Mercury 13

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Seven members of the Mercury 13 in 1995

Mercury 13 is the name of a group of female pilots who worked at Dr. William Randolph (Randy) Lovelace successfully passed medical tests designed for the first male astronauts in the Mercury program . The project was privately funded and was not part of NASA's astronaut recruitment . The aim of the project was to show that women are physically and psychologically capable of surviving the rigors of a stay in space. Despite lobbying for female astronauts from some of those involved in the project, specifically Lovelace and test takers Jerrie Cobb and Janey Hart, NASA could not be convinced to include women in its astronaut program in the 1960s.

Course of the project

Lovelace, who helped develop the tests for the male astronauts in the Mercury program , invited Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb to undergo the same tests. Cobb was the first American to pass all three test phases. After the results were published at a conference in Stockholm, Cobb and Lovelace set about recruiting more women for the project, including entrepreneur and pilot Jacqueline Cochran , who bore the remaining costs for the project.

Of the slightly more than 20 women tested, 13 passed the tests; these women came to be known as the Mercury 13 . The 13 women were:

  • Myrtle Cagle
  • Jerrie Cobb
  • Jan Dietrich
  • Marion Dietrich
  • Wally Funk
  • Janey Hart
  • Jean Hixson
  • Gene Nora Stumbough
  • Irene Leverton
  • Bernice Steadman
  • Sarah Ratley
  • Jerri Truhill
  • Rhea Woltman

Since the tests for the women had to be inserted between the officially scheduled tests at the Lovelace clinic, most of the women were there alone at different times and did not get to know each other. Jerrie Cobb kept in touch with all women by letter and wrote to them under the name FLAT (Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees) .

Jerrie Cobb, Rhea Hurrle, and Wally Funk underwent additional testing and psychological evaluation in Oklahoma City. A few days before a few of the women in Pensacola , Florida, were due to undergo advanced tests on military equipment and jets at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine, they received a telegram telling them that the project was abandoned. The Navy was not ready to provide their equipment for an unofficial project.

Aftermath of the project

More than 20 years after the Mercury 13, Sally Ride became the first American and third woman worldwide to take off into space in 1983 and Eileen Collins became the first American female pilot in 1995 .

In May 2007, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh awarded the eight surviving women honorary doctorates for their "pioneering spirit and efforts in advancing women's rights."

The Mercury 13 also found its way into fiction. In the computer game Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space (1992), for example, a random event was triggered in which the player was asked to accept women as astronauts. The names of these space travelers are partly those of the Mercury 13, called Cagle, Cobb, Hart, Funk and the Dietrich sisters. In the novel “Space Girls” by Maiken Nielsen , published in 2019, the story of Mercury 13 and a number of invented protagonists is told.

literature

  • Martha Ackmann: The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight . Random House, 2003, ISBN 0-375-50744-2 .
  • Tanya Lee Stone: Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream . Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA, 2009, ISBN 978-0763645021 .
  • Stephanie Nolen: Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race . Avalon Publishing, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-56858-319-8 .
  • Margaret Weitekamp: Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women in Space Program . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8018-7994-9 .

Web links

Commons : Mercury 13  - collection of images, videos and audio files