As she stood with her back turned and slightly apart from the group, her faded brown leather jacket and long blonde ponytail offered no information regarding the age of the woman. Along with a number of other people who stood across the Banana River from the launchpad, she waited for the Space Shuttle Challenger to lift off for its STS-93 mission. When she slowly turned her head to look at those sharing this coveted location with her, the expression on her face was etched with the lines of time.
Forty years earlier, Jerrie Cobb sought to sit in a seat similar to the one presently occupied by Lt. Colonel Eileen Collins in Challenger. Looking at the launch pad, Jerrie was taken down memory lane and remembered how she led the group of women who were huddled around her in a quest to become the first female astronauts. Now she watches as Lt Col. Collins becomes the first women to command a space flight. It was due to Collins’ efforts Jerrie and the others stood where they did because she wanted to share her special moment with the women who were the pioneers responsible for her having the opportunity to be where she now sat.
The countdown continues . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven; then the clock suddenly stops at ‘six’. When a complication adds another delay, someone is heard to say “T minus six seconds!” Unable to hold back, Jerrie Sloan Truhill hollers, “Try T minus thirty-eight years!” Forty years ago it could have been them; they were almost astronauts.
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Members of the Baby-Boomer generation remember back to their school years when NASA began the Mercury program, composed of seven male astronauts - Alan Shepard - the first American to go into space, John Glenn - the first to orbit the earth, Walter M. ‘Wally” Schirra, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, Scott Carpenter, Virgil I “Gus” Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. They were hailed as heroes as their beaming faces filled the cover of Life magazine on September 14, 1959 with the headline, Astronauts – Ready to Make History.
On September 21,1959, Life magazine’s cover revealed seven women – the wives of these seven men, with the tagline Astronauts’ Wives: Their Inner Thoughts, Worries.” The media at that time sought to portray these women as homebodies who carried on with the daily routines as their husbands braved a path into the last frontier. How soon the media seemed to forget the many ‘homebodies’ who enlisted in the armed forces as WAVES and WACS during World War II and contributed to the cause in shipyards, factories and steel mills. They did their country proud by heeding the call and going where they were needed.
At the age of 12, Jerrie Cobb became a pilot. By 1959, she had logged more than 7,000 hours in the air - almost more than John Glenn with 5,000 hours and Scott Carpenter with 2,900 hours – put together. Her past experiences included ferrying military aircraft around the world and she held world records for altitude and light-plane speed. These records involved stats including both women AND men.
In September of that year, Jerrie met Donald Flickinger and Randy Lovelace. Flickinger was known for having his finger on the pulse of manned space travel. Both men considered this young pilot to be the perfect test subject. Medical tests indicated women stood up to isolation and pain better than men, but no test results were yet available to compare the ability of a woman to hold up during space-fitness testing and they wanted to obtain that data. They were in hopes Jerrie would volunteer to offer them the answers to their questions. Having been on the receiving end of discrimination when it came to flying due to the fact she was a woman, Jerrie was thrilled to know the men standing in front of her just might have the power to turn her deep set space dreams into reality. She jumped at the offer!
Unfortunately, Jerrie would soon learn the Air Force had other ideas. Flickinger’s superiors told him they did not want to conduct further testing on women for spaceflight. Cobb received a letter of apology from Flickinger stating Project WISE was over, yet he also encouraged Lovelace and Cobb to continue on and not give up; instead, keep working ‘underground’ until a sufficient amount of test material could be accumulated to present a convincing case to NASA. Flickinger believed in never showing his hand until he knew he was ready to play it.
During this time, Jerrie worked herself hard – getting up at 5:00 a.m. each morning, going for a run, then off to work. Breakfast consisted of hamburgers and steak to stoke her body with additional protein. After work, she was at it again – on a stationery bike for twenty miles a day and running five miles a day. Extra sleep was also incorporated into the routine. Failure was not an option in Jerrie’s mind. She carried on her shoulders the weight of responsibility and opportunity for a woman to go into space. If she failed, she feared no other woman would be given the chance to follow through on what Jerrie hoped to accomplish.
Phase One of astronaut testing began for Jerrie on February 14, 1960. Rather than making a trip to her parents’ house as she had told her co-workers, Jerrie secretly arrived in New Mexico. Here she had blood tests and 100+ x-rays. Her lungs were tested by blowing into a tube. “It’s the lung-power equivalent of showing muscle strength by hitting a sledgehammer on a scale.’
Freezing cold water was injected into one ear to freeze the inner ear bone and induce a sense of vertigo. When the cold water impacted her inner ear, Jerrie was unable to lift her hand back up when it fell from the arm of the chair. She then went into a whirl and the meter immediately started running to see how long it would take her to ‘come to.’ Though the pain involved in the test was bad, it did not compare to how she felt when she saw another syringe headed her way to perform the same test on the other ear.
Jerrie had a battery of ‘firsts’ thrown at her – a 3’ rubber hose put down her throat; drinking radioactive water; giving herself an enema prior to going to bed and after getting up; and being rocked back & forth numerous times on a tilt table - among others. She was flown to a secret location in the mountains of Los Alamos, New Mexico where she was placed inside the belly of a machine to measure the level of radiation in her body. On top of this there were questions – 197 of them – designed to see if they would make her angry and lose her cool.
Jerrie Cobb was the first woman to complete the same battery of 87 tests previously given to the Mercury 7 astronauts. She passed! The doctors reported Jerrie came through it with fewer complaints than the men offered. Now she was told by Randy Lovelace to ‘lay low’. He had a speech to deliver at the international space conference in Stockholm where he planned to make a special announcement. In addition, the August 28th issue of Life magazine would soon hit the news stand with an article detailing Jerrie’s Phase I testing, complete with pictures.
The day after Lovelace made his announcement, Jerrie’s phone began to ring off the wall – along with those of her parents and friends. Everyone wanted to meet this amazing woman. The sudden search for her made Jerrie feel like she understood what it was like to be on the FBI’s 10-Most-Wanted list. Not only did Life run an article on her, but so did Sports Illustrated. She also dealt with a lot of editorial cartoons poking fun at her and socially stereotype interviews questioning why she wanted to go into space rather than get married and raise a family.
Jerrie’s biggest downer was learning NASA was not interested. They announced they “never had a plan to put a woman in space; it doesn’t have one today, and it doesn’t expect to have any in the foreseeable future.” NASA was also concerned about the physiological differences between men & women. Men like Lovelace and Flickinger felt the concern was utter nonsense, but the big boys at NASA did not see it that way. The media, however, considered Cobb to be America’s first lady astronaut.
Lovelace sought out additional testing sights for Jerrie and after being turned down by the Air Force to use their facilities, received an okay from the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. Jerrie arrived in May 1961. Thankfully during her first hot, sticky night she slept well, because she was going to need it.
The grueling drills began the next morning. Jerrie was expected to complete the same fitness drills Navy pilots were put through, with no allowances made for her weight, size or gender – long runs in humid heat; sit ups, chin-ups and climbing over a 6-1/2’ wall. The first time she made a run at the wall, she failed, but the second time she clawed her way over it. No way was a little thing like a wall going to defeat her! Add to this, Jerrie dealt with a lot of men who wanted her to fail. They did not feel she belonged there. The more they cheered for her defeat, the more successful she became.
By September, twelve additional women were preparing to following in Jerrie’s footsteps. Testing of these twelve showed the results of Cobb’s tests were not due to the fact she was one exceptional woman – instead, the other twelve showed the same remarkable ‘staying power’ Jerrie demonstrated. The questions now being asked were – “What is a woman capable of?” and “What is a woman’s place?”
The publicity brought about by an article featured in McCall’s magazine regarding Lovelace’s program became a public relations nightmare for NASA. America now wanted to know what NASA’s position was on women joining the space program. It was a question NASA was not ready to answer. Then, disaster struck for Jerrie . . . just prior to the additional 12 women joining Cobb in Pensacola, Lovelace called her to say the Navy had cancelled all further testing. When she asked why, he did not have an answer to give her. Determined to learn the reason, Cobb was on a plane to Washington, D.C.
The space race was more politics than science. President Kennedy wanted to see the Americans best the Russians. Add to that sending a woman to do a man’s job was seen at that time to project the image of international weakness. Seven rugged male astronauts were better equipped to ‘show up’ the Russians. Lovelace was also saddled with the problem of staying in business. Maintaining the Lovelace Foundation required him to continue working with NASA. If NASA did not want women, he could not rock the boat if he expected to keep working with them.
After proving women were physically capable of becoming astronauts, Cobb needed to prove they also had the right to be astronauts. Cobb felt it was time to do battle and warned others she was about to make a ‘small roar’. Being a NASA consultant, Jerrie started to fly around the country and speak about how women were an asset for NASA. She also went to the Bahamas to plead her case at a NASA meeting. A letter arrived from Hiden T. Cox with NASA’s department public affairs. Expecting bad news from him, Jerrie was not disappointed. “The future use of women astronauts is possible, but at what time in the future programs is another matter entirely. Despite the manifest interest in your proposal from audiences who hear you speak, I am afraid that at the present we cannot undertake an additional program training women to be astronauts.”
While all this was going on, the Russians again bested the USA in the space race. On June 16, 1963, they sent Valentina Tereshkova into space. Tereshkova was neither a scientist nor a pilot; she was merely a passenger – but she was still the first woman to make it into space. When Cobb later met the Russian, Tereshkova told Cobb she had been her role model and felt Jerrie would be the first. Then she asked Jerrie, “What happened?” Jerrie had no answer and NASA did not feel it owed an explanation.
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Fast forward to 1978 and Sally Ride. Sally’s world was different than Jerrie’s. Woman now had a new role in society and doors which were closed to Jerrie opened to Sally. The women who joined the astronaut class in 1978 were allowed to dream – and dream they did. On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space as she rode aboard the Challenger.
July 23, 1999 was another giant leap for womankind with Eileen Collins in Challenger’s driver’s seat. She was the commander of the mission. Jerrie watched as the countdown ended and the rockets ignited which created a blinding light in a wall of flame. The earth beneath her began to rumble, the shuttle broke loose from its booster rockets and calm returned to the area. Four years earlier when Collins took off as the first woman to pilot the shuttle, she carried with her a gold pin Jerrie gave her depicting a Colombian bird. This time as Eileen took off, though Jerrie once again remained on earth, her hopes and dreams were headed into orbit with Eileen.
"It's logical that a woman will be next and there is no one in America more qualified and deserving to be in that space shuttle than Jerrie."
NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin
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