Space 13 hi girls11/4/2023 ![]() ![]() The results were announced at the second International Symposium on Submarine and Space Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden on August 18, 1960. Some were disqualified due to brain or heart anomalies. ![]() Thirteen of the women passed the same tests as the Mercury 7. Lovelace and Cobb recruited 19 more women to take the tests, financed by the husband of world-renowned aviator Jacqueline Cochran. However, they were not entirely unknown.Ĭobb was the first American woman (and the only one of the Mercury 13) to undergo and pass all three phases of testing. The program was hidden from the public eye the Mercury 13 were not reported in any major publications. Lovelace was interested in the way that women's bodies would react to being in space. He was able to fund the unofficial program, the Woman in Space program, and invited up to 25 women to come and take the physical tests. Lovelace became interested in beginning this program because he was a medical doctor who had done the NASA physical testing for the official program. General Don Flickinger invited Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb, known as an accomplished pilot, to undergo the same rigorous challenges as the men. William Randolph Lovelace II, former Flight Surgeon and later, chairman of the NASA Special Advisory Committee on Life Science, helped develop the tests for NASA's male astronauts and became curious to know how women would do taking the same tests. This greatly altered the testing requirements and shifted the history of who was chosen to go to space originally. President Dwight Eisenhower believed that military test pilots would make the best astronauts and had already passed rigorous testing and training within the government. NASA knew that numerous people would apply for this opportunity and testing would be expensive. They also thought people with more extreme sports backgrounds, such as parachuting, climbing, deep sea diving, etc. When NASA first planned to put people in space, they believed that the best candidates would be pilots, submarine crews or members of expeditions to the Antarctic or Arctic areas. ![]() Problems playing this file? See media help. History Jerrie Cobb with a Mercury capsule ( c. The story of these women was celebrated in numerous books, exhibits, and movies, including the 2018 Netflix-produced documentary Mercury 13. One of the thirteen, Wally Funk, was launched into space in a suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's JNew Shepard 4 mission Flight 16, making her the (then) oldest person to go into space at age 82. In 1963, Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for LIFE magazine publicizing the women and criticizing NASA for its failure to include women as astronauts. They testified before a congressional committee in 1962. In the 1960s some of these women were among those who lobbied the White House and US Congress to have women included in the astronaut program. The Mercury 13 women were not part of NASA's official astronaut program, never flew in space as part of a NASA mission, and never met as a whole group. While Lovelace called the project Woman in Space Program, the thirteen women became later known as the Mercury 13-a term coined in 1995 by Hollywood producer James Cross as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The participants-First Lady Astronaut Trainees (or FLATs) as Jerrie Cobb called them-successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as had the astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959, for Project Mercury. The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who took part in a privately funded program run by William Randolph Lovelace II aiming to test and screen women for spaceflight. Medical and physiological astronaut testing Seven surviving FLATs attending the STS-63 launch (1995).(from left): Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Sloan Truhill, Sarah Ratley, Myrtle Cagle, and Bernice Steadman.
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