Page 12 - mia_09-21-2017

Space is so close she feels like she can almost touch it. Nestled inside the Aero Commander, 27-year-old Geraldyne “Jerrie” Cobb coaxes her plane to 30,000 feet and then higher still. The oxygen canister and the rest of the equipment in the plane begin to float as Cobb stares out at the bluest sky she has ever seen, boundless, stretching into the infinite black reach of glittering stars and distant planets. She can barely breathe as the aircraft pushes against the invisible bounds of Earth’s atmosphere, but she stays as long as she can, alone, peering out from her perch in the pilot’s seat on the edge of world.
And then she lands, combs her hair, dabs on some lipstick, and slips into her high heels before climbing out of the plane. She pins on the enigmatic smile she’s cultivated to cover her nerves for years, ever since
the local press discovered “the girl pilot.” Cobb began learning to fly when she
was 12, got her solo pilot’s license at 16, and earned both her private pilot’s license and her commercial license by 20. Report- ers are there when she steps out of the plane. After all, the slim blond is breaking world records, and that makes good copy.
She doesn’t speak much, but she’s learned to play the game, posing demurely and humoring the reporters’ questions, which range from queries about her cooking skills to asking about her fear of grasshoppers and her measurements.
She is the perfect astronaut, decides Dr. Randolph Lovelace, head of the Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, a private clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So he administers more than 75 tests, everything from shooting ice- cold water into her ears to placing her in an isolation tank for hours at a time. Cobb emerges sure she’ll be selected to join NASA, become an astronaut, and see the stars up- close, to satisfy her “urge to feel infinite.”
But it’s 1959. She doesn’t get the call. It will be 20 years before NASA allows women into the astronaut program and even longer before the first female as- tronaut, Sally Ride, makes it to space.
“[Cobb] was ahead of her time. All of the women selected for that program were,” says Margaret Weitekamp, a historian who wrote one of the first books about what was dubbed the Mercury 13 program. “Cobb was fantastically qualified, but she was a woman, and that meant she was never going to be
an astronaut. That was the way it was.” Though many of the women, all pilots,
selected to go through physical testing to become astronaut candidates believed the tests offered a real chance of space travel, in reality, Cobb and the other 12 female pilots who were ultimately tested, ended up being show ponies, the lady as- tronauts who posed for photos but never got close to being launched into space.
Many of the women have spent the ensuing decades living their lives and sometimes pushing back against a story that wants to remember them only for the one thing they didn’t do.
Most have moved on.
But Cobb’s story isn’t that clear-cut. “Why don’t people talk about the things she accomplished? She was one of the best pilots of her generation, easily in the top
Jerrie Cobb underwent a battery of tests, including the injection of ice water into her ears and this 1960 wind-tunnel experience.
putting women in space was a real option, starting with Cobb.
“Randy Lovelace was, in many ways, a visionary,” Weitekamp says. “His interest in women participating was very grounded in that time; he was thinking they would
five, but it all stays focused on the one thing she didn’t do,” says Al Hallonquist, an ama- teur aviation historian who has studied the Mercury 13 project for more than 20 years.
One of the greatest pilots of a gen- eration never went to space, and when she lost her last chance, she left every- thing behind, finding it too painful to even speak of the Mercury 13 or her dream.
Then she disappeared. Some of the remaining women in the Mercury 13 believe Cobb is dead. She’s not. She lives on Dower Way just south of Tampa, anonymously moving through a world where most people will never know the small 87-year-old was set to become
the first woman to fly in outer space.
Photo via NASA
Passengers were known to refuse to ride on a plane piloted by a female, and the par- ents of Jerri Truhill, one of the members of the Mercury 13, threatened to put her in a nunnery when she announced she wanted to be a pilot. As the United States and Russia entered the Space Race in the late 1950s and the federal space program was established, it was not an enormous leap for Lovelace, who had once hopped out of a plane at 36,000 feet to investigate the effects of a high-altitude parachute jump, to consider women go- ing into outer space as a real possibility.
Lovelace thought women might be better suited to the task because, on aver- age, women are lighter and smaller and require less food and oxygen than men.
be someone to do the secretarial work, the pink-collar jobs he thought would be a part of space. But he also started inves- tigating women and found that women’s physiologies are just as capable as men’s. ”
In February 1960, Cobb arrived at the Lovelace Foundation for the first round of tests. Just over a year before this, the male Mercury candidates had been there for the same thing — an experience that astronaut Michael Collins later described as a series of indignities and uncertain- ties where the subject is “poked, prodded, pummeled, and pierced” and where “no orifice is inviolate, no privacy respected.”
For a week, Cobb was given more than 30 physical and psychological tests, measuring everything from the amount of blood in her body to the health of her heart, which doctors investigated by hooking her up to electrocar- diogram sensors, strapping her to a table, and tilting her body at angles that would strain and expose any weaknesses in the organ.
Once she had completed the first por- tion of testing at the Lovelace Foundation in February 1960, Cobb went to Pensacola, where the U.S. Navy gave Lovelace’s team special permission to use its aeromedical facilities, including centrifugal machines and pressure chambers, to conduct more tests.
Cobb also helped Lovelace comb through a pool of roughly 700 female pilots before he ultimately invited 24 women to take the astronaut candidate test. One of them was Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, who had never seemed to fit in anywhere outside of her par- ents’ home in Taos, New Mexico. But when she slid into the pilot’s seat of a plane at the age of 16, she felt like Amelia Earhart, right down to the haircut. Within three years, she was flying professionally, and by 22, she was a flight instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with hundreds of hours already logged in the skies.
When Funk heard about the test- ing, she called Lovelace and asked to be included. “My mind lit up with the idea of going to space. I decided I was go- ing to do it immediately,” Funk says.
Ultimately, the group that completed the first phase of testing was composed of 13 women ranging in age from 23 to 41. Some were professional working pi- lots, and some were homemakers.
Gene Nora Jessen was one of this group. At 16, she had been riding along as a member of the Civil Air Patrol when the pilot gave her the stick and let her fly for a few minutes. He said she was a natural, and Jessen decided she would be a pilot. Her family didn’t even own a car, but she scraped together the money for lessons and became a flight in- structor at the University of Oklahoma before she had even graduated from the college.
“The Mercury Seven had just been se- lected, the first men who would become astronauts,” Jessen recalls. “The >> p14
Glenn argued that testing women was a waste of time and resources.
W
omen have been involved in avia- tion since the first airplanes were invented. In the early days, women
Women are also known to have fewer heart problems and have tested bet- ter than men in isolation studies.
Astronaut candidates were supposed to be U.S. citizens who held college degrees, were jet test pilots under the age of 35, stood less than six feet tall, and had the psychological mettle to handle spaceflight and the physical stamina to pass Lovelace’s tests, but there were no formal stipulations about gender.
Lovelace shopped his idea around to the military and to NASA, where he had already designed and administered the series of tests to the male Mercury candidates, but no one was interested. The female astronaut candidate testing got off the ground only when Jackie Cochran, a wealthy female pi- lot, agreed to fund the tests. With Cochran’s backing, Lovelace began exploring whether
were called aviatrices, and though females were generally not allowed to fly commer- cially, many made names for themselves performing in aerial shows, competing in air races, and pulling off feats by establish- ing records in distance and aerobatics.
When World War II broke out, women were not allowed in combat, but female pilots joined the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, a paramilitary outfit. Over the course of the war, more than 1,000 female pilots flew every type of military aircraft, logging more than 60 million miles collectively. The women ferried planes from factories to U.S. Army Air Forces bases, chauffeured military brass, and worked as test pilots.
12
12
September21-September27,2017 NewTimes | music | cafe | film | culture | Night+Day | News | letters | coNteNts | miaminewtimes.com|browardpalmbeach.com MONTHXX–MONTHXX,2008 MIAMINEWTIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | miaminewtimes.com