her growing desire to fly in space. So for the moment, her own fervent wish about a woman-in-space program was the best answer she could give.

  The press conference was just the beginning. When the LIFE article came out in the August 29 edition, the title declared that “A Lady Proves She’s Fit for Space Flight.” Readers got to see Jerrie in her element, at the helm of an Aero Commander and wired for testing at the Lovelace Clinic. Her more formal publicity photos, meanwhile, graced newspapers accompanied by articles calling the “five foot seven inches, 122 pounds, with measurements of 36-26-34” pilot the front-runner in a test program to put women into space, what she called “the greatest adventure a pilot could experience—any person could.” Of course, most articles included her fear of grasshoppers, but not one mentioned that her medical testing was a private program nor offered a discussion of the broader requirements needed to fly in space. What press coverage did bring was sponsorship offers from companies wanting her to endorse this brand of mattress or smoke that brand of cigarette in a commercial. She declined every offer. She was serious about her intention to pursue any path that looked like it might lead to spaceflight, and was determined that any woman-in-space program would be a serious one, not one based in novelty or publicity hype.

  When Jerrie got back to Oklahoma the following week, she found her desk at Aero Design buried under a pile of fan mail.

  The response to Jerrie’s story wasn’t universally positive. Media reports of a female astronaut program made it seem like Randy Lovelace was working on NASA’s behalf, and the agency was finally forced to set the record straight. In a hastily arranged press conference, an agency spokesman made it clear that NASA has never “had a plan to put a woman into space, it doesn’t have one today, and it doesn’t expect to have any in the foreseeable future.” NASA had good reason for selecting test pilots as astronauts, and for the moment it wasn’t interested in relaxing its strict requirements to include women. Any story to the contrary was simply not true.

  There were some within NASA whose bias against women went beyond a disinterest in female astronauts. Clark T. Randt, director of NASA’s Office of Life Science Programs, wrote Randy a letter congratulating him on his research but confessed he couldn’t see the value in testing women. “Perhaps I am just one of the old school who favors keeping them barefoot and pregnant!” he wrote.

  Randy knew NASA’s stance on women as astronauts, but he was nonetheless surprised that more colleagues didn’t share his scientific curiosity. But Randy didn’t work for NASA, he was merely a consultant, so he was free to pursue further testing on women to satisfy his own interests. With Jerrie’s help, he began compiling a list of possible candidates. They started with baseline requirements of age and experience similar to the male pilots he’d tested for NASA. He wanted women with at least a thousand hours in the air—a tall order, Jerrie pointed out, since women couldn’t fly for the military and were rarely hired by airlines. As for age, he wanted women in their early thirties, though he was willing to make exceptions for younger women if they demonstrated a singular focus on their careers. He knew he couldn’t stipulate the women have college degrees or test pilot experience, qualifications that had been vital for the men: it was uncommon for women to earn science degrees, and since they could not fly for the military, they could not be test pilots. Nevertheless, there w
ere hundreds of candidates, many of whom Jerrie had earmarked with Don Flickinger months earlier and knew through societies or the air race circuit. Though there was no woman-in-space program, rumors of some investigation into women as astronauts was starting to buzz in the ears of female pilots all over the country.

  * * *

  In Long Beach, California, Jan Dietrich followed the stories about Jerrie’s medical testing with keen interest. The slim thirty-four-year-old with dark brown hair and high cheekbones had been enamored with flying since she was a little girl. Both she and her twin sister, Marion, had loved listening to their father’s stories of flying during the First World War when they were girls and always made him bring back autographs of pilots and stewardesses when he traveled on business. Jan always thought being a stewardess would be the way to fly for a living, but had made her way into the cockpit. Now, she had 8,000 hours in the air, an airline transport rating, and even a degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Not just a casual flyer, she was one of the lucky women to succeed as a career pilot; she worked as a flight instructor and occasional pilot for a construction company. Reading about Jerrie, Jan thought the whole idea of women astronauts was pretty interesting, so she took matters into her own hands. On September 8, she called the Lovelace Clinic she saw mentioned in all the articles. The employee she reached took her credentials over the phone and told her the clinic would follow up with a letter asking for more information. From there, providing her medical background withstood scrutiny, it would consider her as a candidate for the medical testing program.

  Only after she’d started the ball rolling with the Lovelace Clinic did Jan stop to think about the implications of her being involved in whatever this testing became. If it did lead to something, some kind of further testing, she would probably have to quit her job to participate. If she did and nothing came of it, she might never get another flying job. As she realized this medical testing could be the end of her flying career, she began to have serious reservations.

  * * *

  Jerri Sloan tossed her mail onto the kitchen table at the end of a long day, though it had been no more frantic than usual. Unlike her suburban neighbors, Jerri was a career pilot. She had more than 1,200 flying hours under her belt, a commercial pilot’s license, multi-engine rating, had flown a number of air races, and even had experience flying B-25 bombers. Determined to fly for a living, she had founded her own aviation school, the Air Services of Dallas, but as a woman, she’d needed a man’s signature on the bank paperwork for the loan; her friend Joe Truhill had thus become her business partner. She built up the business and now had a small roster of pilots flying for her. Her own ongoing flight projects, meanwhile, included a contract with Texas Instruments testing top-secret terrain-following radar that demanded she fly low over water at night. But Jerri wasn’t just a pilot, she was a wife and mother of three, so on top of her own work, she got her children to and from school, fed, and ready for bed.

  Now with a quiet moment, she started sorting through the usual assortment of bills and letters. When she came across one that bore the return address of the Lovelace Clinic, she stopped cold. She knew who Dr. Lovelace was from reports about the Mercury astronauts’ testing. She also had a vague idea why he might be writing to her; her friend Jerrie Cobb had mentioned that she and the doctor were working on something together. Jerri ripped open the letter and found herself holding an invitation to take the astronauts’ medical tests. “These examination procedures take approximately one week and are done on a voluntary basis,” the letter said, adding that the tests “do not commit you in any further part in the Women-in-Space program” unless she wanted to continue. Jerri could hardly believe it. She’d been too young to fly with the WASPs in the Second World War, and now a chance to participate in what sounded like an early spaceflight program had landed in her lap. Before she’d even finished reading Randy’s letter, Jerri had made up her mind. She wasn’t about to turn down a chance to take part in an aviation program like this, especially one that might give her the opportunity to serve her country.

  She was still sitting at the table when her nine-year-old son, David, came into the kitchen and saw the letter. He immediately ran outside and started yelling into the night that his mother was going to the Moon.

  * * *

  Jan Dietrich’s identical twin sister, Marion, got home after a dinner date midway through September and decided to tackle her pile of mail before bed. Sifting through letter after letter, she hit one that just about made her fall off her chair. She stared at the page, rereading the opening line to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, but it was true. The letter really was inviting her to volunteer to take the astronaut medical tests at the Lovelace Clinic. She’d heard about the testing from her sister, but still, she could hardly believe it. To be invited to participate in a program like this on account of her skills as a pilot was incredible.

  Like her twin, Marion was also a pilot. Marion vividly remembered the day sometime in grade school they went to the airport to watch planes land and take off. It was a common pastime, but that day they’d seen a sign: “Learn to fly—$50.” To the girls, it was an invitation to the world they so desperately wanted to be a part of. Before turning sixteen, they gathered their paperwork for their student-pilot exams and even convinced their high school to let them into the typically all-male preflight class. In a matter of months, both earned their private licenses just two days apart. She and Jan had since pursued advanced licenses together and co-entered a number of air races, but knowing that aviation jobs were few and far between for women, Marion had taken a different route than her sister. She’d turned to writing, first a small aviation column that she leveraged into a full-time position as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune. Occasionally she got an assignment that required her to fly, but more often than not, she only spent her weekend hours in the air. All the same, she felt more at home in her plane than her car.

  Marion had no hesitations about the tests but knew Jan had mixed feelings. The swell of emotion she felt reading the letter made her realize she couldn’t let her sister miss out. The girls had always encouraged and supported each other in their shared love of flying, and she wasn’t going to let this be an exception. “Jan,” Marion penned an imploring letter. “We are poised on the edge of the most exciting and important adventure man has ever known. Most must watch. A few are privileged to record. Only a handful may participate and feel above all others attuned with their time. To take part in this adventure, no matter how small, I consider the most important thing we have ever done. To be ASKED to participate, the greatest honor. To accept, an absolute duty. So, go, Jan, go. And take your part, even as a statistic, in man’s great adventure.”

  Marion’s emotional appeal worked. When the girls both got letters from the Lovelace Clinic saying they’d been accepted as candidates for the medical program, both twins accepted. As they awaited the next letter with further instructions, the pair had a doctor who’d worked with Olympic athletes set them a diet of protein-heavy breakfasts, light lunches, and even lighter dinners. They got in the habit of swimming fifty laps at a time to increase their endurance and pedaling hard on rented stationary bicycles every night. They were determined to be ready for whatever was coming next.

  * * *

  On a Wednesday nearly a month after the world learned Jerrie had taken the astronauts’ medical tests at the Lovelace Clinic, she left work at noon. No one at Aero Design imagined that she was doing anything more interesting than her routine physical exams to maintain her advanced pilot ratings. Only Tom Harris knew that she was off to begin her psychiatric evaluation.

  Everyone involved with the Mercury astronauts’ selection knew there was more to being an astronaut than physical fitness. Astronauts needed mental fortitude, too. The same way no one knew what would happen to a human body in space, there were some questions about what would happen to an astronaut mentally and emotionally when seeing the Earth from orbit for the first time. For the
men, this testing had been done at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, but the air force had no operational need for a woman, especially a civilian woman, taking up time in a military laboratory. So Jerrie had taken it upon herself to find comparable testing.

  Her searching uncovered Dr. Jay Talmadge Shurley at the Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital. Jay Shurley, founder and director of the hospital’s behavioral science laboratory and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Medicine, had been interested in the question of astronaut psychology since reading about the Mercury astronauts’ testing. Specifically, he was interested in how sensory isolation on Earth could approximate spaceflight. He hadn’t thought too highly of the men’s isolation test; sitting in a dark room at a writing desk for a couple of hours was, in his professional opinion, a poor approximation of the probable emotional stresses of flying in space. Out of curiosity, he’d developed a water flotation tank that he thought would create a more complete isolation experience and more accurately test a candidate’s mental fortitude for something as isolating as spaceflight. When Jerrie asked whether he would be willing to run some psychological exams on women pilots, giving him a chance to gather data in his tank, his own medical curiosity was piqued. After consulting with Randy Lovelace, Jay Shurley consented to run some psychological tests for the women who went through the medical checks at the Lovelace Clinic, starting with Jerrie.