by Lynn Sherr
“It never occurred to American decision makers to seriously consider a woman astronaut,” writes historian Margaret Weitekamp. “In the late 1950s and early 1960s, NASA officials and other American space policy makers remained unconscious of the way their calculations implicitly incorporated postwar beliefs about men’s and women’s roles. Within the civilian space agency, the macho ethos of test piloting and military aviation remained intact. The tacit acceptance that military jet test pilots sometimes drank too much (and often drove too fast) complemented the expectation that women wore gloves and high heels—and did not fly spaceships.”
Behind the scenes, it was just as bad. In 1964, only 1 percent of those working at GS-12 or higher positions at NASA (the better paying jobs) were women. When Dr. Carolyn Huntoon arrived four years later as a postdoctoral student studying biochemical changes in astronauts’ bodies, she was not permitted to finish her experiments on the recovery ships when the astronauts splashed down because the Navy didn’t allow women on their vessels. NASA wouldn’t intercede. “I had to hire male lab technicians to go and process the samples,” she tells me. “All my compadres were guys. They all went, and would send me postcards from Hawaii and pester me.” I ask if it made her crazy. “No, it just irritated me,” she says calmly. Huntoon, whose soft southern accent and firm resolve make you wonder how anyone could ever refuse her anything, says the attitude persisted in other visible ways. “I believe that people tend to support people like themselves, so when it came to hiring, giving awards and promotions—particularly with guys ten years older than me—they always went to the guys. And I’ve talked with people in other fields, they said the same thing: If there is no woman in the room, women don’t have opportunities. Unless someone there is their champion.”
On the other hand, she added, “once the rules were made in the federal government that they were not going to discriminate against women, the rules were followed.”
PROGRESS
In 1972, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed—technically, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, validating the illegality of discrimination on the basis of sex. Every government agency was ordered to comply, although the path could be steep. In 1973, the woman hired to run NASA’s equal opportunity programs, Ruth Bates Harris, told the administrator that the agency’s effort was a “near total failure” for blacks and women. Minorities comprised just over 5 percent of its employees, compared to some 20 percent for the federal government as a whole. And nearly 88 percent of the agency’s women were stuck in the lowest pay grades. In a report coproduced with two senior EEO staff members Harris wrote, “During an entire generation—from 1958 until the end of this decade—NASA will not have a woman or a minority astronaut in training.” She included a comment that would have been funny if it didn’t ring true: “There have been three females sent into space by NASA. Two are Arabella and Anita—both spiders. The other is Miss Baker—a monkey.” Harris was fired, then rehired (at a salary increase) after a public outcry and congressional hearings, during which one senator lamented that the agency’s “space age bureaucracy” was stuck “in the Middle Ages when it comes to minority employment.”
But the winds of change swirling around the country were beginning to stir NASA. There were studies to test women’s ability to withstand space travel, actual drawings of a toilet that could accommodate female members of a space crew. The armed services opened jets and test pilot schools to women in the 1970s and ’80s.
At the same time, space travel as America knew it was coming to an end. With both public interest and federal funding waning, the last men left the Moon just before Christmas 1972. The next two programs—Skylab, the first US space station; then one with the Russians, who were becoming our friends—ended the run. America had won the space race but lost its motivation. Just as NASA started thinking seriously about female and minority astronauts, there was nowhere to fly them.
SHUTTLE
President Nixon viewed the Apollo program he inherited as a useful foreign policy tool; the reflected glory from the astronauts worked on the home front, too. But his drive to reduce the price tag, and replace large-scale “leaps” with more “normal” space activities, effectively curtailed space exploration. Nixon turned down a proposal for a mission to Mars, approving instead the less ambitious—and far less sexy—plan to create a shuttle fleet for low Earth orbit. It was called the Space Transportation System, and it was planned to go up routinely, fly around the planet to deliver payloads and execute other tasks in low Earth orbit, then return to launch again. In those budget-minded times, it would, as the president said, “take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.” In fact, Shuttle costs far outran the original estimate, and customers complained about the many compromises required to fit their payloads into its cargo hold. With production of expendable launchers suspended, the private sector and the Defense Department, along with NASA, would now deploy all satellites, or anything else they wanted launched, from the new spacecraft. The US military was especially concerned about putting all of our space eggs into the Shuttle basket.
But the unthinkably complicated machine with the overly ambitious schedule also gave America a chance to redeem its image after the emotionally and financially draining Vietnam War and to regain its technological edge. It was a new kind of vehicle for a new generation of Americans that would launch like a rocket, orbit like a spacecraft and land like an airplane—actually, more like a glider. Its centerpiece, the orbiter, or shuttle, looked like a snub-nosed DC-9 jetliner, with a 60-foot-long cargo hold (the payload bay) back where a commercial passenger section would be. Up front was the cockpit, or flight deck, and one flight below, the middeck living quarters, a 13-by-10-foot compartment where astronauts would work, cook and sleep—in effect, a split-level apartment with more space for spacefarers.
To get off the pad, a bulbous fuel tank that looked like a fifteen-story silo (and which, if you laid it down horizontally, was just slightly longer than the distance of the Wright Brothers’s first flight) fed the orbiter’s three main engines with a mixture of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Two solid rockets (safer to store and cheaper than the liquid-fueled rockets of old), poised on the pad like twin white crayons, provided the serious launch boost, to break the earthly bonds and punch through to the sky. And it was all controlled by computers—five onboard machines constantly assessing the situation, the first fly-by-wire spacecraft. Americans would now go into space on a stream of little ones and zeroes.
Unlike the small, ballistic capsules of the earliest explorers—throw-away projectiles to get to the Moon and back—the roomier shuttle was designed to be refurbished and reused. The external tank was the only component that would be ditched when empty. The spent rockets would be retrieved from the sea, to refill and reignite, and the shuttle itself would bring the crew home and then relaunch. Instead of trying to pass through the harsh elements of an alien environment on our way to another world, it would work within the space surrounding this world. It marked, as astronaut Joe Allen put it, a “fundamental shift in the goals of manned space flight from exploration to operation—from testing the means of getting into space to using the resources found there.” From exploring to doing.
NASA was downplaying the exotic and accentuating the ordinary: the shuttle was a truck, they said, a workhorse to deliver satellites and spare parts into space, to conduct experiments and, in time, to serve as a kind of commuter plane to the planned space station. And commuters looked more like you and me. NASA created a new category of astronaut to work alongside the pilots: the mission specialist, a scientifically trained individual who would specialize in whatever the mission demanded. The commander and pilot (mostly drawn from the ranks of military pilots) would fly the shuttle; the mission specialist (with no military experience required) would tend to what was being flown. Either could be any gender and any color. “We needed to recognize that the world was changing and the nation was changing,” explains NASA’s George Abbey, who would
head up the board making the astronaut selection. “And we had some qualified women and minorities that we had to give opportunities to.”
Not everyone could adjust. At one meeting to discuss the new agenda, astronaut Deke Slayton, who supported more traditional recruitment criteria, “stood up and said, ‘I want no part of this,’ and walked out.” He would not participate in the selection of new astronauts for the shuttle program.
MISSION SPECIALIST
NASA issued the new call for candidates on July 6, 1976, just as the three military academies—West Point, Annapolis, and the US Air Force Academy—also prepared for their first females.
The rules for mission specialists were the most relaxed yet. Candidates required no flying experience and just a single degree in engineering, physical science, mathematics or biological science. Advanced degrees were “desired.” Good health was critical, which a NASA physical (less exacting in terms of eyesight than for pilots) would ensure. And NASA welcomed folks between 5′0″ and 6′4″. Here was the job description:
Shuttle missions could include deploying and retrieving satellites, servicing satellites in orbit, operating laboratories for astronomy, Earth sciences, space processing and manufacturing, and developing and servicing a permanent space station.
Mission specialist astronauts will be responsible for the coordination of overall orbiter operations in the areas of flight planning, consumables usage and other activities affecting payload operations. At the discretion of the payload sponsor, the mission specialist may assist in the management of payload operations, and may, in specific cases, serve as the payload specialist. They will be able to continue in their chosen fields of research and to propose, develop and conduct experiments.
Minority and female candidates were “encouraged to apply.”
The notice went out to news organizations around the country, from The New York Times to Ebony magazine to La Luz. Technical publications were contacted, at organizations like the Society of Women Engineers. NASA personnel took to the road to make the appeal in person. “Everyone was asking, ‘Is NASA really serious, or is this just window dressing?’ ” recalls Carolyn Huntoon, elevated to the Astronaut Selection Board now that women were being recruited to join the astronaut corps. “So I went to Lions Clubs, high schools, colleges, clubs, even retirement communities, just telling them that it would be a broader program, that we were including minorities and women.” The only African American on the board, Dr. Joseph D. Atkinson Jr., went to California to find potential applicants at NASA contractors and other sites. “Were we always reaching the individual applying?” Huntoon wonders. “Maybe not, but I was reaching their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, to make sure people knew that we were serious about including minorities and women in the next class.” She said that at one Lions Club gathering, a woman told her, “I can’t imagine any woman wanting to be an astronaut.” And Huntoon replied, “Well maybe you don’t, but your daughter, your granddaughter might.” As a result, she says, “a lot of people applied who wouldn’t have thought it’s what they wanted to do, because they didn’t know they could.”
NASA also stretched into the sci-fi future to enlist Nichelle Nichols, the African American actor who played the brainy Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, to help spread the word. She was fitted with a tailored flight suit and given abbreviated astronaut training to help counter the skepticism. “Women didn’t believe them,” Nichols tells me. “Because for six previous recruitments they would say, ‘Yes, you can apply,’ and then suddenly nobody was qualified that was female.” So she too went on tour—to TV stations and to meetings of black engineers—to pitch the program. Her presence, and the model she’d provided in her TV role, generated a swarm of requests for information.
At Stanford University, Sally Ride was finishing up her graduate studies in astrophysics, unaware of both the twenty-year effort to integrate the astronaut corps and the six-month-old campaign to attract female scientists like herself. NASA, casting an ever-wider net, had recently expanded its appeal to minority and women’s organizations, especially targeting college campuses. Just after Christmas, the director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Women was contacted and asked to recommend potential applicants. Instead, she called the campus newspaper, which published an interview with her on January 12, 1977. That’s the Page One article that caught Sally’s eye.
THE APPLICATION
“I just had this ‘Wow!’ feeling,” Sally later said. “I read through the list of requirements for mission specialist and said to myself, “I could do that.” She ripped the article from the paper and went in search of stationery. On a letterhead from the Institute of Plasma Research (no blue books for NASA), she printed, by hand, a neat, brief request:
The application arrived by return mail, a standard government document that was disappointingly spare. “There was no room on it to convince them I was exactly the person that they wanted,” she said later, in droll protest. When I dig up Sally’s application and see it myself—probably the first time in more than thirty years that anybody has looked—I find myself agreeing. It’s lean. Sally did her best, listing her résumé, her medical history (“good; tonsils out at about 7”), her academic record (grade point averages: 3.67 out of 4 undergraduate, 4 out of 4 graduate). To the question, “Have you ever been convicted of an offense against the law?” Sally wrote, “(1) traffic ticket (about $30, for speeding) and (2) Trespassing violation (1972).” What she trespassed remains a mystery. She also attached her transcripts and her Graduate Record Exam scores (700, 740).
But it gets more interesting. Sally was asked to list several references. Here are the names she put down: Molly Tyson, Bill Colson, John Tompkins. When I spot this on her application, I am startled. Granted that everyone calls on friends to put in a good word, it still seems pretty bold to name three lovers (including two with a secret that would never fly at NASA in 1977) as recommenders for the job of a lifetime. True, John had been her TA at UCLA, and Bill knew her work in astrophysics at UCLA. And all three certainly fit the amorphous requirement for non-relatives with “definite knowledge of your qualifications and fitness for the position for which you are applying” (as if anyone had any idea what made someone fit to be an astronaut). For anyone else it might indicate either a very small cohort of friends or a desire to live on the edge. For Sally, who lived in the moment without guile or regret, it seems more likely that she just picked the people who knew her best, with complete trust in their confidence, and perhaps a touch of naiveté. Anyway, who would think then to ask about love between two women?
On January 30, 1977, just over two weeks after she’d spotted the article, Sally mailed the application to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A form postcard confirmed its receipt and advised her that no decisions would be made until December 31.
THE PROCESS
Nearly 25,000 people received the same government forms that Sally filled out. By June 30, 1977, the deadline, 8,079 had filled them in and sent them back. By far the majority wanted to be mission specialists. Preliminary screening of them (for US citizenship, educational levels, the right major, which included astrophysics) identified 5,680 (including 1,251 women) who qualified for further evaluation. Another eight women (among 659 total) qualified in the first round as pilots. Now NASA had to winnow the applicants to a manageable pool of candidates. They started with the individuals listed as references. Sally’s came through splendidly.
Bill Colson called her “an excellent graduate student and researcher of the highest regard at Stanford U.” On the printed questionnaire, where he was asked to check off rankings about certain qualities, he crossed out all the masculine pronouns (as in, “Quality of His Professional Background”) and replaced them with “her” or “she,” giving Sally the best marks for everything. He did not mention that he was her boyfriend.
Molly Tyson ignored the form, saying their relationship had “not been professional,” but typed up a letter on the stationery of womenSports, the magazine
she was editing in New York, and gave Sally “a very high character rating,” calling her “one of my most trusted friends.” Molly wrote that Sally “was a good enough tennis player that several pros (among them Billie Jean King) urged her to delay her physics career in favor of a career in professional tennis. That Sally chose physics over the more glamorous, potentially lucrative tennis circuit is an unusual, but convincing piece of evidence to her interest in science.” Molly also noted Sally’s double major in English and praised “her way with words.”
Molly’s letter, like Bill’s recommendation, is a tribute to the deep loyalty Sally engendered in so many of her friends. They protected her all of her life, unasked. “There was a kind of unwritten, nondisclosure statement that you signed up for,” says one colleague of several decades. “She never asked you to. It was more of a trust factor that you weren’t going to do anything to embarrass her, or reveal personal stuff. She never told you what you could or couldn’t say. But I can tell you that if people crossed the line, they were out of the inner circle.”