Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  It took me a while to stop dressing how I thought I should look, but I finally ditched the dress pants and button-down shirts for dresses and fun prints, and it makes a huge difference. I’m so much more confident giving a talk or appearing at an event when I feel like my outside matches my inside. It’s a minor detail, but when you know you’re the underdog going into an event, every detail matters.

  In a lot of ways this book was cathartic because I got to dig into that duality of women needing to balance professionalism with style…okay, let’s just admit that I’m hugely on team Jackie. I love that she had this cosmetics empire while also breaking records left and right. I totally love that not only did she refuse to compromise her femininity and love of style, she used it as a power move. The gall to make people wait while you touch up your lipstick after winning a cross-country air race? I love how she takes what would be a moment of superficiality and turns it on its head. She’s such an inspiring example of not giving a damn what people say and making them pay attention to who you are and what you do, not what you look like.

  5. So much has changed since the 1962 hearing—being a female astronaut is no longer unheard of, for starters. What, if any, steps do you think we need to make to forge forward for gender equality in science?

  Representation matters, and we’re still seeing a dearth of women in science of all backgrounds and ethnicities. It’s not that they don’t exist, it’s that it’s so hard for women to really gain a platform. Both TV and digital networks prefer male hosts. If the choice is between a male generalist and a female expert, they’ll still pick the man. And the issue becomes generational. Little girls grow up without science role models and their interest drops off. There’s plenty of data to show that while boys and girls love science in grade school, by middle school, girls’ interest drops off largely due to social pressures of being “cool.” I’ve heard the same thing anecdotally from friends of mine who are teachers or parents, and they’ve also told me about the drop-off of teenage girls liking science because they want to date. Somewhere along the way boys need to learn not to be intimidated by smart girls.

  I wish I had a solution! A lot needs to change. The people who make science TV need to broaden their thinking on what a “scientist” looks like, but also women in science need to put themselves out there. Many are, and it’s so wonderful to see. Be a woman in science and also have pink hair and tattoos, and love music, and have style! Show little girls that you don’t have to compromise who you are to do what you love, and that badasses in science are still badasses!

  6. Throughout the book, Jackie and Jerrie never get on the same page, even though they both want the same thing, a woman in space program. If you could sit Jackie and Jerrie down to have a clarifying conversation, what would you wish they would say to each other?

  I wish I could have been at that dinner in Cocoa Beach in 1962! Honestly, I wish Jerrie had listened to Jackie. I mean, she did things her way in that she badgered and nagged decision-makers in an attempt to forcibly change their minds, and what did it get her? Nothing. Jackie saw things clearly. She knew that the medical tests were only a small part of the qualifications to become an astronaut, and also knew that forcing an issue rarely gets things done.

  Let’s play alternate history for a second. If Jerrie had listened to Jackie and they’d started a larger research program, would Jerrie have flown in space? Probably not, because she didn’t have what NASA needed in an astronaut at the time. Not to mention she wasn’t exactly the team player or well-rounded person NASA wanted to fly in space. All those screenings John Glenn went through were to select for personality and attitude. I don’t know that Jerrie could have passed those tests; remember that even Jay Shurley had some misgivings about her psychological performance. There’s also the issue of her poor performance in Pensacola that Floyd mentions, not to mention the circulatory issues the Lovelace tests uncovered. But she might then have been part of a pioneering program that, like the WASPs, stands as a model of women proving their mettle in a male-dominated world.

  Jerrie never understood that piloting skill and specifically jet-flying experience were more important than medical fitness. Understanding that might have given her a chance to occupy a better spot in history. Maybe. As it stands, I don’t really know what to make of her legacy.

  7. Fighting for Space is so thoroughly researched, it feels like we’re there in that moment of history, experiencing it alongside Jackie, Jerrie, and everyone else. What was the research process like for this book? How long did it take you? What was the most difficult chapter to write?

  Hands down the most difficult part of the story to write was the WASP arc. It’s so important to understand how this first big women’s flying program developed and the issues it faced, but it’s such a huge story! It’s a book in itself—and in fact there are plenty of them out there. Distilling that down while retaining the drama and personality I wanted to make Jackie come to life without overcomplicating it to the reader involved a lot of flash cards to keep my acronyms, dates, people, and places straight.

  But on the whole, the writing process was awesome, and admittedly that’s my writer-self talking! I love this story, and getting to live in it for years was so much fun, not to mention seeing the pieces falling into place and realizing that I had something great happening.

  Even the research was fun; again, that’s my inner archivist-nerd talking. Jackie, thankfully, was an epic pack rat and her whole collection is at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. I loved going to that tiny town and digging through her boxes of letters. It’s amazing to hold a note that LBJ wrote her, to leaf through all her pictures and see her story come to life. That’s where I found all the letters from the women, too, the original handwritten pages. Holding those letters is holding history.

  It was the same at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin and the NASA Archives in DC. Every page is a piece of history, but there are pages missing. It became this game of tracking down a letter or a detail, calling archivists all over the country to find the missing puzzle piece. I wasn’t always successful—some things have disappeared over the years or just aren’t accessible—but some finds were total gems. I mean, I got Bessie Cochran’s divorce filing record! How cool is that!

  Tracking down details led to some strange things, too. I don’t live too far from Indio so I went to see the former Cochran-Odlum Ranch as well as Jackie’s very modest grave. I hunted down all kinds of Jackie ephemera on eBay and ended up with a few compacts, a Perk Up Stick, some luggage, and even the copy of The Fun of It that Amelia inscribed to Jackie.

  All told, from first deciding this was the book I needed to write to getting it done, there were about three solid years of digging, writing, and polishing.

  8. On a similar note, were there any details of their story that didn’t make it into the book? Of these, which do you most wish you’d been able to share?

  There were a lot of little details and vignettes that I couldn’t fit in, either because they felt like they were derailing the narrative or didn’t fit the time frame. Jackie wrote a lot more about her friendship with Amelia Earhart that I would have loved to include, and details about her cosmetics empire. There were also a lot of elements about her relationship with Floyd that are so endlessly heartwarming—Floyd himself is a fascinating person—but felt too shoehorned in when all was said and done.

  The other thing I would have loved to include would have been more letters. The amount of correspondence I have is staggering—letters between the Lovelace women, internal NASA letters, and even just letters from citizens about women in space. I couldn’t reference every letter—it wouldn’t have added much to the story—but they make for some really interesting reading!

  9. Fighting for Space isn’t your first book; you also wrote Breaking the Chains of Gravity, the fascinating story of spaceflight before NASA. How did the writing process for this book compare?

  It was a very different beast. Breaking the Chains was
a story I wanted to tell to demystify NASA’s origins. People are always saying “If we could put a man on the Moon in nine years why can’t we XYZ?” The hope with that book was to show the rich backstory underscoring this government agency everyone recognizes but no one knows about. That said, it was a much less personal undertaking.

  Fighting for Space was a much harder story to write. This one wasn’t about streamlining to draw out a narrative thread; this book was about setting the record straight on a story that I don’t think has ever been told right. To that end, this book took a lot more digging into archives and more figuring out how to take a letter or other detail I found.

  Stylistically, this was also a very different book. Breaking the Chains is meant to inform. Fighting for Space is meant to engage. I wanted to write something that feels like a novel and really draws you in. I read a lot of Sophie Kinsella and Mary Kay Andrews (aka Kathy Hogan Trocheck) while writing this book to help me think through writing a fun page-turner, though, of course, I had to work within the confines of what really happened. Throughout the whole writing process I was trying to find moments that aligned to create parallels between Jackie and Jerrie, or those overlaps that allowed their narratives to cross in perfect ways. And I found some great ones! It was so perfect that both women experienced personal tragedy in 1956—Jerrie ending her relationship with Jack Ford and Jackie losing the congressional election. Reading fiction helped me identify those moments as devices that could shape the reader’s experience.

  10. What’s your favorite space history story? Is there another story, like that of the Lovelace graduates, that you feel has been misrepresented?

  Favorite story, if we’re taking this one out of contention, would have to be Apollo 13. It’s such a mind-boggling story—an oxygen tank ruptures midway to the Moon and yet NASA and its contractors pull together to save the crew. The ingenuity of going to the Moon is incredible in itself. Add the problem-solving that got the crew home safely and it’s a fascinating story that is so much more human than technical. On a personal note, the book cowritten by the mission’s commander, Jim Lovell, and Jeff Kluger was the book that made me want to write; it’s so brilliantly exciting but also teaches you so much about how Apollo worked…and how insane it was that people went to the Moon! That emotional element probably explains why I love the story so much.

  But I would argue most of space history is misrepresented. We have a tendency to blindly celebrate Apollo without taking into consideration the messy political landscape that created it or the flawed legacy it left behind. Apollo was amazing, but trying to recreate a similar program to return to the Moon or go to Mars is setting us up for failure. It’s a prime example of why we need to study and understand history to learn from it, not repeat it. I firmly believe that the circumstances that enabled the Moon landing in 1969 will never happen again; it was a crash solution to a short-term goal and yielded purpose-built technology that couldn’t do much else besides go to the Moon. We need to keep the inspiration of Apollo but change the way we think about space exploration and start laying a real foundation for a long-term presence in space.

  11. If you could travel back in time, which part of history would you want to witness? And which part would you want to be a part of making?

  This one is such a toss between 1930s aviation and the Moon landing, but I’m probably going to have to say the latter. The whole Apollo era is so endlessly fascinating to me, just the amount of innovation and technology that developed in such a short amount of time was so awe-inspiring. I would have loved to see it unfold! Of course, we now get into the issue that women couldn’t fly in space at that exciting time…Being involved in any part of Apollo would be amazing to me, because there were women involved!

  12. Who is your personal space hero?

  Pete Conrad was the first astronaut I identified as a favorite and he always will be. He’s even the namesake of my cat!

  Pete actually gives us a great example to understand NASA’s changing astronaut qualifications in this book. Pete made it to the final round of tests in 1959; he got to the Lovelace Clinic along with John Glenn for the medical tests. But he wasn’t picked to be an astronaut because NASA didn’t think he had the right personality to fly in space. He was, however, chosen as part of the second astronaut class along with Neil Armstrong and Elliot See and flew four awesome and long-duration missions—Gemini 5; Gemini 11; Apollo 12, wherein he became the third man to walk on the Moon; and Skylab 1. So this goofy guy that NASA didn’t think had the right mental stability and personality for spaceflight ended up one of the most flown astronauts of the Apollo era! Personality mattered.

  As a kid, though, I loved Pete because he was human. If you read the Apollo 12 transcript or watch the Apollo 12 episode of From the Earth to the Moon you can see he was fun and funny, and when I was little, he brought out the humanity of the Apollo program. Reading about Pete made me realize that going to the Moon was ultimately a human endeavor, and that storytelling through a human lens is a powerful approach to science and history.

  13. What’s next on the horizon?

  For another big project, I’m not sure yet. I’m excited to venture into whatever new world my next book takes me to, but before I do anything else I’m going to take time off to read some books that have nothing at all to do with pilots!

  Photos

  Jackie Cochran chats with Alexander P. de Seversky in front of her 1938 Bendix plane, a Seversky P-35. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  A young Jackie Cochran and Floyd Odlum early on in their courtship, likely sometime in the mid-1930s (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Jackie and Floyd not long after their marriage (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Jackie Cochran (right) and Amelia Earhart sitting on the diving board at the Cochran-Odlum Ranch in Indio (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Randy Lovelace holds a version of the mask he developed with Drs. Harry Armstrong and Walter M. Boothby, the same early model Jackie used during her 1938 Bendix race. (Courtesy of the Museum of History & Industry, Seattle)

  Jackie Cochran shakes hands with President Roosevelt during the Collier Trophy ceremony on December 17, 1940. Behind them, in the center, is Dr. Randy Lovelace. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Jackie Cochran in the foyer of her Manhattan apartment, the entryway decorated with a compass inlay in the floor and flight scenes on the walls, and lined with her various trophies and awards. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Jackie Cochran smiles at the wheel of a Jeep full of WASPs during the Second World War. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  Jackie sits next to Cary Grant at a dinner party in the early 1940s; at the time, Floyd owned RKO Pictures. (RKO Pictures/Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)​

  Jerrie Cobb in flight at the controls of her favored Aero Commander (Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum Archives)

  Jackie Cochran canvasses voters for her 1956 congressional campaign in front of her personal Lodestar emblazoned with her larger-than-life portrait. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  A nurse at the Lovelace Clinic wipes Jerrie Cobb’s forehead after her exhausting bicycle stress test, the last medical test she describes taking as part of her medical evaluation in February 1960. (Photo by Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection, courtesy of Getty Images)

  An infrared picture of Jerrie Cobb floating in Dr. Jay Shurley’s isolation tank. This was during her second run, the one staged for the cameras. (Photo by A. Y. Owen/The LIFE Picture Collection, courtesy of Getty Images)

  A multiple exposure of Jerrie Cobb during the tilt table test, the one designed to check for circulatory and cardiovascular issues (Photo by Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection, courtesy of Getty Images)

  Jerrie Cobb at the Peaceful Uses of Space conference in Oklahoma, posing with a Mercury capsule

  (Courtesy o
f NASA)

  Astronaut John Glenn relaxes on the deck of the USS Noa after his Friendship 7 orbital flight on February 20, 1962. He’s debriefing into a tape recorder, getting his experience on record before any memories fade. (Courtesy of NASA)

  Jackie Cochran pauses to touch up her lipstick before climbing into a T-38 jet. Behind her, hanging his head on the jet’s ladder, is Chuck Yeager. (Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)​

  Jerrie Cobb and Janey Hart sit at the witness table during the first day of the subcommittee hearings on qualifications for astronauts, July 17, 1962. (Bettmann, courtesy of Getty Images)

  Jackie Cochran with her speedy rival, Jacqueline Auriole. The two Jackies engaged in a friendly competition to outfly each other for more than a decade. (Agence Intercontinentale/Courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library)

  The Lovelace women attending Eileen Collins’s first shuttle launch in 1995. From the left: Gene Nora Jessen (née Stumbough), Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill (formerly Sloan), Sarah Ratley (née Gorelick), K Cagle, and B Steadman. Though some of the women met through air races or other aviation groups before and after their Lovelace testing, this was among the few times they met as a group. They weren’t all in attendance; some of the women couldn’t make it to Florida for the launch, and by then both Marion Dietrich and Jean Hixson had died of cancer. (Courtesy of NASA)