Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes

COLLINS: From Soundprint and producer Richard Paul, this is “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes,” stories of women in space. I’m Eileen Collins, Air Force pilot, Astronaut, and the first woman commander of a Space Shuttle flight.

MUSIC, THEN MONTAGE OF LITTLE GIRLS
GIRL 1: When I grow up I wanna be a doctor.
GIRL 2: I think that when I grow up I will be a photographer.
GIRL 3: When I grow up, I’m going to be a scientist
GIRL 4: I’m going to be an advertising executive when I grow up.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

In second grade I had this farfetched dream. Something only a few people could aspire to. Not an astronaut. I wanted to be a professional singer when I grew up. Of course there was one problem with that; I couldn’t sing. When I tried out for 2nd grade choir, I was cut.

FADE UP MONTAGE OF LITTLE GIRLS
GIRL 5: I think that when I grow up…
GIRL 6: I’m gonna be…
GIRL 7: Some day I want to be a…
GIRL 8: I want to be an artist when I grow up.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

I went to Catholic school. A lot of my girlfriends wanted to be nuns. Others wanted to be secretaries or nurses. That’s what girls were allowed to dream of back then. Most girls, anyway.

MUSIC REMAINS UNDER

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: My parents told me to go for whatever I wanted …
CROSS FADE TO
PEGGY: My parents told me to go for whatever I wanted and I think that was very strong in my background.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: I was never held back,
CROSS FADE TO
CAROLYNN: I was never held back, or it was never referred to that, “That’s just for girls,” or what have you.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: My dad was pretty impressed with my prowess as a chemical engineer in fourth grade!
CROSS FADE TO
JO ANN: My dad was pretty impressed with my prowess as a chemical engineer in fourth grade! And even though there were no magazine articles about women out doing things like that, it didn’t occur to me that I could not do it.

COLLINS: We’re going to hear now from women who dreamed of more. NASA’s first women scientists and engineers. The women who helped get us to the Moon.

MUSIC SHIFTS

My name is Nancy Grace Roman. I was at NASA headquarters for 21 years.

My name is Ann Merwerth. I worked for NASA for 36 years.

My name is Carolyn Huntoon and I began my career in NASA in 1968 to about 97.

My name is Jo Ann Morgan I started to work in 1958 and I retired from NASA in 2003.

I’m Peggy Yohner and I started at NASA in February of 1948. It was not NASA at that time. It was just an aeronautical research facility.

MUSIC UP AND ENDS

COLLINS: In the 1630s, prevailing scientific thought was that the Earth was the center of the universe. Galileo was arrested for saying otherwise. In the early 1960s, the prevailing scientific thought was that men were the center of the universe. And that women had no place in science. These are the women who felt otherwise.

PEGGY: All the way through college, I was one of one or two girls in my math classes. I actually had a calculus teacher who took one look at the two of us and turned his nose up and you could tell -- he did not want women in math.

NANCY: My high school guidance teacher -- when I went to her and said I’d like to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin -- looked down her nose at me and asked, “What lady would take mathematics -- instead of Latin?”

COLLINS: But the hurdles couldn’t hamper a young girl’s passion. And these women had a passion for science, math and engineering. Here’s Carolyn Huntoon.

MUSIC IN

CAROLYNN: I knew that by the time I was in high school that I was going into science. I think the spark came from studying the human body in high school. Learning that you could put all kinds of food in your mouth and it could give the nutrients you needed in your stomach and intestines and you’d get rid of what your body didn’t need; and to me that was fascinating.

PEGGY: When I got into high school, it was my first exposure to algebra. And I fell in love with that I really did.

JO ANN: Fourth grade, my dad gave me a chemistry set. And I blew out a little piece of the wall. And luckily (laughs) my dad was pretty impressed. He said, “My goodness Jo Ann, how did you do this?” And I said, “Oh, it was the chemistry set daddy, the chemistry set.”

MUSIC ENDS
COLLINS: But for women growing up in the 1940s and 50s, a passion for science and engineering didn’t mean a career in science and engineering. Amy Foster is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida.

AMY FOSTER: It’s not a place I want to go back to as a woman (chuckles). It’s not a place I want to go back to.

COLLINS: During the Second World War women who hadn’t been in the workforce built planes and tanks and supported the war effort through their work.

AMY FOSTER: Well, when the war came to an end, women were told, “Thank you for your service. Go back home and have babies.” And that attitude in 1945 stayed strong through the 1950s and into the early 1960s.

COLLINS: As a result, the number of women scientists and engineers – and the number of women who wanted to be – was tiny. Margaret Weitekamp is a curator with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: Very often, for women who were interested in the sciences or in engineering in the late 1950s, they would often be the only woman or one of very few women in those college programs

MUSIC IN

COLLINS: That is, if they could get into a college program at all. Here’s NASA Engineer Ann Merwerth.

ANN: I wanted to go to Georgia Tech and I applied thinking that would be no problem. But it was an all-male school. I found shortly thereafter that most of the engineering schools were male schools.

JO ANN: I started as a freshman at the University of Florida and there were at that time no women in the engineering school so my counselor, when she went over my exam scores, she said, “You would be wonderful if you go to the business school.”

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The women who had succeeded in fields in aviation, and science, and engineering; moving into the workforce was another hurdle to get over. Even with a degree, there was an expectation that young women wouldn’t necessarily have the career aspirations that a young man would.

COLLINS: That was certainly the case for engineer Ann Merwarth and for astronomer Nancy Grace Roman.

NANCY: I was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. But I realized that I had no chance at tenure. I didn’t know of any woman who had tenure in a research observatory.

ANN: One of the first places; I interviewed for a position with IBM in Atlanta and they showed me two pay scales. Here’s the pay scale for women -- right next to it, the pay scale for men at about 30% -- 30-35% higher for the men. I bought a book and looked at places that hired people that had the kind of education that I had and I wrote letters to them all. I had gotten an offer from the Naval Research Lab, Dahlgren, which was really out in the boonies. So I kept on going, and I saw the sign for Goddard Space Flight Center and said, “I am here for an interview.” And they did looked at me like I had two heads. So they sent me off and by the time I got back to the personnel building I had three job offers from Goddard.

NANCY: Actually, NASA was a great place for a woman to work in the early 60s, in spite of the fact that there were so few of us.

COLLINS: What made it great is that, in the scientific parts of NASA, a lot the stumbling blocks you found in the outside world had been taken out of the way.

CAROLYN: If you worked hard, you got to do the job. And it didn’t matter that my first two years there I was a postdoc. People didn’t care.

COLLINS: And – more importantly – she says they didn’t care if you were a woman either. It turns out that this attitude at NASA was not just an accident. Here’s historian Amy Foster.

AMY FOSTER: What I found extraordinarily was a policy that came out in 1965. What this policy said was that NASA would not discriminate based on race, sex, but also to include physical handicap -- that is something that the United States doesn’t legislate on the federal level until 1990. And that blew my mind.

MUSIC ENDS

COLLINS: This open atmosphere allowed women to thrive. Whether it was Nancy Roman in astronomy or Carolyn Huntoon, exploring the science of the body in weightlessness.

MUSIC IN

CAROLYN: I was particularly interested in the biochemical changes that were regulated by hormones in the body, because we had seen a glimpse of evidence that those were affected during the Gemini missions.

NANCY: Up until World War II, we sort of just assumed that stars were bright in the optical – in the part that we could see with our eyes. We didn’t pay much attention to the fact that there were other colors. But the birth of radio astronomy after the end of the war made astronomers realize that there were lots of types of activity in space that they had no idea of before.

CAROLYN: The specific area that I was interested in studying had to do with the regulation of fluid and the regulation of salt metabolism. We were trying to understand: Was this a response to the weightless environment that was acceptable? Or was this something that we should be worried about?

NANCY: Astronomers were particularly interested at the time the space program started in the ultraviolet. They realize that to really understand the composition of the stars and the structure of their atmosphere, we had to get into the ultraviolet.

CAROLYN: Now, we launched the Apollo missions and went and landed on the moon and everything was going very well and then at one point, there were some irregular heartbeats from the moon and we had not had these in any of his training or prior to the flight. So we started looking back at the data that we had collected in Gemini and we realize that there had been some electrolyte changes that could have left some of the crew members deplete of electrolytes. And that may have caused the irregular heartbeat.

NANCY: The main problem in doing astronomy in the early days was that we did not have a system that would stabilize the satellite. The main thing that I accomplished was getting a program off the ground and moving and channeled into a reasonable succession of useful satellites. There was the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory and The Orbiting Solar Observatory. The Orbital Astronomical Observatory’s primary mission was to get ultraviolet observations of the stars.

MUSIC IN

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: There have always been women science and engineering fields but they often work in the assistant role.

COLLINS: Again, the Smithsonian’s Margaret Weitekamp.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: At NASA and in space work, there were often jobs that were considered “women’s work.” Being a computer -- back when computers were people and not machines.

PEGGY: I was called a computer. There were no computers as we know them today. We had electric mechanical calculators -- gear driven machines.

COLLINS: The interesting thing is that calling certain jobs “women’s work” had unintended consequences. And resulted in women making groundbreaking scientific discoveries and inventions. The first time this happened was in the 1890s at the Harvard Observatory, where women like Williamina Paton Fleming and Antonia Maury were the first to study the brightness of stars. Here’s Nancy Roman.

NANCY: Women were considered to be excellent at routine jobs. They felt that they had the patience to classify 200,000 stars as Annie Jump Cannon had done. Or to study plate after plate, looking for variable stars as other women had done.

COLLINS: And with today’s perspective, it’s kind of startling to look at what kind of jobs were considered “Women’s work.” For instance, Computer programming. As JoAnn Morgan says,

JOANN: Most of the engineers didn’t want to do that. One of the very early jobs that I had was working with one of the very first computers we had. We were doing trajectory equations and the computer was not big enough to do everything. So you had to build pinboards and unplug and plug ‘em in. The programs had to be verified with hand calculations and so I got to be a little bit of a pioneer in the aspect of working on some of the very first computers we had.

COLLINS: The work JoAnn Morgan was doing with computers didn’t suit Ann Merwarth.

ANN: It was very boring. So I went out and looked around for what else was going on at the center, and I found a place where there was research going on on putting a computer on board a satellite. There were no computers on orbit. And they had some hardware people looking at how they could build hardware that would survive in space and they needed a software person that could write the operating system. And we did develop what was called in the NASA Standard Computer-1 – NSSC-1, it flew on OAO-C as an experiment. The NASA Onboard Standard Computer-1 went on to be used on a number of different satellite missions and then of course that was just the beginning of processors onboard the spacecraft.

COLLINS: Though the space program slowed down after Apollo, NASA’s space scientists didn’t. Carolyn Huntoon continued her pioneering work on the body.

CAROLYN: So we made these measurements on a number of the crew members before and after flights on the Apollo missions. And then we were able during the Skylab mission to study the crew members before they went, we collected samples during the flights and then after the flights. So is a very complete set of data, and I have to tell you, the best data that has ever been collected to date.

COLLINS: Nancy Roman kept up the pace too; continuing to get astronomical satellites launched into orbit.

NANCY : I felt that my main role in NASA in the early days was acting as an interpreter between the engineers and scientists. Astronomers knew what they wanted, and the engineers were very happy to try to provide it to them. The problem was that to a large extent, they speak a different -- engineers and scientists do not speak the same language. I have been called the Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope. I actually got the project started, gathered a group of astronomers who were interested in the project to start developing more detailed planning.

MUSIC ENDS

COLLINS: All this work wasn’t happening in a vacuum. It was the early 1970s and America was changing. The Women’s Movement had started and while none of these women burned their bras or marched, their work was held up as evidence of what women could accomplish. Here’s Joann Morgan.

MUSIC IN

JOANN: I had become a role model and in fact the third grade science book that most third-graders read -- they had pictures of me and kind of encouraging girls to consider science and engineering.

CAROLYNN: The first woman anything has often received probably more attention than it needed to be. But I think that for our future, we need to keep this movement of considering women in all roles alive, because it can very easily slide back in the other direction.

COLLINS: Carolyn Huntoon was a physical scientist and also the first woman director of the Johnson Space Center. Jo Ann Morgan is an engineer who worked in Launch Control for Apollo Eleven and throughout NASA for 45 years. Peggy Yohner started as a computer and worked at NASA for 40 years. And Nancy Grace Roman who has been called the Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope. I’m Astronaut Eileen Collins. This is “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes” from Soundprint and producer Richard Paul. Coming up: They were TOLD they were going to be America’s first women astronauts. After a break. Stay with us.
MUSIC UP AND OUT
==========================
COLLINS: This is “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes” a look a women in space and space science. I’m astronaut Eileen Collins.

MUSIC IN

FADE UP MONTAGE OF LITTLE GIRLS RE: WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE …
GIRL 9: Some day I want to be a graphic designer.
GIRL 10: …or a professional soccer player.
GIRL 11: A scientist or an abstract artist when I grow up.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: I first started thinking about a career in flying when I was a teenager. I went to the library a lot and I remember taking out a book about the Women Airforce Service Pilots – the WASPS. And their leader Jackie Cochran.

NEWSREEL CLIP
ANNOUNCER: The first plane comes in leading the race from California. And the winner, Jacqueline Cochran.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: She grew up poor, just like me. But she went on to be one of America’s most celebrated pilots. I thought the world of Jackie Cochran.

NEWSREEL CLIP
(MUSIC) ANNOUNCER: She’s out to break the women’s speed record. Jacqueline Cochran. Take off at Detroit for the girl who now ranks as first lady of the sky.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: Jackie Cochran played an important role in the next story we’re going to hear. In the early 1960s, she funded some research that enabled a group of women to dream about having the experience of a lifetime.

MUSIC IN

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: When I was a little kid I always wanted to fly.
CROSS FADE TO
JANIE: When I was a little kid I always wanted to fly and I had to sneak out when I decided to do it.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: I had airplanes hanging from my ceiling as a child.
CROSS FADE TO
WALLY: I had airplanes hanging from my ceiling as a child and in growing up, until I went to college.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: I said, “Oh daddy, that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to fly airplanes!”
CROSS FADE TO
JERRI T.: I said, “Oh daddy, that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to fly airplanes!” And he said “Jerri, gals don’t fly airplanes. Men do.”

COLLINS: It’s safe to say that the story of these women is one you’ve never heard. To start it, here again is Margaret Weitekamp of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: Most people have never heard the story of how 13 women pilots in the late 1950s and early 1960s actually ended up taking astronaut tests -- the same tests that the Mercury astronauts had taken for NASA.

MUSIC UP AND THEN UNDER

JANIE: My name is Janie Hart and I was a member of the Mercury 13, that is the non-successful space pilots.

WALLY: I am Wally Funk and I was a Mercury 13 astronaut candidate (up inflection)

JERRI T.: I am Jerri Sloan Truhill, and I am one of the Mercury 13.

GENE: I’m GeneNora Jessen, a part of the so-called Mercury 13 group.

MUSIC ENDS

ADVERTISING CLIP
(MUSIC) WOMAN: No more clothes lines. No more blue Mondays. Just set a dial and walk away. That's the kind of emancipation any woman could understand. (music)
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: In the late 1950s women in America were really living in the fullness of the return to the home that had come after the Second World War. Suburbia dominated many middle-class women’s lives. But in the midst of this world of stay at home moms, there was also a small but thriving community of women pilots who were part of a women’s aviation world.

NEWSREEL CLIP
ANNOUNCER: She lands. And I wonder how she looks, after flying more than 293 miles an hour. That’s fast enough to disarrange one’s hair. Sure enough. (music ends)

JERRI T.: To get your pilot’s license, you had to have so many hours. And as soon as I got my private license, I wanted to go on and get my commercial license which took 200 hours (up inflection).

GENE: So, dropped out of school, worked some more went back to school, raised more money and became a commercial pilot and a flight instructor and the university hired me than to teach flying at the University.

NEWSREEL CLIP
(MUSIC) ANNOUNCER: The house is packed and so is the parking place. Air races at Cleveland with plenty of public interest.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

JERRI T.: The girls were going to go fly an air race. I said “Oh, this is great!” And that was when the National Women’s Aeronautical Association put on what they called the “Sky Lady Derby” every year.

WALLY: I was doing takeoffs and landings, short field landings, soft field landings, bomb dropping events -- which was 5 pounds of flour in a sack and I was half-hanging out of the airplane and whomp it down into the barrel (laughs).

NEWSREEL CLIP
(Music) ANNOUNCER: Fashion is right in the swim at Beverly Hills California with a preview of Cole Of California’s latest creation. They are called “heavenly bodies” -- the bathing suit that is, designed to make any body more heavenly.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

JERRI T: I think the thing that was always difficult for women back then was the fact that -- if you watched “I Love Lucy” -- they were afraid she couldn’t drive, and like my dad said, “Women don’t fly airplanes, men do.”

NEWSREEL CLIP
ANNOUNCER: This one is called, “skirts a-hoy” -- a two-piece number that can be converted into one piece at m’lady’s whim.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

JERRI. T.: You were taught to be a little lady when I was growing up and not to be a tomboy and you know and -- it’s boring as hell. I used to play with the boys -- build forts and play like I was flying in an airplane, with two little old boys up the street.

JANIE: I was always doing something that wasn’t for girls. I used to ride horses in Madison Square Garden over the big jumps and I would be the only woman -- everyone else was a paid man that I was riding against.

GENE: There weren’t any women flying for aircraft companies, except as far as I know Jerri Cobb.

NEWSREEL CLIP
MAN: Boy, isn’t that a Honey?
BRADY: Yeah. She is a Honey. Meet Miss Jerri Cobb, she’s just flown in here to Tyndall Air Force Base to be with us here at Operation William Tell.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: Well Jerri Cobb was the 1959 woman pilot of the year.

COLLINS: Martha Ackmann is author of the book The Mercury 13.

MUSIC IN

MARTHA ACKMANN: She had set a number of international aviation records, and she was quite an accomplished woman pilot.

NEWSREEL CLIP
REPORTER: You’ve flown the Atlantic Ocean before
COBB: That’s right, I ferried a few planes across the Atlantic.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: And she was just absolutely at the top of the heap in 1961. There was no better woman pilot of her generation at that time.

COLLINS: That year, Jerri Cobb ran into Dr. Randy Lovelace at an aviation meeting in Miami.

TAPE – RANDY LOVELACE AT A PRESS CONFERENCE
LOVELACE: We start out with the extremely detailed clinical examination; perhaps the most exhaustive that has ever been devised. Then we go from that to this battery of what we call “Simulated Space Stresses.”
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: Dr. Lovelace served as head of NASA’s Special Committee on Bioastronautics in the agency’s early years. Here again is the Smithsonian’s Margaret Weitekamp, who’s also the author of the book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The Lovelace Clinic became the site for NASA’s physical testing for their astronauts in large part because they wanted to avoid an appearance of favoritism to any one military service, and so they chose a civilian, nonmilitary site -- The Lovelace Foundation.

MARTHA ACKMANN: His charge was to help select the first group of male astronauts -- and specifically to design and then carry out a series of medical tests that would evaluate how the man would be likely to perform in outer space.

MUSIC ENDS

NEWSREEL FOOTAGE
(music) ANNOUNCER: As the hardware was prepared for space flight, so too was the most important system man. Early in the program, several applicants had been selected -- each meeting the exacting physical and psychological criteria.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: Randy Lovelace and Jerri Cobb met each other quite by happenstance. And it was at the time when Randy Lovelace had this idea about running a group of women pilots through the exact same medical tests that the Mercury seven male astronauts had just taken.

WALLY: How did the pool begin to have the Mercury 13 picked? Lovelace took names from Washington records and also Oklahoma, because that’s where the 99s were.

JERRI T.: “Ninety-nines” is the International Organization of Licensed Women Pilots, started by Amelia Earhart.

MUSIC IN

GENE: I’ve never heard the figure about how many women actually were considered.

JERRI T.: There wasn’t a large pool of professional women pilots at that time.

WALLY: I don’t know if there were any more than a hundred and so that they picked and only 25 responded. I didn’t know any of the other girls, except Gene Nora Jessen, because I was at Oklahoma State she was at OU.

GENE: I was at an air meet one time while I was teaching at OU and Wally Funk told me about a secret program that was happening at the Lovelace clinic in Albuquerque. And they were running women pilots through physical exams -- the astronaut physical exams. Well I thought that sounded pretty neat, and I -- I wrote a letter to Dr. Lovelace and I said, basically “I don’t know how you can do this without me.” You needed to have 2,000 hours flying time and mine was all in Aeronca Champs -- which is a little two seat trainer. And you had to have a college degree. They didn’t care what it was in. Mine happened to be (chuckles) in English.

MUSIC ENDS

WALLY: Well, it was called a Women In Space Program.

JERRI T.: We were led to believe that we would be astronauts.

GENE: I never did meet Dr. Lovelace. So I never had any conversation with him whatsoever about why we were taking the tests, all I knew was what was in his letter he called it “female astronaut program.”

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: These women unfortunately we’re never going to be astronauts.

COLLINS: The Smithsonian’s Margaret Weitekamp.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The program started as a private program and it was always a private program. NASA became aware of it as it started to get more publicity but it was never intended to be a part of the NASA spaceflight program.

JERRI T.: Every test that we would take, the doctors and the nurses and the people that would give them to us you know -- they would say, “Oh, you are so lucky. You are going to get to go into space.” Well, we thought we were.

NEWSREEL CLIP
ANNOUNCER: Each a jet aircraft test pilot with a minimum of 1500 flying hours. As the hardware was prepared for space flight, so too was the most important system man And with their selection, a new household word was introduced, “astronaut.”
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

GENE: I always kind of wondered how somebody flying an Aeronca Champ with an English degree could make it into the astronaut corps. I believe that what really occurred was that Dr. Lovelace had met Jerri Cobb and he ran her through these tests and she did extremely well. And apparently, he thought “Well, if I’m going to convince anybody that there should be female astronauts, we should have a group of women go through the tests, not just one.” But that didn’t concern me, because it was just too much fun to be involved and see what would happen next.

NEWSREEL CLIP
ANNOUNCER: The 7 new astronauts spent months and months undergoing rigorous testing and training. (Music)
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The women all came to The Lovelace Clinic and while they were there, they took the most comprehensive set of physiological tests that had ever been assembled in one set.

JANIE: I can’t tell you what all the tests were but I can remember some of them that were pretty ridiculous.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: It was one of the most comprehensive physicals that had ever been given. It was revolutionary in its breath; its depth.

JERRI T.: We were x-rayed in places we didn’t know we had places.

GENE: And a lot of that -- they wanted you to be empty. So you would start off the day with three enemas

JANIE: I sometimes thought that it was just to see how much you could take. I really did.

WALLY: I had to swallow 3 feet of rubber hose and you know, it didn’t bother me a bit.

GENE: I aced that one (laughs).

JANIE: One of the things that was when they put your arm in a bucket of ice water.

JERRI T.: And you put your hand down in there, and you left it in there, it seemed like a long time. And then, when they got through, they put it on the – the other hand in it and then they put our feet in it! To see how we reacted to shock.

JANIE: I think the one that was most difficult was the one where they put you on a bicycle that was on a rack and then they would raise the bike so that you were going uphill, uphill, uphill, and you would go into you were totally exhausted and then they would say, “And one more minute.”

JERRI T.: They even had us drink radioactive water, and then we had to carry a jug around with us to wheedle in so they would know how long it took for the radioactivity to pass through our bodies.

JANIE: I don’t know what the outcome was, but apparently I passed.

WALLY: The thing that hurt was when they injected super, super cold water in our ears.

JERRI T.: And that would put you into vertigo. You would actually whirl around and around and around and they wanted to see how long it took you to recover from vertigo. They said. “Tell us when you quit spinning.” So I said, “I quit” and they said “No you haven’t.” I said, “How do you know I haven’t?” They said, “Because your eyeballs are still going round and round.” (Laughs).

MUSIC IN

WALLY: They said, “Show up at 8 -- at 730.” One particular morning and bring your swimsuit and you are going to go into do another test. So they place me on the water. I have enough of foam rubber that if you folded and eight half by 10 piece of paper in half. That was the amount of foam rubber that was behind the back of my neck. To keep me afloat without struggling. This tank is about 8’ x 8’. Okay, so I am on this water, and I know I can’t move. Everything is to stay straight and level, and I am just -- you know, I didn’t have a whole lot to think about. Finally, I hear this voice coming overhead, and they said, “Wally, what time do you think it is?” I said, “I don’t know.” This isolation Tank -- having all of my senses taken away from me. So (chuckles) I got my debriefing and they said that I had spent 10 hours and 35 minutes in the tank and had broken all records.

JERRI T.: No she didn’t. there wasn’t 10 minutes worth of difference on how long those girls stayed in there. There was no record. We weren’t competing against each other, that’s #1. But #2, Rhea Waltman did better on that test than anybody did.

JANIE: But we did as well as any of the guys did. The men would get a little cuckoo after a while and they’d start seeing thing. But the women – I guess we’re used to being shut up for a while (lauhgs)

JERRI T.: (laughs) Our girls did good. (Laughs).

MARTHA ACKMANN: The testing was divided into three different phases. The first phase is medical testing that was done by Randy Lovelace in Albuquerque, the second phase was psychological testing that was done in Oklahoma City. The third phase of testing was space flight simulation. Randy Lovelace told them to clear their calendars.

GENE: We all received airline tickets and we were all set -- I quit my job -- we were all set to go to Pensacola for two weeks for further testing.

JERRI T.: And we get this telegram.

WALLY: August of ‘61 “Regret to advise, arrangements at Pensacola canceled. You may return any expense advance allotment to Lovelace Foundation or by letter to me. We will further advise you.”

JERRI T.: There was no explanation. There was no, “Thank you very much.”

MARTHA ACKMANN: Before the women could use the Navy’s equipment down at Pensacola, it had to be certified that this was part of an official NASA program. So when NASA was officially asked, James Webb said no. It wasn’t worth the time, it wasn’t worth the money to go forward with it.

JERRI T.: There was nothing. Nothing! We were calling each other back and forth -- “What the hell is going on?”

WALLY: Well, that was the end of that -- and unfortunately a year or so later, Dr. Lovelace was killed in an airplane accident.

MUSIC UP FULL

MARTHA ACKMANN: When the Pensacola tests were canceled and the question really became a political one, regarding: Do women have the right to fly into space?

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: Jerri Cobb flew to Washington, DC and literally started knocking on doors.

MARTHA ACKMANN: She took advantage of every opportunity she had to speak to groups to speak to the media.

NEWSTAPE
REPORTER: Visiting Pittsburgh is that blithe spirit and the first woman astronaut in America, Miss Jerri Cobb. Hello Jerri it’s nice to see you.
COBB: Yes well thank you. It’s wonderful to be here
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: Certainly the questions that were posed to her by inquiring reporters ran the gamut.

NEWS CLIP
REPORTER: Well a pretty girl like you must have thought something about marriage. What about that?
COBB: No, I am more interested in this right now than anything else in the world.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: I remember one question in particular where a reporter asked her if a pretty girl like you was more afraid of boyfriends then going into space.

NEWS CLIP
REPORTER: You mean that you are a little bit more afraid of men than you are of space?
COBB: No (chuckles) I wouldn’t say that but I would love to participate in the space program -- more than anything else.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARTHA ACKMANN: The women were able to obtain a congressional hearing both through the efforts of Jerri Cobb as well as Janie Hart.

NEWS TAPE
REPORTER: Miss Cobb, you argued today that women would make better astronauts in some respects than men. Do you really believe this is true?
COBB: This has been proved true by doctors and scientists in certain areas.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: At the congressional hearing, they were two days scheduled. The first day for the women. And the second day for NASA’s representatives who were George Lowe, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter.

JERRI T.: The men were heroes and we were put down as – we were called “95 lbs. of recreational equipment.” Hello! We got hate mail; “You should stay home with your children.” It was a double standard that we were not prepared for.

MUSIC UP FULL

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The most important thing about the Lovelace women in space program was that it was treating women as physically capable beings. It is one of the first places where you see a significant medical study devoted to women’s physical capabilities, not just adding a woman or two to a set of physiological tests on men and finding out that they do okay. Having a medical researcher looking at women and investigating women because they were physically capable is the beginning of a slow change that happens in the 20th century that ends with things like title IX.. It allows the creation of things like women’s professional sports, women being recognized as able to participate in military as full participants

JANIE: I couldn’t see any reason why women couldn’t do everything that a man could do. And it’s true, isn’t it?

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: The women who participated in the Lovelace tests, the end of that, had really very different effects on them. Some of them had given up very good jobs and found it very hard to get back into the workforce.

JANIE: Well, it’s infuriating, of course.

JERRI T.: We were all professional pilots, dammit! And nobody seemed to care.

MARGARET WEITEKAMP: And for some of the women it becomes a short, two-week period of notoriety that was interesting as a young woman but then they went on to have successful families and careers and do other things.

GENE: For me, the astronaut thing was certainly not the high point of my life. I think some of the women were very, very disappointed that they didn’t get to become astronauts.

JERRI T.: It still brings tears to my eyes sometimes when I talk about it. We will never get over it. Never!

WALLY: Am I going to make it into space? You bet. I want to get into space in the worst way and I will do anything I have to to get there.

MUSIC ENDS

SOUND – SHUTTLE LAUNCH
GROUND CONTROL: We have booster ignition and lift off of Columbia. Reaching new heights for women and X-ray astronomy.

COLLINS: I was on that flight. In fact, I was the commander. The first woman to command the Space Shuttle. We headed into orbit on July 23rd, 1999. Our payload was the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

SOUND – SHUTTLE LAUNCH
GROUND CONTROL: And Columbia, Houston. You are "go" with throttle up.
COLLINS: Columbia Go with throttle up.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: The women you’ve just been listening to were all there that day. I don’t remember when I first heard their story, but I have to say, I was very surprised when I did. I was also excited, and inspired in a way. The tests they endured -- drinking radioactive water, swallowing hoses, the enemas. It’s breath-taking -- and a little infuriating -- what they went through. I didn’t want them to think that they did all that for nothing. Plus, their story ended so sadly. I wanted them to know that I understood all that. And so I invited them to come to the Cape that day -- the day my dream was realized. I was the first woman commander of a Shuttle. I wanted them there so that they understood: They had a role in women’s history too. Because, while these women were never astronauts, they WERE pioneers ... the definition pioneers. They were out there doing it for the first time. For me. And for all the astronauts who got come after them.

MUSIC UP FULL

COLLINS: You’re listening to “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes” from Soundprint and producer Richard Paul. I’m Eileen Collins. When we come back, the first women in space.
================================
COLLINS: This is “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes” – looking at women in space and space science; their dreams and reality. I’m Eileen Collins.

MONTAGE OF LITTLE GIRLS RE: WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE …
GIRL 1: When I grow up
GIRL 2: When I grow Up
GIRL 3: I think that when I grow up I will be
GIRL 4: A marine biologist or
GIRL 5: A scientist
GIRL 6: or a veterinarian.

The reality at NASA today is that women work there who didn’t fight their way to get into a math classes or justify a science career. We hear now from America’s first women astronauts plus the first African-American woman astronaut … whose experiences have made dreams that today’s little girls know they can achieve.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: The whole time I was a child, I just loved finding out facts CROSS FADE TO
SHANNON: The whole time I was a child, I just loved finding out facts about the world that we live in. And I loved science.

VOICE OF A LITTLE GIRL: I was fascinated by the stars.
CROSS FADE TO
MAE: I was fascinated by the stars; I don’t think there’s anybody who hasn’t looked up at the stars and wondered, you know -- who lives there?

AMY FOSTER: All of the women that were selected to be astronauts in the 1970s had extraordinary parents.

COLLINS: Again, Amy Foster, professor of history at the University of Central Florida.

AMY FOSTER: Particularly because they are raising girls in the 1950s and the 1960s. None of them said, “Well, because you are a girl, you shouldn’t pursue any particular dream.”

MAE: I did something really remarkable.

COLLINS: Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman in space.

MAE: When I was being born, I chose my parents well.

AMY FOSTER: Extraordinary parents that encouraged to their daughters in ways that even as an historian I would say is quite unusual.

MAE: One of the things that happens to girls, I think is they are always confined by -- you know -- not doing icky stuff because you’ve got to keep your clothes clean. And in fact, I was probably the antithesis of that (laughs). We think that children don’t like science. Kids love science! The bugs, the snails, all that kind of stuff -- because they want to know what’s going on with the world.

MUSIC ENDS

COLLINS: That was certainly the case for me. At summer camp there were two older men who showed us how to find snakes, or turn over rocks to look for crayfish. When I got older I’d take out books from the library about amoebas and protozoa. The other thing I have in common with the first women astronauts; when I was a kid, I absolutely loved to explore. When I went hiking, I never wanted to turn around. I just wanted to keep going. It’s the same thing for the first woman to ever take a space walk, Kathy Sullivan.

KATHY: My life as an explorer begin in wonderfully modest ways. A little band of us and we all sort of loved to wander and adventure and we would get together at the crack of dawn on a Saturday and just range off into the open lands and ride down the hills and climb up and explore the rocks and home at supper time or sundown whichever was going to get you in the least trouble.

AMY FOSTER: The fact that they had these parents that were supportive to a fault really gave these women, a mindset that they can do anything.

ANNA: I was working as a volunteer at a hospital with one of my best friends I was probably about 14

COLLINS: Anna Fischer – the first mother in space -- was in of the first class of women astronauts.

ANNA: And I remember telling her as we were doing some work in the x-ray lab, that I wanted to be an astronaut. And she didn't laugh at me. She's the only person I ever really mentioned it to because it didn't seem like a very realistic goal at the time.

CLIP FROM A NASA FILM
(music) ANNOUNCER: Project Mercury -- the country’s first manned spaceflight program -- was given the go-ahead just one week after NASA was formed on October 1, 1958. Seven test pilots were selected to become astronauts.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

SHANNON: I can remember very clearly when I heard the first announcement of the Mercury astronauts.

COLLINS: Shannon Lucid is the first American woman to take a long-duration space station trip.

SHANNON: It was so exciting to see that the United States finally was going to get into the space program. But then they made the announcement of who was selected and I mean, we were totally excluded. It was just like somebody had stuck a dagger in your heart.

COLLINS: But these women held on to their dreams of outer space and in the meantime went about finding other outlets for their life-long passions for science and discovery.

MUSIC IN

RHEA: I grew up in a wonderful little neighborhood.

COLLINS: Astronaut Rhea Seddon.

RHEA: The family that lived across the street were the Garrisons and Susan Garrison was my best friend growing up. Her father, Dr. S. C. Garrison had an office right near the high school. And frequently, instead of walking the mile and a half home, I would go with Susan to her father’s office and we would do our homework. But -- you know -- I suddenly discovered that where we were doing our homework was a medical library. And as I became more and more interested in medicine, I began to pull the books off the shelf and I studied anatomy and physiology and disease processes -- it opened a whole new world for me and it was just one of those fortunate coincidences.

KATHY: I marched into the University of California at Santa Cruz as a linguistics major and was informed that the breadth requirement around campus was to take three natural science courses during freshman year. Somebody should have made a B-level comedy out of this – it was every line of argument bordering on tantrum and tears and everything I could try to say, “No, no. You don’t understand. I have a plan” and the reply always was, “No, no you don’t understand. We don’t care. You are taking three science classes.” Well, the first of those was a marine biology course for non-majors; just turned my head completely. Who knew? This is the life I was looking for all the way along I liked all of it, the descriptive parts, the running around exploring parts, and also the detailed challenging technical parts … the insight and precision and care with which you can make the measurements and observations that let you ask and answer questions that matter that makes science and engineering so intriguing to me.

MAE: I spent time overseas, while I was in medical school, and even before, because I liked to explore. I loved the idea of being able to spend time in Africa. And so I did things to try to make it happen. And the fascinating thing about my time that I spent in Africa, was that I found out I love primary care medicine. And that’s how I ended up staying in West Africa for 2 1/2 years as area Peace Corps medical officer. Because there’s something about being in other countries, where he you learn so much about yourself.

MUSIC ENDS

COLLINS: America was changing as these women left college. But, as University of Central Florida historian Amy Foster says, times could still be tough for a woman trying to crack into a man’s world.

AMY FOSTER: In the case of Shannon Lucid, she was entering the workforce with her bachelors degree in biochemistry in the late 1960s.

SHANNON: At that time, “Shannon” was considered a male name. And so I would send out all these letters -- you know – sent it out “Shannon Wells.” So, I would get a letter back, and it would be addressed to “Mr. Shannon Wells” and they were always very positive. And then they would say, “Please send in a picture” as soon as I sent in a picture, it was all over. I even got letters back saying that they had absolutely no jobs at all available. And it was addressed to “Miss Shannon Wells.” So, scientific evidence.

NEWWSREEL CLIP – PROTEST MARCH
ANNOUNCER: Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King leads the procession to the United Nations where he urges UN pressure force the US to stop bombing North Vietnam
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

AMY FOSTER: The Women’s Movement comes out of all of these other movements that we see, particularly in the 1960s. We see these women getting involved, and they are finding, “Hey! Wait! We are fighting for rights for African-Americans, but we are being told, ‘Well that’s all well and good but your job is to be our secretary and to make coffee.’” And that really lights a fire under the Women’s Movement that we see rising in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The way the women’s movement really paves the way for the women astronauts in the 1970s is that those women didn’t have to prove that they had a right to be there.

NASA MOVIE CLIP FROM 1978
(groovy music plays) ANNOUNCER: Anticipating the space shuttle flight schedule in the years ahead, NASA selected 35 new candidate astronauts in 1978. The 35 -- including six women -- were chosen from nearly 8000 applicants. (More groovy music plays)

AMY FOSTER: Well, by 1975, there have been a couple of major changes that happen. We are seeing new rights for women in terms of divorce. We are seeing opportunities for women to be home owners. They are getting jobs on their own. By the time, the first six women were selected by NASA to join the astronaut corps, all of those questions about whether women can do math, whether they can be engineers; whether they can be physicians basically, those questions had already been asked and answered.

COLLINS: And at NASA there was something that turned out also to be a new opportunity for women too. That was the introduction of the Space Shuttle.

NASA MOVIE CLIP FROM 1972
ANNOUNCER: It is called Enterprise. First of the space shuttle orbiters. The beginning of a new space transportation system.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

COLLINS: The Shuttle could take larger crews – up to 8 people. And not all of them had to be pilots. As Amy Foster says,

AMY FOSTER: Everybody except the pilot and the commander are going to be scientists and engineers and physicians.

COLLINS: And, as astronaut Kathy Sullivan point out, those doctors and scientists were going into space on an equal footing with the pilots.

KATHY: These guys – I realized – were asking scientists and engineers to become what I would call “ship’s company” – not the visiting scientific party, but actually the ship’s company – know the ship, know its capacities, know how to make it work.

COLLINS: While women still couldn’t be pilots – that didn’t happen until I went to the Air Force -- they COULD be scientists. So finally, Rhea. Anna, Shannon and Kathy -- along with Sally Ride and Judy Resnick -- could stop dreaming and actually begin planning to take their lives’ passions into space.

NASA PROFILE FILM ABOUT RHEA SEDDON
ANNOUNCER: An operating room in Memphis, Tennessee’s VA Hospital not too long ago. We are watching 31-year-old Ray Seddon, M.D.

CROSS FADE TO
NASA PROFILE FILM ABOUT KATHY SULLIVAN
ANNOUNCER: This is 27 year old Kathryn D. Sullivan receiving her PhD degree in geology from Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
PRESIDENT: Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan in geology (applause). Dr. Sullivan leaves us to go NASA the US space agency, to be one of the first women to enter the training course as an astronaut. And we wish you (applause)

CROSS FADE TO
NASA PROFILE FILM ABOUT SHANNON LUCID
ANNOUNCER: After two years of training and preparation, Dr. Shannon Lucid’s job will be carried out in orbit, around the earth. Dr. Lucid, a biochemist, is one of 35 persons selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate.

KATHY: I just love the operational and logistics and planning challenges. Putting those things together, and then letting mother nature and everything else throw unforeseen circumstances at you and deal with them all and achieve success. And: extra added benefit -- anyone who actually gets in, will get to see the earth from orbit with their own eyes instead of looking at other people’s pictures. And I -- you know -- how can I -- you can’t be a card-carrying earth scientist and not want to have that experience.

NASA PROMOTIONAL MOVIE CLIP
RICARDO MONTALBÁN: Who is to say who will succeed or fail in any task we earthlings undertake? For is there really any difference between the minds of males and females? The women of NASA don’t think so. And neither does NASA.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MUSIC IN

AMY FOSTER: When you look at NASA in the 1960s, and you see white men, crew cuts, pocket protectors. These engineers, unfortunately are very much a product of their times. They haven’t ever worked with women.

RHEA: There weren’t an awful lot of women at NASA at the time. And I think the men just simply didn’t know about working with women.

MAE: Let’s just say, NASA is a microcosm of the United States, and so you are going to run into some of the best people I have ever met in the world and some -- some “works” (chuckles) you know, you’re going to run into both.

RHEA: I think the men were trying to figure out exactly how to treat women who were equal colleagues.

COLLINS: Astronaut Rhea Seddon.

RHEA: They didn’t know whether they should hold doors open for us. They didn’t know whether they should help us carry our parachute and all of our gear out of the plane.

COLLINS: But the first women astronauts had an important ally. Someone we’ve heard from already in this program. Physical Scientist Carolyn Huntoon. By the 1970s, she had worked her way up the chain of command at NASA, on her way to becoming the first female director of the Johnson Space Center.

CAROLYN: The idea of giving women a chance was something I wanted to get our whole organization toward doing and we were able then to bring in the first woman flight docs.

COLLINS: Flight doctors like Anna Fischer and Rhea Seddon.

RHEA: I can remember the first time I met Carolyn Huntoon. She was, as I recall, the only woman in the interview process for selection.

ANNA: Carolyn was very instrumental and you know you could go talk to her if there were any problems.

RHEA: She had been at NASA long enough; she knew how we could get the results that we wanted, and she was wonderful in sort of getting us through some tough times.

COLLINS: But Carolyn Huntoon wasn’t just a source of strength bulwark for these younger women. The women doctors had been brought in to continue the pioneering work Carolyn Huntoon did to explore the effects of weightlessness on the human body.

RHEA: To understand what happens to the heart, what happened to the bones, what happens to the immune system, what happens to the lungs, what happens to muscle fitness, things like that.

COLLINS: Science on the Shuttle was designed to prepare humans for longer-duration flights. Getting humans ready, Mae Jemison says, for flights to Mars or trips on the planned International Space Station.

MAE: We looked at our heart and did cardiographic ultra-sound images of the heart. We also did things like frog embryology experiments where we took up an adult female frogs, caused them to shed eggs, look at the growth and development of amphibians in weightlessness. You know, do arms cells know where to rotate to become an arm on this ball of cells?

RHEA: Two of my three flights there were science experiments; and the humans served as both subjects and operators for experiments that had been proposed from scientists all over the world. Bringing back a lot of information and for the first time bringing back a lot of information on women.

NASA MOVIE ABOUT THE SHUTTLE
GROUND CONTROLLER: fire! (Sound of rocket lifting off)
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

MAE: Why did I want to become an astronaut? ‘Cause I wanted to go into space. I could have waited to in a Nebraska cornfield with aluminum foil on my head for ET to come find me and take me home, but I thought I had better chances applying to the astronaut program.

KATHY: The views of the earth are magical and endlessly fascinating and zero gravity is a ball, and people are fascinated with all of those dimensions. There was a dimension to me of being up there that kind of also had to do with the completing of a story. I am a complete addict and fan of the Olympics and I’ve had a couple of chances to talk with Olympians and try an analogy out on them and ask if it seems like it maybe made sense. And it goes kind of like this: That I think if you get into the astronaut corps and go through all the qualifications that are assigned to a flight and the day comes that you walk across a launchpad to climb the Gantry and get aboard a spacecraft, I think that is like marching into the Olympic Stadium wearing your country’s uniform. That is astonishing. So few people ever get to do that. It is a magical moments; you have no clue what lies ahead.

NASA MOVIE ABOUT THE SHUTTLE
CONTROLLER: The gear is coming down at 270. And it’s coming. The doors open and they are down -- coming down. Look down here. 50 feet. 40 feet; 30.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

KATHY: But I think when you land; and the flights now done. You’re safe, you’re home, the mission worked, I think that has to be like finding yourself on the gold medal platform and listening to your anthem being played. And it is what you dreamt of and it is done and it is here. And it is gold medal.

MUSIC UP AND OUT

Kathy Sullivan, Rhea Seddon, Anna Fisher, and Shannon Lucid were four of the first six women Astronauts. Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman Astronaut. You’ve been listening to “Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes” from Soundprint and producer Richard Paul. Our newsreel footage of Jerri Cobb was provided by Jim Cross. Interviews were recorded by James Baumgartner, Charles Bornstein, Bart Rankin, Bruce Doerle, Mac Dula, Scott Smith, Eric French, Erik Jones, Alan Melson, Richard Chin Quee. The narration was recorded at SugarHill Studios in Houston. Our music was composed and arranged by Lenny Williams. I’m Eileen Collins.

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