During the 1950s and 1960s, Cochran demonstrated that a woman could fly almost anything, hold more records than anyone else, and win the most prestigious trophies. Six times she received the annual Harmon Trophy as the world’s best aviatrix. Cochran held commercial and transport pilot licenses and had a business in addition to being a competitor. She later rose to the rank of colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Cochran approached aviation as her career, and as a leader in aviation organizations she encouraged women pilots. Her influence was unparalleled in bringing women into aviation and helping to change attitudes about women pilots. Her exceptional piloting skill in many different aircraft made credible the ability of a woman to fly as one of the best.[22]

  Two other women pilots achieved high acclaim and influence by the 1960s. Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb had amassed seven thousand hours in flight and three world records before she turned thirty. Like Cochran, she also gained access to military aircraft on occasion. Cobb desperately wanted the United States to put the first woman in space and would have been thrilled to be that woman. Jerrie Mock, a wife and mother rather than a full-time aviator, who was sometimes called the “Flying Housewife,” flew solo around the world in 1964. She was the first woman to do so, becoming the first woman to fly across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and making those flights in her secondhand single-engine Cessna. Mock also set various speed and distance records. Both women received many honors and awards, including a Harmon Trophy for Cobb, who leveraged her fame to promote women’s right to be astronauts, whereas Mock modestly tried to avoid publicity and underappreciated the significance of her achievement. Together they inspired many young women to follow their dreams into the sky.[23]

  Advocacy was another way to open cockpits to women, and a number of organizations with that mission existed by the 1960s. The Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots formed in 1929 to see women aviators treated seriously as equals or peers to men who flew and to preserve the history of women pilots, had grown over thirty years to have more than one hundred chapters across the country. Whirly Girls, founded in 1955 as an organization for women helicopter pilots, likewise sought camaraderie and communication among women in aviation. Both shared the goal of advancing women in aviation and used educational programs and scholarships toward that end. As pressure built in the 1970s and 1980s to open more aviation roles to women, whether in the cockpit or on the ground, these organizations were visible and vocal.

  Pilots in the Lovelace Woman in Space Research Program, 1960–1962

  In 1960, two aerospace medicine specialists who had managed much of NASA’s evaluation program for men under consideration to become astronauts had an idea. They wondered how women would perform under the same rigorous physical and mental tests, initially a battery of medical exams that took an entire week to administer and measured every conceivable parameter of health, strength, and stamina. They hatched the idea of conducting a private research program to test women exactly as the men had been tested to discover whether women might be suited to withstand the conditions of spaceflight. Comparing data from the most fit male and female pilots would challenge the notion that women were the weaker sex and perhaps give NASA a practical reason to recruit women candidates.[24]

  The research program was conducted in 1960–1962 by W. Randolph Lovelace II, who was the medical director of his family’s private Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and director of its research arm, the Lovelace Foundation. A twenty-eight-year-old pilot who was one of the best in the world, Jerrie Cobb, was the first woman in this program to undergo the same physical and psychological fitness tests that the astronauts had passed. Two women pilots already had some exposure to the testing regimen in 1959, one in cooperation with NASA for a cover story in Look magazine provocatively titled “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” and the other at the invitation of Air Force medical researchers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but neither had the full evaluation that Lovelace planned.[25]

  Cobb reported to the Lovelace Clinic in early 1960 for the first phase of stress testing, a regimen that examined every system in her body for any physiological flaws or weakness. She then moved on to a second stage of psychological stress testing and a battery of intelligence and personality tests. Cobb performed exceptionally well, and the examiners reported that “she has very much to recommend her for selection as an astronaut candidate.”[26]

  Lovelace and Cobb kept quiet about this accomplishment until he announced the results of her testing in August 1960. Cobb became an overnight sensation, sought after for interviews. The New York Times, Washington Post, Life, Look, and Time magazines, among others, hailed Cobb as America’s first prospective woman astronaut or the first successful female astronaut candidate. Some went so far as to call her America’s first woman astronaut and predicted that she would fly as soon as 1962. Even as they praised her mettle, though, they diminished her by focusing on her figure, size, and “girlish” look, and using terms like “space lady,” “girl astronaut” and other trivializing labels.[27]

  Meanwhile, Cobb and Jackie Cochran scoured aviation records to identify other women pilots who might be eligible and willing to volunteer to undergo the same tests. Of twenty-five women invited, nineteen participated and twelve more passed the first round of testing.[28] Three moved into the second round of stress testing, but scheduling others was delayed. The thirteen women who successfully completed most of the astronaut fitness tests, including Jerrie Cobb, were Myrtle Cagle, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Irene Leverton, Bernice “B” Steadman, Gene Nora Stumbough, and Geraldine “Jerri” Sloan.

  The third and highly anticipated final phase of testing—wearing pressure suits, simulating high-altitude flight in a pressure chamber, and testing the effects of gravity (“pulling g’s”) by flying in high-speed Navy jets—was to occur at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. Only Cobb completed this testing in a one-time arrangement that Lovelace brokered. The Navy declined his request to test the other twelve upon realizing that NASA had not endorsed the research program or these expensive tests. At that point, the Lovelace Woman in Space program came to a sudden, disappointing end.

  Jerrie Cobb and Jane Hart, the pilot wife of Michigan’s Senator Philip Hart, for months campaigned around Washington for continued testing of women pilots and consideration of women as prospective astronauts. They met with government officials, gave talks around town, and had an audience with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to seek his support.[29] They even managed to secure a congressional hearing in July 1962 to examine whether NASA was discriminating against women in astronaut selection. Cobb and Hart presented their arguments for women’s ability as pilots and their proven physical and mental fitness. They also argued that women were eager to do their civic service to the nation as astronauts and that the United States, as a point of pride and leadership, should send the first woman into space.

  NASA countered that the space program did not yet have a requirement for women and no woman could yet meet the essential qualification of test pilot experience. The agency did not currently have a need or resources to train women for the job. Contrary to Hart and Cobb, Jackie Cochran agreed with NASA, asserting that it was not the right time to launch a women’s astronaut program during the urgent space race.

  All outstanding pilots, the Lovelace women made successful careers in aviation at a time when women were rare in the business. In 2021, one of the thirteen women, Wally Funk, made it to space.[30] Many years after she had applied to NASA four times without success, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin space company, invited the eighty-two-year-old to join him on a brief suborbital flight, finally achieving her dream.

  All the Lovelace women were ahead of the times and eager to aim for spaceflight. The Lovelace program was the first modern effort to take women’s bodies seriously, to examine the extent of their physical and mental toughness, and to challenge beliefs about women as the weaker sex by sustained, rigorous research. This challenge originated in the medical research community but through publicity spread into public discussion about the abilities and roles of women. It also raised the issue of sex discrimination before laws were passed to ban it. Through Cobb’s and Hart’s public campaign for women astronauts, the possibility received favorable media attention and congressional consideration. That in itself was a remarkable accomplishment.

  Even so, when NASA seriously began to consider recruiting women into the astronaut corps during the mid-1970s, the results of the Lovelace research program were not taken into account. Indeed, the Lovelace Woman in Space program faded from memory until the 1990s and 2000s, when researchers identified those pilots as pioneering women and set about to revive their untold story and significance, culminating in a 2018 Netflix documentary, The Mercury 13, that told the story mostly in the participants’ own words. Some writers were eager to claim that these women paved the way or opened the door for women astronauts. In fact, they had not done so in any direct way; they met a dead end. Only Shannon Lucid, an avid pilot among the earliest women to apply to NASA for the job of astronaut had ever heard of them. Eileen Collins, who came to regard them highly enough to invite them to her space shuttle launches, did not know of them until she was already a NASA pilot astronaut.[31]

  Lovelace Women in Space participants at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1994: (from left to right) Sarah Gorelik Ratley, Gene Nora Stumbough Jessen, Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Irene Leverton, Jane Hart, Jerri Sloan Truhill, Rhea Hurrle Woltman, Bernice Steadman, Wally Funk. Photo by Michael Althaus

  As their story has been told and retold in books, documentaries, and elsewhere, some repeated misconceptions have distorted certain facts. The Lovelace research program was private, voluntary, unofficial, and independent; NASA was not involved in it, and thus NASA did not cancel it. The program was not hidden or secret but received considerable publicity at the time. The women who were evaluated never trained to be astronauts, nor were they applicants or candidates for selection as astronauts. They were highly qualified pilots, but they did not have the right kind of piloting experience that NASA required for astronauts. They were never called the Mercury 13 until a television producer coined the term in the early 1990s. Such embellishments have to some extent layered their story with myth. The facts alone are a compelling story of “the first systematic testing of women’s capabilities for spaceflight” and an important chapter in the progress of women toward spaceflight.[32]

  Women Military Pilots

  The most important and effective way to enable women pilots to qualify as astronauts was to admit them into military aviation.[33] That was originally the core requirement for becoming an astronaut, but women were simply not allowed. The forces of the civil rights movement, women’s movement, and the military’s own needs in the 1960s prompted a slow, incremental approach lasting more than thirty years until women gained equal standing in military aviation. A long-held tradition of gallantry—based on beliefs that women should be protected and that military aviation was too dangerous for women—had to be eradicated, along with beliefs that women’s temperaments were unstable, their bodies not strong enough, and their presence disruptive to discipline and morale. That effort resulted in three decades of “gender wars” within the military, played out through study commissions, resistance, and other strategies. Change did not come easily.

  Women in the military services during the 1960s were primarily nurses and medical specialists or “typewriter soldiers.”[34] As a visible minority, these early military women were more concerned with acceptance than equality. Their professional code was to be highly qualified and present a “neat, feminine appearance,” properly dressed and groomed, fit and trim. The more challenging technical positions were closed as “unsuitable for ladies.” As long as the draft satisfied military manpower requirements, there was no incentive to recruit more women or expand the roles open to them.

  The real thrust for change had to come from within the military services. During the Vietnam War era, to meet their workforce needs, the services began thinking about expanded training and new roles for women in aircraft maintenance, air traffic control, and instruction. Most women pilots were in general aviation, flying small planes and being flight instructors, and there were so few women in aeronautical/aerospace engineering—only 1 percent of undergraduate women—as to be invisible. The services removed limits on the number of women employed in the armed forces but still barred them from being pilots.

  A 1967 article in Air Force Times made a then-progressive argument for women pilots in noncombat flying, in response to internal pilot shortages.[35] In 1969 the US Air Force opened its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program to collegiate women, as the US Navy did in 1972. ROTC could open a path to aviation. The first woman to complete the ROTC program was commissioned into the Air Force in 1971, coincidentally the same year that the first woman achieved the Air Force rank of brigadier (one-star) general. ROTC was a route for many young men and women to enter into military service as commissioned officers, especially in aviation, and a number of those later selected to be astronauts followed this path.

  A decade of change began in 1973 as the draft ended, military services shifted to all-volunteer forces, and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution seemed on the verge of success.[36] Recognizing women as a sizable recruitment pool, the services sought ways to appeal to career-minded women. They dropped most restrictions on the types of jobs women could hold and opened promotion paths, pilot training, and eventually test pilot training to women. That year, the secretary of the Navy announced that a group of eight women had been selected to enter flight training as a “pilot project” to determine whether using women pilots for noncombat duty in helicopters and transport aircraft was feasible. Six earned their wings of gold, and the Navy never looked back. By 1977 the Navy and Naval Reserve had five thousand women in aviation as pilots and in various other roles.[37]

  The first women to enter flight training in the Army and Coast Guard earned their wings, too, primarily in helicopters. The Air Force lagged in bringing women into flight training because it considered all pilots to be combat pilots, and women were legally restricted from combat duty. However, it did begin to admit women into other aviation roles, and the first woman, Jane Leslie Holley, graduated as an Air Force flight test engineer in 1975. By the end of 1975, the Air Force announced that women would begin pilot training to determine how they could be used outside of combat, and in 1976 two women’s classes entered its undergraduate pilot training program in T-38 Talon supersonic jets. As in the other services, the women student pilots did as well as the men and toppled concerns that they could not handle military aviation. Flying military jets was finally the opening women needed to qualify for consideration as astronauts.

  The service academies—the entry point for future military leaders and alma mater of some of the first astronauts—did not open to women until 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-106 requiring admission of women. The women of the class of 1980, admitted in 1976, were the first to graduate from the Air Force, Army, and Naval academies despite resistance by those wanting to preserve these bastions of masculinity.[38] Attrition rates for women and men were comparable, demonstrating that the high standards could be met by both sexes and women would not cause the rigorous curriculum to collapse. The first woman academy graduate to enter the astronaut corps, Susan J. Helms, arrived in 1990. She graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1980 and then graduated as the Outstanding Flight Test Engineer at the Air Force Test Pilot School in 1988. This was as early as it was possible for women to gain the full military piloting experience originally required of astronauts.[39]

  Not until the 1980s did the military services begin to admit women into their test pilot schools, several years after—spoiler alert—NASA had decided to start recruiting women astronauts. Although the first woman, helicopter pilot Colleen Nevius, graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland, in 1983, the military test pilot pipeline was sparsely populated by women for almost ten years. Neither men nor women could jump directly into test pilot schools; they had to meet certain qualifications in assignments and time served and compete for a limited number of slots. That path could take ten or more years to navigate. Test pilot school included two tracks: flight test engineer and flight test pilot.

  Other first women to emerge through the military test pilot pipeline graduated from the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Flight test engineer Jane Leslie Holley graduated in 1975 and submitted her application in the 1977 astronaut recruitment but was not selected. Susan J. Helms followed in 1988, graduating as a flight test engineer. In 1989 the first woman graduated from Edwards as a test pilot, Jacqueline S. “Jackie” Parker, a former NASA software analyst and member of the flight controller support team in Houston who then chose a career in the Air Force. Right behind her, graduating in 1990 as the second female Air Force test pilot, was Eileen M. Collins, who applied to NASA while at Edwards and was immediately selected as a pilot astronaut candidate. Collins and Helms were selected together into the 1990 astronaut class.[40] NASA seized opportunities to add women test pilots who met the toughest requirements for the astronaut corps, but there have not been many available to apply to NASA, and of those few women test pilots, some elected to continue their military careers instead.