In April of 1959, NASA selected seven male astronauts from a field of 69 candidates to pilot the Mercury capsules into space. The selection process centered around performance on a battery of physical and psychological tests developed and administered by the Lovelace Clinic, a major center for aero-medical research. The Mercury Seven became famous, but hardly anyone has heard of the Mercury Thirteen.
At the same time the male pilots were being evaluated, the clinic’s founder, Randy Lovelace, assembled a similar group of female pilots for evaluation. His reasoning was simple: women were lighter and so required less propellant to boost to orbit. They were also less prone to heart attacks, and he suspected that they were less subject to claustrophobia and isolation. Lovelace and Air Force General Donald Flickinger jointly founded the Women In Space Earliest (WSE) program, but before any testing could take place, the Air Force cancelled the project.
Undaunted, Lovelace formed the Women in Space Program (WSP) and began subjecting the female candidates to the same battery of tests as the males. At the completion of the tests, thirteen candidates passed, giving the “Mercury Thirteen,” a higher success rate than the male candidates. The four leading female graduates had scores as high or higher than every male candidate. The results of those tests were published for the first in this September’s issue of Advances in Physiology Education. In some cases the women did much better than the male subjects.
For example, before the female candidates were tested, the longest any subject (all of them male) had undergone sensory deprivation without experiencing hallucinations was six hours. When Jerrie Cobb was tested, she went over nine hours without ill effects, at which time the test controllers terminated the experiment. Later two other female candidates went ten hours without ill effects before the controllers terminated the test.
There is also anecdotal evidence that the testing of the female candidates was more rigorous than that for the male candidates. The sensory deprivation (SD) test for the women was conducted submerged in an enclosed cold water tank. John Glenn’s memoir, however, describes his SD test as lasting only four hours and being conducted in a dimly lit room, in which he sat and was given a pen and paper.
In the end, however, no amount of test data or arguments concerning weight savings could push open that door in 1959 – at least not in the United States. NASA added an additional requirement that the candidates be familiar with military test aircraft – which women could not as they were not at that time accepted as military pilots.
Four years later, the first woman rode into space – cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. It would be another twenty years before Sally Ride joined the crew of the Challenger space shuttle and became the first American woman in space.
It could have been a lot different.
We can’t change history, but we can at least take a moment to remember the forgotten “Mercury 13.”
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