posted 07-15-2018 08:16 AM               

The Woman in Space Program began as an Air Force project that grew out of two researchers' interests in women's capabilities for spaceflight. Because, on the average, women are smaller and lighter than men are, scientists speculated that they might make good occupants for cramped space vehicles. In 1960, Dr. William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace II and Brig. General Donald Flickinger invited award-winning pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb to undergo the physical testing regimen that Lovelace's Albuquerque, New Mexico Foundation had developed to help select NASA's first astronauts.

Although the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research was a private organization, Dr. Lovelace also served as head of NASA's Special Committee on Bioastronautics. When Cobb became the first woman to pass those tests, Lovelace announced her success at a 1960 conference in Stockholm, Sweden. As Cobb coped with the ensuing publicity, Lovelace invited more women pilots to take the tests.

posted 07-15-2018 08:34 AM            

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
The "Women in Space Program" was the title that the Lovelace Clinic gave to its privately-funded project in 1961, contemporary to when it was running.

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posted 07-15-2018 08:36 AM               

1. Personalities matter. One must consider who is involved in the decision making and the perspective that those decision makers would bring to the decisions given the times they live in, and

2. People do the things they do or make the decisions that they make for what, to them, are good reasons at that time.

Man. Moon. End of decade.

End of story!

We had cramped spacecraft, whether speaking about the Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo, so biological needs would have been a real challenge.

In addition (and more importantly), women were never seriously considered for Mercury or Gemini because the people considered were all test pilots, and there simply were no women test pilots at the time.

For Apollo, theoretically women could have been considered but there was no reason to do so. There were plenty of qualified men, and then what would one do about getting the women trained as pilots?

All Apollo astronauts had to go through USAF pilot training if they were not already qualified military pilots. There were no women in USAF pilot training until the late 1970s, so in order to send women through USAF pilot training they would have had to create a separate program for them, or else decide to have women in the program who were not qualified pilots (how would that have gone over in the astronaut corps?).

posted 07-15-2018 09:22 AM               

As for biological needs, that was as much an excuse then as it is now. So we can figure out how to go to the moon but can't figure out how to fly absorbent pads?

It is not something that we like to accept, because it adds a black eye to a program we all want to celebrate, but NASA's choice to not even appeal to the White House for the ability to add women in its astronaut ranks was largely driven by sexism.

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Originally posted by David C:
...it doesn't actually make it a "Space Program."

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posted 07-15-2018 12:35 PM               

The decision to use test pilots was made by Eisenhower... but it made sense at the time. There were lots of test pilots — highly qualified professionals who were already tested for their ability to handle stressful situations (many of them in combat). When accomplishing a program that was pursuing a vital national interest, why expand the group of people considered when you already had the most qualified people available?

And, surely you understand that there were many more engineering challenges with including women besides "where do we store the pads?" The urine collection systems in the suits, for example, would need to be redesigned. What purpose (other than to satisfy future social justice warriors) would adding additional engineering complexity to an already cutting edge mission that was on a serious (self imposed) time constraint and a serious funding constraint serve? Incidentally, without the time constraint, Congress may well have pulled the plug on funding before we ever reached the moon.

Any era in history, when viewed through the lens of modern social justice, will inevitably be viewed as having "a black eye."

One last point. I went to USAF pilot training in 1988, 25 years after the decisions regarding astronauts in the 60s were made. In my class, which graduated 18 of the 32 who started, there was one female. Then, as now, the Air Force was making a concerted effort to attract and recruit women and minorities who might be able to complete the program, but even today most USAF pilot training classes have only one or two females.

That's not because women are incapable. There just weren't that many women who wanted to do it, and there still aren't. Is that because society still tells them they can't? Maybe, I'll leave that for others to determine.

But know this: In my class, every male who went to a "faculty board" (which is where you go when you are on the verge of "washing out" of the program to determine whether there were any extenuating circumstances that should result in you having another chance) was eliminated after one faculty board. Every ... single ... one. The one female in my class went to five faculty boards before finally washing out without soloing in the T-37.

posted 07-15-2018 01:07 PM               

Mercury was about learning if humans could survive in space. That was answered. Test pilots weren't needed to determine if humans could live in space for 14 days or to conduct a spacewalk. Test pilots weren't needed to deploy science experiments or collect moon rocks or staff a space station.

NASA dragged its feet when it came to expanding the make up of its astronaut corps. It practically needed to be forced to open its ranks to scientists, and then to women and minorities.

That wasn't because of engineering concerns. It wasn't because we were in a race with the Soviets.

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(other than to satisfy future social justice warriors)

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posted 07-15-2018 02:41 PM               

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
Yes, test pilots made sense at the time — but that time changed after the first selection...

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Every flight had these kinds of things happening, and the reason why we didn't have more problems is because we had experienced test pilots in the seats.

posted 07-15-2018 03:15 PM               

Test pilots weren't wrong for the job, they just weren't the only people for the job.

But it really isn't the test pilots we are discussing here. It is the managers, directors and elected officials who used the test pilot case to justify keeping others out of the program, not because of performance but because of biases that had nothing to do with the rigors or demands of spaceflight.

It is easy to justify why test pilots were selected. But as Kennedy said, "we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."

posted 07-15-2018 04:21 PM               

With all due respect, we were trying to win a Cold War. Demonstrating that we can foresee what the political and social climate will be 50 years from now was not part of the equation.

To somehow claim that Elliot See crashing a T-38 demonstrates that test pilots were unnecessary to reach the moon is ludicrous. I won’t even address Apollo 1... no one could have survived that situation.

posted 07-15-2018 04:37 PM               

Equal opportunity wasn't a foreign concept. It was however, a lot easier to dismiss because it was men who held all the cards. It was men who decided that only men be allowed to be military test pilots. It was men who decided that women shouldn't be allowed to apply to be an astronaut. And, on the flip side, it was men who took up an interest in trying to change that.

posted 07-15-2018 04:56 PM            

Mercury selection pre-dates the moon race. Unlike the X-15, it was entirely possible to fly the complete mission in a fully automated mode with animal or human test subjects and that was the original plan (much like Vostok). That plan was changed. Should it have been?

With airplane guys running the spacecraft and test pilots flying it, you get a completely different system to what missile guys and doctors may have produced. Not necessarily any better, but rather incompatible.

After Mercury is a different topic. By then they were designing ships that required pilots. Putting women in the system they'd designed wasn't simply a matter of "figuring out how to fly absorbent pads", and by then, there was a race on. It became a matter of trying to win.

Of course women, scientists, etc., could still have all been flown. If we're seriously talking equal opportunities for all people, then adding in a few privileged, white, female, American, pilots hardly achieves that objective. But quite simply it wasn't an equal opportunities social program, it was a race. All those changes would have slowed us down, added cost, and reduced the chances of success. Would the tax-paying public have accepted or even wanted that mission change? NASA wasn't a law unto itself. It's unfair to berate them for trying to cope as efficiently as possible with the position that society had put itself in.

Now if the US had been socially different in 1940, then by 1960 a completely different pool of qualified people should have been available. If Mercury had remained fully automated then perhaps Gemini and Apollo could have employed completely different people. Neither of those were the case and they had to select people who gave the best prospects for winning the race. As it was, the Soviets came very close to "winning" — hence the whole point of Apollo 8. The Soviets may not have been on the point of landing, but it was felt that if they circumnavigated first, in the eyes of the world we'd have lost. We now know that the Soviets really were on the verge of a manned circumnavigation, and that any such well intentioned delays would have been disastrous to the primary program objective. Can you imagine that national feelings after losing again would have taken much consolation from flying (and quite possibly killing) a few women? Do you think it could have destroyed the entire US civilian human space flight program?

We didn't originally say we were going to the moon "for all mankind." America was sailing a "New Ocean," and out to beat the Soviets. All mankind was a nice sentiment on Apollo 11, but if really true it would have been an international program. Goodness knows the allies had plenty of well qualified people. Yes, I know a bit of international cooperation did sneak in (the Swiss solar wind experiment and MSFN for example).

A decade later in Skylab they really should have been making a lot more effort, but you're back to personalities and organisational inertia. Of course they could and should have flown an all female and necessarily rookie crew. For goodness sakes they were happy to schedule an all male rookie crew for the longest ever mission up to that date. But then you have to bump people that have been working away in the queue for years. Now in the big picture that's less unfair, but on a personal level they're you're buddies and it's disloyal. A strong President should have intervened, but he was busy elsewhere.

posted 07-22-2018 10:34 AM               

As for the Mercury 13, it seems trendy to criticize them and their program. The reality is they all knew it was not a program that promised them a spaceflight seat, nor training. That myth is only perpetuated by one, and writers not doing the research or promoting an agenda.

posted 07-22-2018 08:15 PM               

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Originally posted by albatron:
...remember that Cunningham and Cernan, to name two, were not test pilots.

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posted 08-06-2018 12:10 PM               

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Originally posted by albatron:
Right or wrong, the prevailing attitude at the time precluded them from going.

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The PR disaster of male military astronauts dying on the Moon, being lost in space for eternity, burning up on the launch pad or during re-entry was bad enough for NASA and the US to contemplate without adding a direct female dimension. Grieving widows were an understandable consequence of both hot and cold wars of the era; grieving widowers and motherless children would have created an unthinkable and unacceptable social vista for that time. Jane Briggs Hart, for example, was a mother to nine children - losing her in an Apollo 1 scenario would have been devastating for her family and catastrophic for the US Space Program.

The following Conversation / Smithsonian article John Glenn and the Sexism of the Early Space Program makes for very interesting reading. It includes some of his July 1962 congressional testimony:

I think this gets back to the way our social order is organised really. It is just a fact. 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 be undesirable.

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
...spaceflight techniques have no direct parallels in aviation.

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Familiarity with spin recovery of experimental jet aircraft departed from stable flight would have assisted Armstrong and Scott on Gemini 8. The rapid reflexes, judgement, and situational awareness honed through fast jet flying certainly saved Armstrong's life when flying the LLRV-1.

Joe Engle was the only pilot to manually fly the space shuttle orbiter from orbit through entry and landing specifically because of the similarities of the flight characteristics of the X-15 and orbiter wings. Familiarity with the X-15 reaction control system (RCS) would also have been a transferable skillset for Armstrong and Engle. S-turns performed by the orbiter to bleed speed for landing are also executed by parachutists for the same reason.

Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad made an interesting observation regarding the difficulty of landing the lunar module Intrepid, on page 33 of LIFE Magazine, Dec. 19, 1969:

I suppose I did only a minute and a half's worth of real flying in that baby of mine, but during those 90 seconds I needed everything I had learned in 20 years of piloting.

posted 08-06-2018 08:31 PM               

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Originally posted by capoetc:
But they were military-trained pilots flying high performance aircraft.

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Let's take it a step further and use Ed Gibson as an example. He wasn't a military trained pilot, but he became one after his selection.

So to eliminate the women because they weren't test pilots, okay, at that time it was a requirement. But later, it changed (Walt and Gene-o). And a tad later (Group 6) it changed further allowing scientists to become astronauts, and giving them military training.

The women still weren't considered.

And I guarantee you Jerrie Cobb's experience was far far greater than Ed Gibson's entering the program. She'd have done fine.

Anyway it's all a moot point. The gals all knew there was never a promise to go into space. Jerrie did try, and her logic to allowing her (and whomever) to go was impeccable.

It was simply a sign of the times. Wasn't going to happen.

Robert brings up an excellent point — NASA dragged their feet for many years in regards to women. Not only as astronauts, but as scientists, managers, engineers and so forth.

Lovelace taking the bull by the horns and medically testing these ladies, was actually an excellent idea. Social mores aside, it's about science.

I get your point about females in flight school in the military. The Mercury 13 gals I all know, think that's reprehensible, but those are political decisions.

I would like to again point out, only one claims she was promised a seat. And it isn't/wasn't Jerrie Cobb.

posted 08-07-2018 01:30 AM            

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Originally posted by albatron:
They deserve better than that, and have a truly historical part of our space history and falsehoods denigrate them.

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posted 08-10-2018 05:56 PM            

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Originally posted by YankeeClipper:
Joe Engle was the only pilot to manually fly the space shuttle orbiter from orbit through entry and landing... S-turns performed by the orbiter to bleed speed for landing are also executed by parachutists for the same reason.

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