Wally Funk's Race for Space

by Sue Nelson

  When an astronaut returns to Earth this way, NASA flight surgeon Dr Shannan Moynihan is often one of the first faces that they see when the hatch opens. Like Wally, Moynihan has aimed high from an early age. But whereas there were no women astronauts as role models in 1960, Moynihan had someone to emulate.

  ‘I have a note from when I was four years old in kindergarten,’ she said. ‘I had written to Shannon Lucid.’

  Lucid was a biochemist and one of America’s first female astronauts. Her classmate, Sally Ride, pipped her to that post. Lucid had been working at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation when NASA finally opened the astronaut candidate training programme to women in 1978. She was selected and went into space as a mission specialist on STS-51G on 17 June 1985. By the time she retired, in 2012, Lucid had logged 5,354 hours (223 days) in space, held the record for the most hours in orbit by any woman in the world until June 2007, and before that, in 2002–03, served as NASA’s Chief Scientist in Washington, DC.

  ‘I didn’t know she was a doctor then,’ said Moynihan. ‘I had the great honour of working with her in Star City while we were both there working. So that was just a dream come true for me.’

  Moynihan, a tall, smiley woman with a halo of curly hair, must be a welcome sight for astronauts after a rough ride home. ‘Some astronauts are feeling very well, others might be having some symptoms due to gravity, sort of like a bad case of vertigo, dizziness, off-balance, nauseated. They might want to vomit. Some are weak and dizzy, and have difficulty walking in a straight line.’

  ‘Does space affect a woman’s body differently than a man’s?’

  ‘The answer is no. We haven’t seen any definite differences between women and men in orbit. The same physiological effects from being in that environment seem to affect both men and women,’ she said. ‘It’s an interesting question, but, to date, no.’

  According to Dr Donald ‘Don’ Kilgore, however, who had worked with Lovelace on the astronaut tests for the Mercury 13, ‘The results were impressive in that the women very frequently performed at least as well as the men did, and in some cases they performed better. The tests then were rather primitive compared to what we can do nowadays. To test balance, we rotated the patients in a chair while we measured eyeball movements in response to those stimulations. We also irrigated the ears with water at zero degrees centigrade, which causes vertigo. That was the unpleasant test that all of the candidates, both male and female, remembered for years afterwards. The presence of ice water in the ears is not a pleasant experience.’

  Wally agreed. ‘That test made me lose control of my body.’

  A pilot himself, Kilgore became the chief executive officer of the Lovelace Medical Center until his retirement in 1987. Ten years later, we had discussed the issue of performance for the male and female pilots. ‘The women utilised less oxygen, they were lighter in weight, they endured things like the sensory deprivation experience with greater strength than the men did,’ said Kilgore.

  ‘Some of the men didn’t last very long in the sensory deprivation experiment, which had to do with floating in water in total darkness with no sensory stimulation – no light, no hearing, no smell,’ he said. ‘The women routinely did better than the men in that particular test. Dr Lovelace early on delivered a paper in Sweden in which he suggested that women were perhaps more suitable space candidates than men, but there was considerable objection to that for many reasons.’

  In 2014, the Journal of Women’s Health published manuscripts that summarised the latest published and unpublished research into human spaceflight. Six work groups, put together by NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, examined the work and investigated whether being a man or a woman made a difference physiologically, psychologically or behaviourally in space. No evidence was found of psychological or behavioural differences, but small differences were recorded between male and female bodies. Female astronauts were more likely to report space motion sickness after arriving at the International Space Station, for instance, while more male astronauts were sick on returning to Earth. Men had a higher risk of a visual impairment after space travel and, since women are more susceptible to cancers induced by radiation, women required lower exposure levels. In certain mental tests women were slower but more accurate; men chose speed over accuracy. In other words, more modern tests showed a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. However, the pool of eligible results for women compared to those for men was small, since eight times as many men had flown into space at the time of the studies. One of the recommendations was, therefore, to select more female astronauts for space missions.

  As Wally’s interview with the NASA flight surgeon progressed, Wally poured through my list of questions and brought up the practical issue of being a fertile woman in microgravity. ‘Women nowadays have the opportunity to suppress their period while on orbit by taking hormone pills,’ said Moynihan. ‘That’s something that’s done on the ground very routinely for people, and it can make training and logistics easier for them. If a woman chooses – and it’s all a woman’s choice – to menstruate while in orbit, that is certainly something we can accommodate, and we have in the past.’

  For older women, like Wally, bone loss during prolonged stays in space is more of an issue. ‘Having a crew member who is post-menopausal is something we work with,’ said Moynihan. ‘We’re always concerned with bone loss in microgravity. Post-menopausal becomes a bigger risk. We have several different ways to deal with that, and we work with group of experts to tailor a specific programme for each woman who is going to fly.’ This could involve a course of hormone-replacement therapy or a different category of medication to help protect bones.

  Moynihan was warm and encouraging, putting my near-octogenarian interviewer totally at ease. ‘What are the advantages for women in space? Do we have any advantages?’

  Before Moynihan could respond, Wally answered the question for her: ‘I would think so! How do today’s physical requirements compare with those needed when I did tests in the 1960s?’

  ‘I would guess a little bit gentler and a little bit more focused than what you dealt with back then,’ Moynihan said fondly. ‘We’ve learnt a lot over the years. We do a good deal of screening, obviously, when people are selected and before they’re assigned, to make sure they’re healthy and ready to go fly. It’d be interesting to hear your experience.’

  Out it poured, spoken quickly with barely time for a breath, but interspersed with delighted laughter from Moynihan: ‘Jerrie Cobb called and said, “Wally, do you want to go to space?” and I said, “Absolutely!” She said, “Get a hold of Dr Lovelace.” Okay, the name Funk rang a bell with Dr Lovelace because his uncle took care of my father, who was ill, and brought him to New Mexico. That’s where I was born and raised, in Taos, New Mexico, at 7,000 feet. I am used to altitude. I skied at 13,000. So, as a youngster, I was able to do anything I wanted to do: bike, shoot, ride, ski. I was never told no. If I hurt myself I licked my wounds and went about my business. I was totally brought up differently from most girls. Made model airplanes and liked space. I wanted to go so bad, so when Jerrie [Cobb] said, get to Lovelace, and I did, Lovelace said, “You be here on Monday.” I had a week of tests that I could not believe. I don’t hurt. I don’t have pain. I’ve learnt how to deal with pain. Of course they wanted to x-ray every bone, every tooth, every part of my body. First, they strapped me in the Dennis chair and injected 10-degree water into one ear, and what do you think happens to your body?’

  Moynihan, the medical doctor, knew immediately. ‘You get a little dizzy.’

  Wally shook her head rapidly and lolled her tongue from side to side like a horse neighing. I lowered the recording level on the sound recorder.

  ‘You go crazy!’ Wally added.

  In between laughs, Moynihan responded with an ‘absolutely’.

  ‘You cannot control yourself,’ Wally continued. ‘They make you go out the room, and they bring you inside in an hour and do the other
ear. Well, yeah, that one pierced a little bit, but I got over it. Then we were taken into an area where they wanted to see if we would hallucinate.’

  Then, like a needle skipping over a track on a vinyl record, Wally jumped ahead to a memory from when she had met the first American woman in space. ‘Sally Ride said, “Wally, thank you for taking all those tests. They barracked you with needles and prongs.” And it didn’t bother me. I was so normal that I beat the girls and I beat the Mercury 7 guys.’

  Moynihan mumbled, ‘That’s impressive.’

  Inwardly, I winced a little. Wally had done extremely well in the tests, and had surpassed both the men and women in at least one of them. But she hadn’t beaten all of the men in all of the tests, as her wording might have implied, and reports from newspapers in the 1960s state that she had come fourth out of the women overall. Also, as the telegrams showed, the time frame between being called to the clinic was weeks rather than days. But, to be fair to Wally, it is easy to forget exact timings as you get older.

  ‘Then they took us into the tank to see if we would hallucinate or get strange.’

  It was another mental jump. We had gone from discussing phase one of the tests, which were taken by all the women, to the phase two isolation-tank test, which just Jerrie Cobb, Rhea Hurrle and Wally had taken. It consisted of a circular container of warm water in darkness, to mimic conditions of sensory deprivation and simulate weightlessness, in a soundproofed room.

  ‘When I got into the pool, the first thing I recognised was, as I slapped my face, I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel the water. They had the temperature exactly to my temperature and all aspects of the room to my temperature. So this was their way of saying this is what it’s going to be like in space. Jerrie had a whole flotation deal around herself. I had something around the size of a brick. I had foam rubber behind the back of my neck and my back, and I was to lay on that body of water. The lights came down, my ears were plugged, and they said, “Wally, talk or tell stories, do anything you want, stay in as long as can”. In those days I didn’t talk, so I’ve come a long way.’ Moynihan grinned.

  ‘Anyway, I stayed there, and after a while they said, “Wally, how do you feel?” I said, “I feel fantastic!” Then they said, we’re going to turn the lights on and take your ear plugs out, and I came out. I knew there was a clock by the door, and I was real anxious to see how I did. Those guys were so smart they’d covered the clock. Anyway, I went out, I did my debriefing and got a lot of the same questions I’d had three days before about my parents, my animals, my studies, the Bible and so forth. They asked me everything about my life. Everything was the same!’ Wally was indignant. ‘I didn’t change my mind on anything just because I was in a tank with water the same as my temperature. So then they said, “You stayed in 10 hours and 35 minutes …”’

  Moynihan took a large breath.

  ‘“… and you broke the record.”’

  ‘Wow.’ For once, this ‘wow’ was not from Wally. There was not much more to be said, to be honest, when you’ve heard it in more detail instead of just a number. It was an incredible feat.

  ‘So,’ said Wally, ‘I don’t know if this kind of a test goes on in today’s time or not?’

  ‘No ma’am, no ma’am. What an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. I’d heard pieces along the way, but I’ve never heard a first-hand report.’

  Wally laughed and said, ‘You’re welcome’. It was a wonderfully engaging exchange between a twenty-first-century female NASA flight surgeon and a woman who, fifty-five years earlier, in the last century, had been a medical guinea pig for female human space travel.

  ‘Dr Lovelace was ahead of his time in just about every area in which his interests took him,’ his colleague Dr Don Kilgore told me. ‘He understood that women had an equal place in history that was being made in those days and he did his best to convince other people. He was only partially successful in that, but his attitudes in the 1950s were refreshingly different to those of the average person, and certainly very different to what we found in the media coverage of what we were trying to do.’

  The headlines from Michigan’s Lansing State Journal, 4 September 1960, were a case in point. ‘To Space in High Heels? First Lady Astronaut is First a Woman. Pretty Jerrie Cobb Puts Femininity Right Up There With Flying.’

  The article on ‘America’s first lady astronaut’ – written by a woman – was, like many of the day, focused on Cobb’s appearance, reassuring readers that the aviator remained a woman first and foremost. Cobb was ‘a pretty 29-year old miss who probably would take high heels along on her first space flight if given the chance.’

  It later told the reader that Cobb was ‘equally at ease in a fashionable dress and hat or bulky space suit and helmet’. She ‘maintains her femininity with deliberate aplomb’. And, in case that was too subtle: ‘There’s nothing masculine about her 121 pounds attractively arranged over 5 feet, 7 inches.’

  ‘The fact that we had these wonderful women who were wonderfully well qualified and tremendously motivated was an interesting phenomenon,’ said Kilgore, ‘but it couldn’t change fact – and the fact was the world wasn’t ready for women astronauts on this side of the Atlantic.’

  Although that attitude certainly changed in the United States, it took longer than many women expected. However, by 1997, when I’d spoken to Kilgore, female astronauts within NASA were the norm. Linda Godwin, for instance, who I had met at the NASA Johnson Space Center, had been an astronaut for eleven years and completed three missions. Her fourth and final spaceflight, in 2001, was yet to take place. Godwin combined impressive science qualifications with being a pilot, as many astronauts routinely do now. ‘The women in the past paved the road for this to make it better today,’ she said. ‘Those were the women that bucked the system and took a lot of the curves out of the road for the rest of us.’

  I’d also interviewed a relatively newly qualified female astronaut, mission specialist Dr Janet Kavandi. She was from the class of ’95, which consisted of nineteen astronauts. Kavandi was one of five women on the team. Two of them were pilots. The rest, like her, were scientists. ‘Personally I have not experienced a situation where it was a disadvantage to be female,’ Kavandi said. ‘I know that’s probably changed over the years, but honestly, today, I feel the equivalent of all the male and female members on the team. From my perspective, I get treated like everybody else in the astronaut corps.’

  At that time, Kavandi had two young children and a supportive husband, and was waiting to fly into space. Today, she is a veteran of three spaceflights between 1998 and 2001, the earliest being the final Space Shuttle mission to the Russian space station, Mir. She spent thirty-three days in space and made 535 orbits of the Earth. In 2016 she was appointed director of the NASA John H Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Nowadays, the tests for male and female astronauts take the form of a less invasive but more extensive form of medical screening over several weeks, including a psychiatric and physical component. Due to the collaborative nature of the International Space Station, the ability to speak another language has become an additional required skill. When Wally made her first bid to become an astronaut, America and Russia were rivals. Decades later, American and European astronauts learned Russian for joint missions on board their communal home, orbiting our planet at 17,500 miles per hour.

  So far, despite my reservations, Wally had done a great job with her first two interviews as reporter. While she drank a glass of water, I decided to get thirty seconds of ‘room atmos’, since it was useful for editing, and explained the need for silence. There was just one problem. Wally couldn’t keep quiet. Within ten seconds she started whispering to Moynihan. Audible, ludicrously loud stage-style whispers.

  ‘You do know that me recording the room in silence means you not giggling?’

  More sniggering followed. This time from both of them. My producer’s poker face faltered. ‘I’ll record the room afterwards.’

/>   When we continued, Wally showed Moynihan a photocopy of her schedule for several days of her tests at the Lovelace Clinic. ‘This is amazing,’ said Moynihan. She read it out loud, skipping the odd word. ‘Monday, February 27th, 1961: stool sample … Report to the lab. Audiology … we do that as well … cold presser … proctology exam …’

  Proctology was an anal examination or, as Moynihan put it, ‘that’s looking from down below’. There then followed, ‘sinus … that’s to see if you’re able to equalise … pulmonary tests …’

  Wally was astonished. ‘It’s interesting you’re recognising this when it was so many years ago.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Moynihan. ‘A lot of barium and a lot of stool samples … ENT, very important with pressure changes. EET … Brain and procedural activity. Oh, tilt table. We still do that.’

  ‘Bet you’re not putting zero-degree water in their ears.’

  It was ten degrees, but we knew what she meant. It was ice cold. Moyhinan laughed. Both the women were united, doctor and test subject, separated by over fifty years, but comfortable with each other in mutual recognition of their roles within the US space industry. When the interview was over, Moynihan thanked Wally effusively. ‘It was so great to meet you – a member of the Mercury 13.’

  ‘And I’m the only one of them alive,’ Wally replied.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ I said.

  Wally turned around to look at me, surprised, and said: ‘Oh.’

  Jessica Meir was a recently qualified astronaut candidate from the class of 2013. NASA’s astronaut selection that year had made worldwide news. For the first time, it was an even split as four of the eight astronaut trainees were women. Meir appeared far younger than her mid-thirties and was obviously eager to get into space. The reality was, as she knew, that it could take years on the waiting list, and every astronaut has to be patient. Like Wally’s, her ambition had started young. ‘I wanted to be an astronaut when I was five years old,’ she said. ‘My first distinct memory was when I drew an astronaut on the surface of the Moon.’