Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  THE RIGHT STUFF

  The new gods of the sky wore suits of silver.

  They were instant heroes, flesh-and-blood Flash Gordons who would zoom us into the future, seven supermen with the otherworldly new title, Astronaut. Like much of the country, Sally Ride knew all their names: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton—an All-American front line of square-jawed, white Protestant husbands and fathers. At the press conference introducing them—an event so stuck in a time warp, three of the new stars casually smoked cigarettes—the usually cynical press corps stood up and applauded. The astronauts were such immediate portraits of virtue (having done nothing more heroic than show up to be announced), the supreme arbiter of American values, Life magazine, paid them $500,000, to be divided equally, for exclusive rights to their stories, which were carefully sanitized and spun out like modern fairy tales.

  Like the Greek and Roman idols for whom the program itself was named—Mercury, the fleet messenger of the gods with his winged sandals, for the single-man capsules that would get us into space quickly; Gemini, the twins, for the two-man capsules that would flex NASA’s maneuvering muscles; and Apollo, the god of prophecy and light, to carry us to the Moon with a crew of three—the astronauts inhabited their own pantheon. With their own mythology. Author Tom Wolfe called it “The Right Stuff,” a dashing brew of confidence, courage and “aw shucks” cool that was rooted in the cockpits where they’d earned their wings. Never mind that the other, equally fearless test pilots they left behind at Edwards Air Force Base in California (epitomized by Chuck Yeager, the man who first flew faster than sound) denigrated them as “spam in a can”—mere passengers in flying pods. The nation’s first astronauts leapfrogged to the top of the heap, viewed by a hungry public as sole possessors of the patriotic moxie that would catapult America to its righteous command of the skies.

  That was the hope, despite a dizzying succession of embarrassments under the next president, John F. Kennedy. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting Earth one extraordinary, revolutionary time. A week later, the United States suffered a humiliating defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, at the hands of Fidel Castro, the USSR’s man. Finally, on May 5, the US launched its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, a grand achievement that lifted national spirits and made everything—in the new space idiom—“A-O.K!” But Shepard’s fifteen-minute flight was suborbital, just on the fringes, up and down. Moscow was literally flying circles around us. “The Communists,” said one reporter, “seem to be putting us on the defensive.”

  Still, Shepard’s success emboldened the new young president. Less than three weeks later, the United States stopped looking over its shoulder and chose to lead what Kennedy would call “the greatest and most complex exploration” in human history. He gave the newborn space program its purpose and expansive vision, dramatically regaining the high ground on May 25, 1961, when he announced to a joint session of Congress, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” It was audacious, it was electrifying, and better yet, it was funded by Congress with almost no debate. With an unprecedented fusion of brain power, guts and deep pockets, the United States would shoot for the Moon and the pendulum would swing back to the West. It was all about beating the Russians. “To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight,” President Kennedy announced a year later. “But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.”

  If the American space program was triggered largely by the fear of “going to bed each night by the light of a Communist moon,” as LBJ put it, it was also energized by the wonder of the unknown. Kennedy, who would not live to see the realization of the force he’d unleashed (but whose name would identify the site from which its missions were launched), softened his Cold Warrior stance with an exuberant metaphor. “This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space,” he said on the day before he was assassinated, “and we have no choice but to follow it.” That confident spirit infected millions, who saw the mission and its missionaries as saviors of the American dream.

  No one exemplified it better than John Glenn, the freckle-faced Marine and stalwart family man whose small-town charm and fighter-pilot fortitude made him a sentimental favorite. On February 20, 1962, the third Mercury mission, he climbed 162 miles into the sky to become the first American to reach orbit, circling the globe three times as the entire nation rode with him. Glenn came home to a star-spangled welcome that certified the growing might of US rockets and celebrated his own valor.

  In time, the Mercury Seven would all prove their mettle, their swashbuckling self-assurance toughened by years in uniform. They wore suits and ties now, but all were members of the military, as directed by President Eisenhower when he reluctantly signed off on the program. In an effort to catch up quickly to the Soviets, Ike had ditched the idea of open applications for the first astronauts and restricted NASA to the pool of military test pilots, reasoning that the nation’s high-performance fliers, battle-hardened to screeching brakes, steep climbs, nose dives and eject buttons, were already cleared for national security and accustomed to dealing with danger.

  And they faced very real dangers. They were sitting atop the world’s biggest firecrackers, smaller versions of which, without human cargo, had exploded on the pad—sensationally, with the world looking on. The modified missiles were such volatile cannons, their missions were called “shots”—space shots. Moreover, the first people to step into the black void were no surer of their fate than the first fish that crawled ashore. It would take raw gumption to ride an untested rocket into the void … and then what? Would weightlessness make it impossible to swallow? Would eyeballs float out from an astronaut’s sockets? A year before the first astronauts were chosen, a New York Times Magazine article asked about a hypothetical human flier, “Will he need bones of steel and powerful muscles to resist rocket thrust … a mighty heart, the aplomb of an acrobat … ?” The article was entitled, “Portrait of the Ideal Space Man.”

  Make no mistake, the only humans considered for space travel were men—white men, no taller than 5′11″ at first, so they could fold inside the blunt-nosed cones. Race was not mentioned, but no pilots of color were selected. And at a time when newspaper Help Wanted ads were legally separated into “Male” and “Female” columns, NASA hadn’t bothered to stipulate gender in the search for its first space travelers. It wasn’t necessary: the military and its jet aircraft were strictly off-limits to women, guaranteeing that none could even apply.

  ASTRONETTES

  American women had been piloting planes in increasing numbers since the 1920s. Amelia Earhart, the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (1932), was just the most famous. Equally intrepid women performed vital roles in World War II, ferrying bombers across the seas and training male pilots for battle command, as bona fide members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. But the women were unceremoniously sent home when the war ended, banned from jets until the 1970s, officially forbidden from combat roles until 2013. They weren’t even awarded veterans’ benefits until two female members of Congress interceded. The bias continued in peacetime, when the closest women got to commercial cockpits was, at first, as stewardesses, that quaint combination of hostess, nurse, safety officer and sex symbol, to usher in the air travel business.

  Space travel gave women new hope. While the new Mercury astronauts were training for flight, a group of female pilots underwent some of the same grueling medical exams that had gotten the men selected in the first place. Dr. Randy Lovelace, a NASA consultant in aerospace medicine, recognized that women would one day be part of space-based communities. How might they fare, he wondered, taking the same tough tests he’d devised for the men? With funding from Jacqueline Cochran, who led the WASPs during wartime and was the
first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953, Lovelace invited some highly skilled aviators to be guinea pigs, including Jerrie Cobb, a decorated and record-setting pilot and aviation executive, and Jane Hart, a pioneering aviator and outspoken feminist. They were among the so-called Mercury 13—an after-the-fact label never used by the women themselves—who had icy water squirted into their ear canals, barium enemas shot through their intestines, and all senses deprived in a dark tank of water. “We were x-rayed in places we didn’t know we had places,” said one of the volunteers. The women did splendidly, but when a final test was scheduled at a US Navy facility, the program was abruptly canceled. The women were furious.

  Lovelace had never promised them NASA’s approval or acceptance—his research was independent—but the women kept pressing for their chance to fly. On March 15, 1962, Cobb and pilot Jane Hart took their case to Lyndon Johnson, now vice president. During a meeting in his office across from the Senate, the man who ran the National Aeronautics and Space Council told them the matter was out of his hands. What he did not tell them was that his executive assistant, the resourceful Liz Carpenter, had drafted a noncommital letter from her boss to the NASA administrator, in which Johnson agreed “that sex should not be a reason for disqualifying a candidate for orbital flight” and asked for clarification of the criteria. Carpenter suggested LBJ show it to the women to give them “some encouragement” and get some “good press” for himself. He did not. Instead, after Cobb and Hart left, Johnson scrawled his decision across the signature line in inch-high letters: “Let’s stop this now!” And directed that the paper be filed away. The unsent letter remains the only known written proof that women were purposely grounded for twenty-five years.

  Four months later, Cobb and Hart appeared before a House subcommittee to settle “once and for all,” according to a New York congressman, “this problem about women astronauts.” The women pointed out their physiological and intellectual readiness, and noted the prestige factor of getting a woman in space before the Soviets. “[W]e women pilots … are not trying to join a battle of the sexes,” Cobb said in her opening statement. “We seek, only, a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination.” One member was strongly sympathetic; the rest, barely tolerant. Celebrity witness John Glenn, still enjoying the full glamour and glory of his triumphal flight earlier that year, spelled out the status quo. “I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized,” he said. “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may,” he added, “be undesirable.”

  Glenn testified on the second and last day of the hearings, which were summed up by Ohio Democrat Walter H. Moeller. “[I]f today our priority … is getting a man on the Moon,” he intoned, “maybe we should ask the good ladies to be patient and let us get this thing accomplished first and then go after training women astronauts.” It was the same patronizing reply that women had heard for centuries, as they demanded everything from the right to vote to the need for equal pay: Wait—until we’re ready to let you in.

  So the exclusionary treatment continued. When half a dozen women applied for training in the second astronaut selection, in 1962, NASA disqualified them because none had jet test-pilot experience; several, management said, also lacked the educational requirements and another was too old. The response was the same even as the prerequisites became less stringent. In 1963, the test-pilot requirement was removed; in 1965 and 1967, you didn’t even have to know how to fly. NASA was seeking non-pilot astronaut scientists, and gender wasn’t specified. Still, NASA turned down the two women who sought pilot jobs in 1963, the four women who sought scientist-astronaut jobs for the third group in 1965, and the seventeen accomplished female scientists who applied for the 1967 selection. “No Girls Allowed” was the message clearly scrawled on the NASA clubhouse, because they’d set the bar way beyond women’s access. Candidates were required to have a degree in engineering, or certain technical abilities, at a time when few women qualified for science or engineering doctoral programs. “The US government isn’t going to have women astronauts for two thousand years,” grumbled spurned applicant Janett Rosenberg Trubatch, one of the first female graduates of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. “NASA thinks the American ideal is for women to marry, have kids and stay home.”

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the Russians beat us again. On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first female and the sixth cosmonaut to fly in space, orbiting Earth forty-eight times over three days. American space leaders brushed off the event as propaganda, belittling Tereshkova’s background as an assembly worker in a textile factory and an amateur skydiver. US journalists commented condescendingly about her plump charm and dimpled chin, with “her feminine curves hidden in a clumsy space suit.” Life magazine ran a suspiciously posed photo of a grim Tereshkova getting her dark blonde hair combed out by a hairdresser, “primping for orbit.” Whatever the Soviet motivation, it was not necessarily equal rights. Tereshkova never flew again, and the Soviets didn’t send up another woman for twenty years.

  Nor did Tereshkova’s flight advance the public dialogue in the United States, with its winks and one-liners. A 1958 editorial in the Los Angeles Times had welcomed women on interplanetary flights as mere “feminine companionship” for the “red-blooded space cadet,” to “break up the boredom” and produce “a new generation of ‘space children.’ ” But, asked the writer, what if the “feminine passenger” (the concept of coworker was not yet on the radar) was incompatible? “Imagine hurtling tens of millions of miles accompanied by a nagging backseat rocket pilot.” Look magazine, Life’s popular, photocentric competitor, framed the debate more soberly (but no more hopefully) in 1962, with a cover story entitled, “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” Answer: “[W]omen will follow men into space.”

  As “cosmonaut” and “astronaut” became concrete career goals, culture goddesses from Lucille Ball’s “Lucy” to Mattel’s “Barbie” slithered into space suits, with the predictable emphasis on comedy and curves. But the “problem that had no name,” described by Betty Friedan in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, had not yet lured many women to liberation, and the clenched fists of the modern women’s movement would not be raised en masse until the next decade. In 1965, newspaper columnist Dorothy Roe declared, “Girls who are clamoring for equal rights as astronettes [I swear, she wrote “astronettes”] should consider all the problems of space travel. How, for instance, would they like to wear the same space suit without a bath or a change of clothes for six weeks? … How will a girl keep her hair curled in outer space?” A Wisconsin editorial writer fantasized, “We want our gals to look their best when they meet up there with those Martians and Venusians.”

  Earthlings married to astronauts also had to dress for success. News about the men and their machines was worshipful; stories about their wives worshipped what they wore to church. “Jane Conrad … is dressed in intense canary yellow and a matching headscarf,” NBC’s Aline Saarinen breathlessly reported—LIVE!—in August 1965, while Jane’s husband, Pete, flew on Gemini 5. Women remained support players in the drama hanging overhead, the big round Moon still ripe for plucking by the Russian enemy unless we got there first.

  On July 20, 1969, that is spectacularly what happened. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin alit on the Sea of Tranquility, emerging from the Eagle to explore the mythic disc of so many dreams. For the first time, humans set foot on another heavenly body. In full view of this world, the rest of the universe seemed a bit smaller, the new possibilities, infinite. The space race was over, and the winners planted a US flag on the Moon. The message on the plaque they left behind was more inclusive: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

  As five more spacecraft deposited ten more men on the lunar surface, the women behind them also went under the microscope, with their own oppressive code of conduct. “Astronauts’
wives were to be back home in Houston, running the household and smiling for photographers,” writes Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to leave his footprints on the Moon. In an unusually candid confession, Cernan calls the lack of attention to wives by both hard-driving astronauts and clueless NASA management, “a dreadful oversight.” When he came home for a weekend, he writes, “all I wanted to talk about was our training and the program. It was, ‘My God, let me tell you what I did,’ rather than asking, ‘What did you do this week?’ Looking back now, I realize my family suffered because of my tunnel vision.” Cernan, like the majority of his astronaut colleagues, subsequently got divorced.

  No one reported on the extramarital activities of the country’s most celebrated hunks, and no wife complained out loud. For them, as one explained, having the right stuff meant looking the other way. Some of the wives also opposed the idea of sharing their men with women in the cockpit, for the same reasons male police officers’ wives early fought against allowing female partners to ride shotgun in the front seat.

  What they saw as a threat their marriage was viewed by some of their husbands as a threat to their manhood. Space was no place for “the weaker sex,” they said, because the suits wouldn’t fit and the women wouldn’t fit in; stress was too high and the danger too great. Danger, one might ask, to whom? “Had we lost a woman back then,” said Mercury flight director Chris Kraft many years later, “we would have been castrated.” And when all else failed, someone invariably brought up personal hygiene. How to cope with privacy issues for mixed genders in spaceships so confining, the joke went, you didn’t fit into them but put them on? Eileen Collins, the air force colonel who would become the first female commander of the space shuttle in 1999, saw some of the same limp excuses regarding women in the military. While the vast majority of her male colleagues were supportive, she says, there were a few with attitude, for whom it was all about the male ego. “Occasionally, I would run across a man who thought, ‘If a woman can do it, then apparently I’m not as good as I think I am.’ ”