Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3129
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
|
posted 12-15-2020 06:32 PM
   
As mentioned in the posts that began this discussion in 2010, there was a team of women scientists — known back then as "space specialists" — that were chosen by NASA to participate for possible space shuttle flights as scientists (payload specialists), conducting experiments in the joint Spacelab program between NASA and ESA. At the time, more than 45 years ago, before any woman astronauts had been considered as shuttle astronaut mission or payload specialists, the honor of becoming the first U.S. woman astronauts in space had been a real possibility for at least three candidates.Those early female astronaut candidates, as named, were Dr. Mary Helen Johnston, an engineer-scientist since the 1960's, Carolyn Griner, an astronautical engineer, and physicist Ann Whitaker, all NASA employees at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. They're seen in the photo below with all smiles after passing their checkout in pressurized Apollo-era space suits in 1975 at the Marshall space complex. Another candidate was Doris Chandler, a key aerospace engineer, and the only woman that had a major leadership role at NASA during the 1960's. All four of them were involved in designing science experiments on materials processing in space and were qualified, except Chandler, to conduct simulations of experiments while wearing the spacesuits and submerged under water in the MSFC neutral buoyancy tank. Throughout 1974-76 the trio had completed training in scuba diving, been checked out in an Air Force altitude chamber and two of them, Whitaker and Johnston, had conducted experiments while flying zero- gravity arcs in a KC-135 aircraft. They certainly seemed to be ready and in the right place of their careers for a future "first ticket" ride on the new space shuttle orbiter as Spacelab scientist-astronauts.  As a teenage space enthusiast and space autograph collector, I remember coming across an article about the women astronaut trainees in an Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1976. I wanted to contact them and wrote Whitaker a fan letter during that era. She had responded a few weeks later with a lovely signed glossy of all three woman in training, also, she was kind enough to "carry" a couple of envelope covers for me on an early Spacelab AO Response simulation-test at Marshall Space Flight Center on May 6-10, 1976. The cover is shown along with another that had been signed by all three of the pioneering woman astronaut candidate team with a MSFC-postal 7-24-75 cancel on the splashdown day of the U.S. Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Note also the small black rubber stamp cachet at bottom left, perhaps an official NASA-MSFC cachet, which I believe, was a gift from space cover buddy Bob McLeod at the time, along with one or two other "carried-type" covers depicted below the above photo. One by Whitaker is for a non-Spacelab event concerning the school-bus sized Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) that had been in space for more than six years. NASA officially selected 35 new astronaut candidates as shuttle pilots and mission specialists in 1978. Six of those 35 were women. Unfortunately, neither Whitaker, Johnston, nor Griner were chosen in that first shuttle group as there were no payload specialists included. The closest they came to an actual spaceflight assignment (as pointed out by Hart) would be with Johnston as she had been selected as a scientific payload specialist in 1984 as an alternate or backup astronaut for Spacelab-3 on Shuttle Mission 51-B in May 1985. Dr. Johnston, a holder of two dozen patents — mostly involving laser-surface modification research — retired from NASA in 1986 to became an university professor and later director of a hydrogen research national center in Florida. During her "astronaut" years at MSFC, she led three science experiments and helped her fellow astronauts to develop techniques to be used on Spacelab. In 1976, Johnston had indicated that she "had planned to work in hopes of going on an orbital mission in the 1980's," but it was not to be. Although Whitaker never flew on the shuttle, her materials science experiments did fly in space and her pioneering experiments provided data used to design the now on-orbit International Space Station. In her later career with NASA, she headed the Science Directorate at MSFC leading a team of 700 researchers. Before Griner's retirement from the space agency in 2000, she had served as an acting director of the Huntsville-based space center in 1998. A year later Griner received NASA's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, for her extraordinary contributions to our nation's space efforts. |
advertisement