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magazines and the newspapers were full of stories on them. It was all anyone could talk about. To have even a bit of knowledge about the space program, to be involved and participate in some way, it was something I had to do. I think we all felt that way.”
Nobody was supposed to know about the women’s testing program until Lovelace presented his initial findings based on Cobb’s test results at a conference in Switzerland at the end of 1960, but word began to spread.
During an annual air race in Cali- fornia, the women crammed together into a tiny motel room, and Cobb locked the door and pulled the curtains. Then they sat together and whispered about possibly becoming astronauts.
In 1961, Jessen quit her job after her boss refused to give her time off to attend the second phase of testing involving Navy jets at the Pensacola base. Funk was packed and had already bought her plane ticket to Florida. A third candidate, Sarah Ratley, who had flown for the first time in Kansas at the age of 14 and become an engineer, didn’t hesitate to inform her employer she would need to leave in the middle of a project so she could complete the testing.
But five days before they were due to arrive at the naval base in September 1961, a telegram summarily informed them the testing would not happen.
Cobb hopped on a plane to Washington, D.C., and tracked down the chief of naval operations, who explained the tests were canceled because NASA did not want to test women. Unbeknownst to the women, NASA administrator James Webb had disavowed involvement in the testing and the Navy refused to move forward. So Lovelace, who would end up being appointed NASA’s chief of space medicine, withdrew his request.
When President John Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress in May 1961 and announced the United States was going to the moon, “that was it,” Weitekamp says. “For NASA, after that, there’s no longer room for experiment- ing. Everything is focused on this goal.”
From that point on, NASA was locked on choosing white, Protestant jet test pilots, mostly from the Midwest. There was no longer interest in pursuing any avenues of research that did not lead directly to an astro- naut planting an American flag on the moon.
Only Cobb had been allowed to finish all three phases of the physical testing. She had passed with scores that rivaled those of one of the Mercury Seven’s top perform- ers, John Glenn, but it didn’t matter.
Months later, in July 1962, Cobb slid into a chair next to Janey Hart, the wife of Demo- cratic Michigan Sen. Phil Hart and a mother of eight, who had joined Cobb to try to force Congress to revive the program. The pair had worked for months, writing letters to Kennedy and to then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was heavily involved in the po- litical side of NASA. Appearing in the offices of scores of congressmen, Cobb and Hart ar- gued that women deserved to be included in the astronaut program. Their efforts garnered some interest from Congress, and a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics was convened.
Photo via NASA
Gene Nora Jessen (left), Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle, and Bernice Steadman of the Mercury 13 posed outside Launch Pad 39B near the space shuttle Discovery in this photograph from 1995.
Cobb was reticent by nature, keep- ing an enigmatic smile in place at all times to cover her nerves. She presented a good front before the congressmen.
Sitting in the hearing, conscious of a clutch of reporters and photographers, Cobb kicked off her heels and tried to get comfortable, staring up at the dais. She and Hart seemed to gain some traction with the subcommittee the first day of testimony.
But on the second day, Glenn, who had become the first to launch into manned orbit that February, ap- peared before the committee.
His words carried enormous weight. He argued that testing women or doing anything that took funding away from the main mis- sion to go to the moon was a waste of time and resources. “I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized,” Glenn told the subcommittee. “It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the air- planes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
The subcommittee sided with Glenn.
In 1963, the Soviets sent a woman into space, and the novelty of a lady as- tronaut was gone. In 1965, Lovelace died in a plane crash when his pilot flew into a canyon wall, and that was the end of any chance of reviving the program.
All of the women dealt with the disap- pointment differently. Hart focused on the nascent women’s rights movement. Ratley continued to study engineering and later married. Jessen became a pilot for stunt shows designed to sell airplanes where she met her husband and went on to start a flight school she still runs with him. But not all moved on with their lives.
Funk ran off to Europe, she says. She didn’t look at a newspaper or follow the
congressional hearings over the question of women in space, she says now. Once she returned, she gradually found ways to take the physical tests to become an astro- naut. She called in favors from university friends, sometimes just surprising people and asking if they would run tests on her.
And then there was Jerrie Cobb. hese days, some people say Cobb
is living in the Amazon with the
Cobb accepted a job with NASA as a consultant on the matter of women going to space, but in 1965 she quit and flew to the Amazon to give food, clothing, shoes, and basic medical supplies to the natives. She established the Jerrie Cobb Foundation to handle donations that funded her missionary work and spent more than 40 years mak- ing countless runs to drop off more clothes and medical supplies and seeking to convert anyone whenever she spied a chance. (In 1981, an Oklahoma congressman nominated her for a Nobel Peace Prize for her humani- tarian work, although she did not win.)
But she wasn’t living in the Amazon full- time. In the 1960s, Cobb shared an old three- story house with Ivy Coffee, an Oklahoma journalist who had chronicled Cobb’s career since the would-be astronaut began making headlines in the little town of Ponca City. Janet Reitman, a writer who would eventu- ally co-author Cobb’s first autobiography, Woman Into Space, also stayed at the house.
Though Cobb was devoted to her work in the jungle, she still wanted to become an as- tronaut, an urge that quietly remained inside her for the next four decades. She kept her- self fit, competed in air races and appeared at air shows, published a pair of autobiogra- phies, and even allowed some journalists and
writers to travel with her. When she wasn’t in the Amazon, she lived in a modest home in Florida and kept a place in Oklahoma. She was often identified as the woman who was almost an astronaut, and she didn’t seem to shy away from that description.
Meanwhile, Funk gradually annoyed the other members of the group with her continued insistence that she was going to space. When women were finally accepted to NASA in 1978, Funk began reapplying. She sent in her application four times be- fore giving up. Her relentless drive has left the other remaining members of the Mer- cury 13 perplexed. “She did so many things and accomplished so much, but she just can’t seem to get over this,” Ratley says.
Cobb bided her time. And then, in 1998, it was announced that Glenn, by then a senator, would be launched on the space shuttle Discovery to allow scientists to ex- amine how space affects the human body. It helped that they had Glenn’s Lovelace test results, which had chronicled the state of his body when he became an as- tronaut, down to the smallest details.
Cobb saw her chance and “came out of the Amazon,” according to dozens of stories written about her at the time. She promoted her second autobiography, published in 1997, granted scores of interviews, contacted national women’s rights organizations, and even asked the remaining members of the Mercury 13 to sign a petition ask- ing NASA to include her in the age study.
NASA officials were not persuaded. Glenn went back to space. Cobb never launched.
“Jerrie really believed in it, and she may have wanted it more than anyone else,” Ratley says. “Even in her 70s, she was still trying. But after that, she became more of an introvert.”
Al Hallonquist, a retired police officer and amateur space historian, met >> p17
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indigenous tribes. Others be- lieve she’s dead. None of it is true.
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