Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  The final weeks were marked by more letters flying across the country, but notable by its absence was any word from Jim Webb. Jerrie couldn’t understand it. He’d said he was appointing her a consultant, but she was never told to whom she was meant to report nor was there any record of her affiliation with the space agency.

  Jackie, meanwhile, changed her mind on being in Pensacola to oversee the testing. She had the chance to try to break nine records in a Northrop T-38 jet around the same time and couldn’t ask the company to halt ground organization and let the plane remain idle while she took a trip that had no bearing on Northrop’s interests. Besides, flying a jet was a better use of her time than standing around in Florida as a spectator. She did, however, assure Randy that she still wanted to see the program succeed providing it was adequately controlled. “The screening process that brings these girls together as a group was much less refined than in the case of the Mercury Astronauts,” she wrote Randy in the final lead-up to Pensacola. “None of these has had specialized training, probably none of them has had military control and the volume of important kind of air hours is not great in many cases. I hope these facts will be taken into account.” She knew the Lovelace pilots, however physically fit, weren’t the test pilots NASA needed in its astronauts. Moreover, as she prepared for these T-38 flights, she knew she was still the only woman with any relevant test pilot experience.

  As the Pensacola testing drew nearer, Randy wrote to each advising them of their financial coverage and urging them to do some last-minute studying. True to his word, he also kept Jackie apprised of all relevant communications. He sent her the final list of Pensacola candidates at the end of the month: Myrtle Cagle, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Mary W. Funk, Sarah L. Gorelick, Jane B. Hart, Jean F. Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Irene Leverton, Bernice Steadman, Gene N. Stumbough. Jerrie had already done the Pensacola tests. Jerri Sloan had withdrawn her name. The group’s total number going into this final test phase was twelve.

  * * *

  By fall, NASA decided that the time for extreme caution was over. Operations and planning shifted to preparing the larger Atlas rocket that could put the Mercury spacecraft into orbit for manned flight, and John Glenn, after serving as backup twice, was finally prime pilot. He felt like he’d drawn the first orbital mission by chance more than anything else, but he didn’t care. John was going to be the first American to orbit the Earth.

  NASA wanted to launch one final orbital mission with a primate on board before announcing John’s new assignment. Without a new astronaut to write about, journalists returned to the story of the female astronaut hopefuls. Jerrie’s was, of course, a familiar face, but after Marion Dietrich’s article appeared in the September issue of McCall’s, she and Jan were added to the public’s consciousness. Alongside articles about decorating children’s rooms and the dangers of subsidized marriages, the story of the twins learning to fly together and details about Marion’s time in Albuquerque appeared under the headline “First Woman Into Space.” Across the board, headlines and reports inflated the program, turning it from a medical endeavor into an actual female spaceflight program. Though the world didn’t know the names of the Lovelace women, they were obliquely dubbed the “Astranettes” and described as a team of woman pilots training for spaceflight. Articles named Randy Lovelace among the men behind the program and speculated wildly that the first women to fly would be flat-chested since it would simplify finding a spacesuit that fit.

  The real female pilots, meanwhile, eleven of them in all shapes and sizes, were quietly preparing to travel to Florida. Their expectations varied, some hoping their time yielded good data and others hoping to join the space program. Jerrie, the twelfth member of the group and their self-appointed spokeswoman, hoped their success would fast-track her own flight into space.

  22About $5,900 in 2019.

  23About $10,100 in 2019.

  24About $2,500 in 2019.

  Chapter 20

  September 12, 1961

  Five days before the Lovelace women were due in Florida, Randy Lovelace was caught in a storm in Texas when someone called his office. His secretary, Jeanne Williams, answered but didn’t know what she should do. Figuring inaction was worse than anything, she sent telegrams to each of the pilots on behalf of her boss.

  “Regret to advise arrangements at Pensacola canceled probably will not be possible to carry out this part of program you may return expense advance allotment to Lovelace Foundation ℅ me letter will advise on additional developments when matter cleared further.”

  Then Jeanne sent a telegram to Jackie.

  Eisenhower Presidential Library

  Jerrie was in Florida preparing for the women’s arrival when she heard the news. It had been two years since she met Randy Lovelace and Don Flickinger on that beach in Miami. She’d done all the tests and devoted time to raising public awareness on the value of women in space. She’d worked to get the group of women set for their trips to Pensacola. She had been so sure that she was on her way to space only to have someone pull the rug out from under her at the eleventh hour. She was livid, not with the Lovelace Clinic but with the unknown person or persons who had made the call. So she packed her bag and checked into a cheap Washington, DC, hotel with a shared bathroom down the hall.

  The next day Jerrie started knocking on doors trying to determine who had cancelled the Pensacola tests and why. She went to NASA headquarters and to the Pentagon, cornering anyone she could get to listen to her, but the answers were always some variation on the same theme.

  “Don’t know.”

  “What testing?”

  “Ask the navy.”

  “See NASA.”

  Wading through an unrelenting sea of red tape, Jerrie did learn one thing. The navy needed a “requirement” from NASA, a letter or memo indicating its interest in the program to justify the navy’s time and money to host the women. That “requirement” was missing.

  Back at the Ranch and without any legwork, Jackie succeeded where Jerrie failed and got to the heart of the matter. Her friend Admiral Robert Pirie sent her a copy of a letter from Hugh Dryden stating that NASA did not have a need for a women’s program, though he recognized that some testing on women would likely happen in the future. Hugh’s letter, in effect, explained the “missing requirement,” and it left Robert’s hands tied. “This doesn’t leave much as to there being a requirement to perform these tests,” he wrote to Jackie. “I do not see how we can proceed further with them.” If NASA didn’t need the test results, the navy couldn’t justify letting a group of civilian women take up a week on expensive simulators.

  Eisenhower Presidential Library

  Unaware of the upheaval unfolding around the Pensacola tests, interested women continued sending Jackie letters asking for details about the program, hoping to get involved. Even girls as young as ten asked how they could grow up to qualify for the women-in-space program. Across the board, Jackie’s replies echoed what she’d been saying for months: there is no women-in-space program, but the best way to be ready should NASA accept women in the future was to attend college, keep flying, and stay in good physical condition. Two pilots had heard that the Pensacola tests had been cancelled and wrote to Jackie hoping to join the program when the testing resumed.

  For Floyd, his interest in the cancellation was financial. Randy had billed him $10,601.3325 in connection with the Pensacola testing. The Cochran-Odlum foundation had covered the cost with a donation of 3,200 market shares of the Federal Resources Corporation, which were valued at about $18,700,26 with the understanding that he would donate more if the cost of the testing rose. Now, he needed to know where his money was going.

  Jerrie persisted in her efforts to track down a single party to hold accountable for killing her dream. She drew enough attention to the issue of the women’s testing that Randy was forced to clarify his stance on the program for NASA. “The purpose of these comprehensive examinations here was not to try to put a woman into space at an early date
but to collect detailed information on them and to endeavor to determine where they would best serve in the future,” he wrote to Jim Webb, confirming that his interest in testing women was purely a medical curiosity. He had never promised any of the women that their testing would lead to a mission. “There seems to be no reason why there should be any urgency about putting a woman into space at the moment. No program for women should be activated, in our opinion, that would slow up or interfere in any way with the men’s program now underway or even give that appearance publicly.” What he wanted was the same thing he’d done with Jerrie’s original testing: to keep the results confidential until they could be collated and presented in a scientific paper. Randy knew—and he needed NASA to know that he understood—that the agency was facing far bigger challenges and he in no way wanted to interfere or compete with the lunar landing goal.

  Letters and memos about the cancelled Pensacola tests got little notice as they crossed over Jim Webb’s desk. In spite of the public image that NASA was a well-oiled, cohesive machine, it was, in reality, a group of disparate centers geographically far from one another working toward a goal not one person knew how to achieve. And Jim, from his desk in Washington, had to guide it. He had yet to make a decision on the mission mode for Apollo. The longer he waited, the more urgent the issue became, and now he had a third mode to consider.

  Lunar-orbit rendezvous complicated the mission but solved the problem of launching a large spacecraft filled with heavy fuel off the Moon. This method hinged on the idea of keeping the heaviest element, the propellant, on board a mothership in orbit around the Moon while the crew landed in a dedicated small lander that would double as its own launchpad. Because the lunar landing payload was lighter, the whole mission would be light enough to launch on a single smaller Saturn rocket, which in turn promised to shorten the program’s development timeline and give NASA a real shot at beating the Soviets to the Moon. It was an elegant solution with just two major hurdles. First, NASA engineers would have to figure out how to separate and reconnect the spacecraft in the unknown gravity field of lunar orbit—perform the actual lunar-orbit rendezvous. Second, the astronauts would have to learn how to fly these difficult maneuvers. It was clear that test pilots would be as vital for Apollo as they had been for the Mercury program.

  The mode decision now more complicated, NASA received five bids from contractors hoping to build America’s lunar spacecraft in early October. The space agency weighed the measures of each and couldn’t deny that North American Aviation—the company behind the P-51 Mustang, the B-25 bomber, and the X-15 rocket-powered plane—had the most relevant experience. On November 28, NASA announced that North American would be building the Apollo spacecraft. The winning contractor just didn’t know whether that spacecraft would be a full ship, a lander, or the mothership.

  * * *

  “This is ridiculous. I need to take some pictures, because people are going to want to see what it looks like to be an astronaut.” John Glenn knew he was about to make history, and this seemingly small detail was hugely important to him. Engineers and mission planners argued that a camera would be little more than a distraction and that people already knew what the Earth looked like from space thanks to satellite imagery, but John wasn’t budging. He knew the value that could come from a simple picture, that it could in effect bring every American along for the ride. He couldn’t let it go. One day, during a trip into Cocoa Beach for a haircut, he popped into a drugstore and saw a little Minolta Hi-Matic camera boasting automatic exposure for forty-five dollars. He bought it on the spot, had it rigged to use while wearing bulky pressure gloves, and the matter was sorted.

  As 1962 dawned and his launch date approached, John watched America get increasingly wrapped up in the excitement of the launch and knew he had been right to insist on a camera. The drama surrounding the mission increased even more as the initial launch date of January 16 slipped to January 23, then to January 27 when the weather failed to cooperate; for both launch safety and mission recovery, flight rules said no mission could launch in adverse weather or through cloud cover. Headlines focused on the “will he launch or won’t he?” angle until yet another delay forced journalists to find a new take on the story. Articles speculated whether John should be taken off the flight since the mounting delays were surely taking a toll on his mental state.

  In Washington, Lyndon Johnson felt the tension of the continuous launch delays. Jack Kennedy had decided that, as head of the Space Council, it would be most fitting for LBJ to congratulate John on his courage and his dedication after the flight. It would also fall to him to tell the world if any of the thousands of things that could go wrong did. So, though both the president and vice president had statements ready in case John died, the blame would fall firmly on Lyndon’s shoulders.

  The launch was finally set for February 20. ABC, NBC, and CBS were all planning uninterrupted coverage of the launch. TV executives knew that John’s life would be hanging in the balance for the duration of the flight. Viewers wouldn’t be watching a quiz show or soap opera when the real drama would be playing out in orbit.

  The day before the launch, Jackie could feel Cocoa Beach buzzing with excitement, but she had work to do. She knew Jerrie was also in town for the launch, so she invited her to dinner. To Jackie’s dismay, Jerrie accepted the invitation but wanted her friend Jane Rieker, the LIFE writer who’d photographed her in the isolation tank more than a year earlier, to join them as well. Irritated by the uninvited guest, Jackie nevertheless extended a polite invitation to Jane.

  Jerrie had certainly gained confidence in the months she’d been giving public talks about women as astronauts, but facing Jackie was different. She felt she needed some moral support, and Jane, who was more socially at ease and had a stronger voice than she did, promised to make her feel that much more comfortable.

  The three women sat down to dinner, and almost immediately the conversation turned to women astronauts. Jerrie asked Jackie a dozen times how she felt about the woman-in-space program and what she saw happening with it going forward. Jackie’s answer was the same the first time as it was the twelfth: she didn’t believe there was any real merit in fast-tracking a female spaceflight. The best thing for America and American women, she repeated throughout the meal, was to take a slow and steady approach to gathering data on female pilots as potential astronauts. That way, when NASA decided to fly women, the legwork would be done. The agency would have all the information it needed and maybe even some viable candidates on hand to make women’s inevitable entrance into space that much smoother and quicker.

  That answer didn’t sit well with Jerrie. She wanted to fly now, and she pushed Jackie to commit to helping her build a public groundswell that would force NASA’s hand. She reasoned that with enough pressure, the agency would cave and let her train alongside the male astronauts.

  Growing increasingly exasperated, Jackie reiterated her unwillingness to force a fast-tracked women astronaut program, but her answer never seemed to sink in. When the women parted ways that evening, they hadn’t come to any agreement on the status of Randy Lovelace’s medical research program or the best next steps for possible future testing.

  On the morning of February 20, 1962, John Glenn woke around one-thirty in the morning. It was the eleventh scheduled launch day, and he tried not to think about it ending with an eleventh launch delay. A little after two, flight surgeon Bill Douglas came in. The weather was fifty-fifty, he said, and John’s backup, Scott, had already been up to check out the capsule. Everything looked ready to go, just so long as the weather held.

  He showered, shaved, and dressed in a bathrobe, then after a quick breakfast, Bill gave him a final medical check and he was declared fit to fly. John donned his pressure suit, and under a cloudy sky, he took the elevator up the gantry to the white room that sat flush against his spacecraft christened Friendship 7 by his children, Dave and Lyn. He wriggled in feet-first and settled in for the countdown as technicians bolted the hatch
in place. The original launch time came and went as the clouds refused to break. Using a mirror to see through the small porthole window, he could just see the blockhouse and a hint of blue sky over the Atlantic.

  While he waited, Scott patched a call from his wife, Annie, through to the cockpit so husband and wife could speak privately.

  “How are you doing?” John asked. He knew there was no training course for being the wife of the first American in orbit. Annie told him they were all fine, watching all three networks’ coverage at once, that the preparations looked exciting. But he knew she was worried.

  “Hey, honey, don’t be scared,” he told her. “I’m just going down to the corner store for a pack of gum.” It was the same thing he had told her when he’d gone off to fight in the Second World War and the Korean War.

  “Don’t be long,” she whispered back, her well-practiced reply caught in her throat.