The Woman Who Should Have Been the First Female Astronaut 200
StartsWithABang writes We like to think of the Mercury 7 — the very first group of NASA astronauts — as the "best of the best," having been chosen from a pool of over 500 of the top military test pilots after three rounds of intense physical and mental tests. Yet when women were allowed to take the same tests, one of them clearly distinguished herself, outperforming practically all of the men. If NASA had really believed in merit, Jerrie Cobb would have been the first female in space, even before Valentina Tereshkova, more than 50 years ago. She still deserves to go.
Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point we'd just be paying to put an old woman into space in the name of equality. Someone pin a ribbon on her chest, say a formal apology, and let the space program be used for space research rather than as a political platform. The only reason that this stuff is coming up so much lately is Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, anyway.
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Re:Eh (Score:4, Interesting)
Which manned space program are you talking about?
Odds are Elon Musk will pick the crew for the next US manned mission, based on recruitment and testing done at SpaceX. There is something to be said for sending elderly people on the first test flights, since that minimizes the loss of life-years in the event of a fatal accident... But there are probably more important criteria. The top candidates will perhaps be ex-NASA astronauts in their early 60's / late 50's.
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BTW, thanks to OP for sharing this. I don't think I'd ever heard of Jerrie Cobb before today. I did, however, immediately reflect on one of her peers, Pancho Barnes, who probably taught several hundred pi
Re:Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't the lesson to use the best people regardless of gender? In which case, why should she go instead of someone more qualified?
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Isn't the lesson to use the best people regardless of gender? In which case, why should she go instead of someone more qualified?
When she was tested, there weren't many that were more qualified. She should have been part of the Mercury 7.
Sending her now, well, it wouldn't make sense in a role more suited for someone younger, but if she could be sent as part of aging research, like John Glenn was, then that'd be great. But mostly the article laments that a great talent was denied something she'd have been perfect for because of stupid sexist notions from the 1950s.
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i don't doubt sexism was part of it, but let's face it.. if a woman was killed the space program would have been in serious jeopardy.
let's not forget that while SHE may have been qualified, WE really had no idea what we were doing.. making it up as we went a long. waaaay more risk back then - Mercury was our first foray into manned spaceflight... lots of unknowns
if she was, say, killed in Apollo 1, we may have never gotten to the moon. Mondale almost got the program cancelled after White, Grissom and Chaff
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Yeah, I remember how the United States surrendered to the Japanese when the first woman was killed at Perl Harbor.
I also remember when New York City shut down its subway system back at the turn of the century when the first woman was killed by a subway train.
And remember the government program to build interstate highways across the US? Shut down in its first 100 miles after the first female was killed in a freeway accident.
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Yes, it is sexism. It's also a very real response that would have shut the program down.
Remember we are talking such high risk the speeches for their deaths were written before hand.
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When she was tested, was a year after they had already tested and picked the Mercury 7 crew. Who knows what she would've tested at if she was tested a year earlier along with everyone else. If we're going to venture into supposition well, let me counter the article's and your supposition with a different one. With her connections in the aviation community, she could've known about the tests and what they were requiring. And either trained or been prepared for the test when she took it in the following year.
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Have you read the article? It mentions that she performed in the top 2%. It doesn't specify whether that was top 1.4%, but your blind assumption that her performance was not outstanding is quite clearly unjustified.
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The point of the article was that at one time, she was just as or even more qualified than the Astronauts that went. Keep in mind, Deke Slayton was actually grounded for a heart murmur and so didn't actually get launched into space.
Now, currently with our manned space program, I think launching this woman into space through a privately build program would at least be justified for this disservice we did to her in the 1960s.
As of late, we have continued slut shaming of anyone who uses any means required to
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As of late, we have continued slut shaming of anyone who uses any means required to get ahead.
Hold on, are you justifying the use of sex for favors or promotions? Because if you are, then I'm going to go ahead and say you're very wrong on this.
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Yeah... uses any means required to get ahead is generally not something to be proud of. (And no, it being legal doesn't make it ethical or admirable.)
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Women, not so much. Women are more likely to encounter the inverse, doing everything on the level and then being accused of something underhanded if they do well since people still seem to have the idea that women SHOULD do
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Now, currently with our manned space program, I think launching this woman into space through a privately build program would at least be justified for this disservice we did to her in the 1960s.
The (generally quiet) conservative in me thinks this is a dangerous precedent for how to spend NASA's already limited budget.
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"which also prompts him to promote her game,"
Nope. Never happened. Gamergate made it up.
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If we don't try to learn from it, it won't ever get better.
Right, hence:
pin a ribbon on her chest, say a formal apology
Re:Eh (Score:4, Insightful)
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tea party WERE libertarians
No, the tea party WERE dixiecrats. Since when have "traditional republicans" been pro-state's rights Southerners?
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After sending up old John Glenn, NASA already lost any remaining credibility anyway. May as well send her up too--along with a monkey, a celebrity, and an athlete (I've even already arranged everyone in declining order of intelligence for them).
She would've flunked the sperm test (Score:5, Interesting)
cos she has no sperm.
(and no I'm not kidding, they tested your sperm to see if you qualified as part of Project Mercury)
Re:She would've flunked the sperm test (Score:4, Funny)
K. S. Kyosuk - Re:She would've flunked the test (Score:4, Interesting)
That reminds me of the old joke about the male athlete who planted someone else's urine to clear himself of doping charges. "We have two good news for you; first, you've been cleared of the charges, and second, you're pregnant."
It happened - was a racing cyclist in the 1970's, possibly in the Tour de France. Dope tests were relatively new then and only used in the topmost races.
The "other person" was his wife. The sample was given in front of a doctor, so "planting" someone else's urine would have been very difficult. The story I heard (as told in the "Cycling" newspaper) was that before the test he emptied his bladder behind the bushes and refilled with his wife's urine via a catheter. AFAIR he was not a top rider, just a lowly domestique desparate to stay in contact with the race. He was certainly not cleared of charges.
Re:K. S. Kyosuk - Re:She would've flunked the test (Score:5, Informative)
Snopes [snopes.com] isn't so sure. "We haven't yet found a verified news report of a drug testee whose cheating was exposed when urinalysis revealed him to be pregnant. (Pregnancy tests aren't a standard part of the drug screening process.)"
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Reminds me of this one: Girl to boy "You have one of those, and I have one of these. And with one of these I can get as many of those as I want!"
All about perception (Score:5, Interesting)
The public weren't prepared to accept female deaths - or at least, politicians didn't think they would.
Women performed better in many tests - particularly stress testing, sensory deprivation, etc.
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Nothing to do with this. White men running NASA, white men running the Air Force, white men running the show could not and would not have a woman beat them to space. End of story. It's pure discrimination. It was widely known that physiologically and psychologically a woman is better suited for space flights. It was just ignored. Just like the claim "they can't fly", in WWII many women pilots proved that they could do the work as well, if not better, than their male colleagues who were busy with things "mo
Re: All about perception (Score:3, Funny)
Didnt they send monkeys to space before whitesï¼Y
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The Oatmeal discusses this in depth: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/ani... [theoatmeal.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I would argue that women are genetically predisposed to perform some tasks better than men, while the same is true for men as well. I know none of my girlfriends ever got me pregnant, or even given me a pregnancy scare!
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You're being pedantic. The statement "men can run faster than women" has implicit meanings which you are ignoring -- namely that the best male runners will always outperform the best female runners. This is demonstrated empirically every four years with the summer olympics.
I agree with some of the sentiments of your original post -- there's a huge variation in the human population and we should be careful to be aware of this so we don't presume in favor of the average (lefties know how that feels); but I th
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It was widely known that physiologically and psychologically a woman is better suited for space flights
Careful, you are contradicting PC axiom that men and women are equal in all things, including any psychological predispositions.
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Yes and no.
It was morally repugnant to put women in high-risk situations because for thousands of years women were considered too valuable because of their child-rearing roles. Men, in contrast, were expendable.
It's especially perverse since women were not usually treated as valued members of society.
No-one would have been consciously thinking that way in the 1960s, but it was, and to a degree still is, deeply ingrained in the culture.
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White men ran the USSR too. That didn't stop THEM from having a female cosmonaut.
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So do you feel better about yourself for being so offended by the sexism of 50 years ago?
Guess what racism and sexism where both more mainstream 50 years ago. The fact that they even where willing to test a woman was very progressive for the time.
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" End of story. "
Ah, I see you're a sharp critical thinker, with such an unassailable argument.
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Those factors ceased to be relevant when military operations stopped being about people walking a hundred miles on foot and then clubbing each other in the head with heavy bits of metal.
Smaller? Well that means they are a smaller target, you can fit more of them into a transport, they have more room to move around the interior of a fighting vehicle. Strength matters somewhat but smaller people also eat less, and so are a reduced logistical burden.
In terms of speed and endurance, it is far from clear that wo
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"Differences between men and women *on average* are meaningless." Physically, this is untrue.
"The average soldier can be easily replaced with exceptional women." Which more or less negates your point.
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The Rangers perhaps aren't, but the general military is.
Armies are not composed of average men. They are, specifically, a subgroup of all persons that can pass through a specific set of selection filters.
Average men are average, not "average minus all the ones we deselected because they didn't meet a variety of physical and mental standards."
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"No, the problem is women simply don't make as good of soldiers as men. They are smaller and have less strength, speed, and endurance."
That was true in ancient time when they carried pikes, swords and bronze armour.
With an assault rifle though size and strength are not such a big deal.
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I always got annoyed by the different standards applied to women and men in the Marines, and though anyone should be available to be assigned combat roles, as long as you meet the same criteria. When I
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If that would be the case, Israel would have ceased to exist either in 1948, in 1967 or in 1973, at the very latest in 1982.
Another junk article from medium.com (Score:5, Informative)
Consisting of a handful of sentences written in 20 point font that failed to support its facts nor conditional, inflammatory conclusion. It is a troll article, like so many from that site.
The point made may be true, but why should a reader spend more time researching the article's sources than the writer themselves did to find the truth?
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The point made may be true, but why should a reader spend more time researching the article's sources than the writer themselves did to find the truth?
Welcome to Socratic Journalism.
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Propagandists are not journalists.
um... ok (Score:2)
let's send an 83 year old woman into space to satisfy some fucking clickbaiter's need for a political score.
Fuck me, she'd be dead before she clears the tower.
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Yeah, I was a bit confused at that "She still deserves to go" comment as well.
[...] Glenn lifted off for a second space flight on October 29, 1998. He took flight on Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-95. At age 77, Glenn became the oldest person to go into space. Glenn states in his memoir that he had no idea that NASA was willing to send him back into space when NASA announced the decision.[17] According to the New York Times, Glenn "won his seat on the shuttle flight by lobbying NASA for two years to fly as a human guinea pig for geriatric studies", which were named as the main reasons for his participation in the mission.[18]
Glenn's participation in the nine-day mission was criticized by some in the space community as a political favor granted to Glenn by President Clinton.[citation needed] Others noted that Glenn's flight offered valuable research on weightlessness and other aspects of space flight on the same person at two points in life 36 years apart—by far the longest interval between space flights by the same person—providing information on the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on the elderly, with an ideal control.[citation needed] Shortly before the flight, researchers learned that Glenn had to be disqualified from one of the flight's two main priority human experiments (about the effects of melatonin) because he did not meet one of study's medical conditions; he still participated in two other experiments about sleep monitoring and protein use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... [wikipedia.org]
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yeah, still bugs me how he got onto STS-95 even what, over three decades after sustaining that head injury? He did pass all the fitness requirements apart from that one melatonin test, but that wasn't enough to disqualify him either.
The mention of Valentina Tereshkova is ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, please. Tereshkova was nothing but a political stunt (easily demonstrated by the fact that it took twenty years to get another woman into space). She wasn't even a pilot at all at the time when every astronaut candidate was expected to be an already accomplished test pilot. Cobb has more bragging rights that Tereshkova ever had. The same goes for the "Meanwhile, NASA wouldn’t open its astronaut ranks to women until 1978" sentence. The astronaut ranks in the USSR weren't really much better.
outperforming practically all of the men
It's ambiguous whether this means "practically all of the male candidates" or "practically all of the Mercury 7". The former is obvious, the latter isn't mentioned anywhere in TFA, and judging from the numbers ("the top 2% of all candidates", which counted five hundred), it's far from clear that this was the case.
Re:The mention of Valentina Tereshkova is ridiculo (Score:4, Insightful)
Cobb has more bragging rights that Tereshkova ever had
That could very well be true, except for that one right the article is referring to -- the right to brag about being the first woman in space. That one belongs to Tereshkova and will, at least until facts mean more than rationalizations.
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It depends on whether you consider "look what happened to me!" to be worthier than "look at what I achieved in my life through my own skills and determination".
Wan Hu [wikipedia.org] was determined to go to space. That didn't do much good for him, since he happened to live in 16th century (if at all). It takes more just personal qualities to achieve anything at all, thus evevery achievement has an element of "look what happened to me!". And of course this is all ignoring the fact that while you did indeed earn those skill
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Re:The mention of Valentina Tereshkova is ridiculo (Score:5, Insightful)
A fair percentage of early space exploration was entirely political stunts. It was one of the driving forces that made it all happen.
Doesn't mean it wasn't an achievement and Tereshkova has something that no-one can ever take away from her.
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Right, exactly. What the USSR and the US chose to do in the space race was to symbolize those aspects of their national character that they wished to promote. That the Soviets sent the first woman, made a pretty clear message - that at that time at least, the USSR was ahead of the US in terms of gender relations.
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Oh, sending a woman into space was 'ahead in terms of gender relations'. So sending a man is automatically sexist? I tell you a secret: Only the most stupid brainwashed sexists think that way.
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Parent has it right. All early spaceflight was about political stunts. The USSR used it to send a positive political message: one of gender equality (well, Gagarin was still the first, but women weren't all that far behind). The US sent a negative one: only men get to go to space.
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I don't think that the USSR were making any particular statement about gender politics. They were simply looking to score another 'first'.
There's also a suspicion that their statement was that their space industry was so advanced, that they could send up even a woman. So the exact opposite of a positive gender equality message.
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outperforming practically all of the men
It's ambiguous whether this means "practically all of the male candidates" or "practically all of the Mercury 7".
The only important data is whether she outperformed one single male in the Mercury 7: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton.
If she didn't, the entire topic is sexist.
If she did, the program was sexist.
If it wasn't known either way, the program was sexist, because it should have been known prior to selecting among the candidates.
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Different countries - different standards. For example by Soviet standards Alan Shepard's flight was just a political stunt, because the flight was merely suborbital.
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Women outside the house... (Score:1)
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Social Dynamics? (Score:1)
Love never should have entered;
It was never in the plan.
We were finally going to have her
And let Joe be damned...
-Monsters, Blue Oyster Cult
This Yeti/Area-51/LochNess story just won't die (Score:5, Informative)
NASA did NOT test that group of women, and NOT to the same standards as the original astronauts. The ladies in question were sharp, physically fit, and had pilot's licenses BUT that's nearly the extent of their resume' overlap with the Mercury 7. Every few years some self-styled feminist guy or some ladies' magazine or website pretends nobody knows about ms. Cobb and her obviously unfairly overlooked sisters and then treats a generally ignorant public to tails of these superwomen being better than the men NASA chose but being overlooked because the nation was run by a bunch of "male chauvenist pigs". This is a re-writing of history by people who certainly know better but have outed themselves as unreliable sources of unbiased historical facts.
Jerrie and her fellow would-be lady astronauts were on an "equal rights" political campaign. They set out to prove on their own that they should be allowed into the program and had they been a bunch of men with the EXACT SAME records nobody would have given them the time of day. Instead, over the years, they have been embraced as pioneers for women's rights and become celebrity causes. Government officials, always alert to politics and the need to have support from activists, have given them awards and lots of free complements in speeches (but notably NEVER slots on the astronaut corps, nor even guest roles as shuttle payloads like a couple of members of congress - Senator Garn and Senator Nelson should ring some bells...).
NASA required all the original astronauts to have engineering degress and military flight experience in high-preformance jets (particularly choosing test pilots); this was not arbitrary - they wanted people with a PROVEN record of self control, proven affinity for understanding engineering, and a proven ability to remain calm and observant and carry out technical procedures while facing death. Neither Jerrie nor her fallow would-be lady astronauts fit the bill (just as most male aviators in the US also did not fit). Indeed, had the scope of astro candidates been expanded it still would not have included these women because there were plenty of other male miitary test pilots available with far better qualifications. When you have plenty of candidates who fit your requirements already, you do NOT add-in another set of unknowns and another set of hassles (like the need to deal with male AND female sanitary requirements, the need for a wider variety of spacesuit design features, etc) without some really good justifications. NASA accomodated women much later when it was appropriate - in the shuttle era. Had NASA in the late 1950s had a huge pool of qualified female test pilots and no qualified males, they would have gone with women and added men later.
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Had NASA in the late 1950s had a huge pool of qualified female test pilots and no qualified males, they would have gone with women and added men later.
NASA most definitely would not have done that! You are totally taking history out of context.
The US was a high discriminatory society in the 1950's. Women had only been allowed to vote 30 years earlier and the Jim Crow laws were still in effect until 1965.
There is no way that anything other than a white male would have been approved by NASA at a time when the majority opinion was that a woman's place was in the kitchen and a black's place was in the back of the bus.
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Uh, actually, it was a derived requirement. "Must have military test pilot experience" *WAS* a requirement.
Since the military did not allow women to be test pilots, "Must urinate via a penis" was a derived requirement.
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As that was never a requirement, regardless of your tenuous stretching of logic and 'fact', your entire argument fails.
In the 1950's, "military flight experience in high-performance jets" and "had penis" formed a perfectly circular Venn diagram. Until 1976, women weren't allowed to be military pilots, period.
It was not a literal requirement, but it was both a practical and technical one to the point where it might as well have been a literal requirement.
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Your thought process here is completely backwards. NASA's goal with the space missions was to get people into space and back to earth. This was not easy and required extremely capable individuals to carry out this mission. Had NASA wanted to ensure that both men and women were sent into space in the name of equality they would have had to delay the mission for several decades. This was because of the social conditions in the United States and you can harp on how terrible that was all you want, but that was
enough of the first female black Puerto Rican ... (Score:2)
For many decades now we've had female heads of state (ie Thatcher), female Supreme Court justices, female CEOs of top companies (ie Whitman). At this point, women have done pretty much everything men have done. It's not 1940 anymore. Isn't it time we stop the sexist talk about "female astronauts", "lady lawyers", etc and just talk about astronauts and lawyers? Do we really need to call one of our national leaders a "black woman senator"? She's senator, period. She's neither less than or better than anot
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There is a place for pointing out system biases, because by nature they are difficult to perceive, except for the people who are actively and in bad faith looking for them. But the basic fact about systemic biases is that they are statistical and never a reflection on an individual.
But it is true that Western societies have passed the point where a person from an identifiable group achieving something is any kind of achievement for that individual. The "first black female Puerto Rican pole vault champion"
sports, yes indeed (Score:2)
Yeah the same thing bugs me when watching football (handegg ). I get excited for half second when the announcer says Manning just set a record, then goes on to say it's the record for most completed passes in the first quarter of a home game in Denver against a team with a winning record on the road. Wtf.
true that. We Americans have it combined, so (Score:2)
Good (or pedantic?) point. Since I come from a country where the head of state, head of government, and head crook are the same office, I tend to think of all national heads as "head of state".
Needs a new title. (Score:3)
"Had NASA believed in randomly allowing people to not meet any qualifications other than the final testing.."
Females weren't considered at the time.... (Score:5, Interesting)
....Because none of them had the type of test pilot experience necessary for the Mercury program in the USA or the Vostok program in the Soviet Union..
We forget that at the time of the start of manned flights in 1961, it was an extreme unknown on how well an astronaut would handle a spacecraft in Earth orbit. As such, both the Americans and Russians chose trained test pilots, who had the ability to calmly handle any dangerous situation during a test flight. And in those days, only men met that qualification. It wasn't until the middle 1970's that both the Americans and Russians--based on their spaceflight experience--finally figured out how to choose females to become astronauts/cosmonauts on something besides a publicity stunt.
Outrage! (Score:2)
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Are you really that stupid? Seriously? While it is outrages that a qualified person was not allowed onto the team ONLY because of their gender. It was a long time ago. No one is outraged now.
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Are you really that stupid?
Not in the way you are implying (maybe other ways). You see, the post wasn't meant to be taken literally. If you go back to the first woman is space, during that specific period of time there were only women in space and no men. But it loses something when I have to explain it. Now, as for your first question, I could retort with an equally juvenile response, but it wouldn't add anything to the conversation.
Regards
Change her name (Score:2)
I have to question the facts of the matter (Score:2)
The politics on gender equality have created a lot of zealots that are pushing propaganda of various kinds. We see it every day... And while I do believe in the equality between the sexes, I do not believe in advocacy for either of the sexes.
There is a lot of advocacy going on in this general topic and I have no patience for it because it is ultimately dishonest.
Do women deserve to compete against men? Sure. Join the male Olympics and tell me how well you do there. Sound unfair? That is competition. It isn'
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If it was a physical issue, then how do you explain Valentina Tereshkova?
You're example will be valid once people run to the Moon, until then you should probably realize you examples is just a unconscious bias.
She passed all the test and qualified. So the only reason for her not to get chosen is because she was a woman. Probably because a femal death would have been a big blow to the program; which is a form of cultural sexism.
She was not a military test pilot, but neither was John Glenn.
Now, to you far mor
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Just because the Russians sent a women into space does not mean that any other specific woman was superior to the male choices that were offered at the time.
As to passing all tests and qualifying, many men did as well and many of them never went into space. By your logic, the only reason they didn't was because of gender bias.
You have correlation, sir... not causation. You can show that a women that qualified did not go into space. You cannot show that she was not chosen specifically because of her gender.
T
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John Glenn was indeed a military test pilot. In 1957 (one year before Mercury 7) Glenn was a test pilot at NAS Patuxent River and was the first to complete a supersonic transcontinental flight in the Vought F8U-3P Crusader.
The other reason she would not have qualified is she had little to no experience flying jets. She flew a jet once.
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I should also add, as someone else mentioned, the Mercury Seven candidates had to have a bachelor's degree or equivalent. Jerrie Cobb only had a high school education.
The article goes too far... (Score:2)
Yes she was passed over due to sexism, indirect though since they were only accepting military pilots (who were only male). The article says towards the beginning:
Although they were certainly deserving, well-qualified and capable, there was a better candidate than many of these men who was passed over for all the wrong reasons.
Okay, a valid thesis except...
The Lovelace Clinic was where a series of physical and mental tests...were performed on the candidates to determine their fitness for space. The first crew, the aforementioned Mercury 7, were chosen from among the top performers.
But about a year later, Lovelace became curious about how women would perform on this same test...
Thirteen American women...were selected to participate in the three phases of testing. Jerrie Cobb was the only one who passed them all.
So Jerrie Cobb took the test after the Mercury 7 crew were selected. They weren't picked over her, because she at the time was not known to be as qualified or better.
Further the last line of the quoted section is false. 19 women were selected to participate in the testing (recruited by Lovelace and Cobb). 13 passed t
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Right. I always prefer 'womanimals'.
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You think the first astronauts invented rockets and the necessary physics themselves?
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This seems to be the new standard spin on these stories after simply trying to claim that there wasn't a problem failed. Now it's just "we are sick of hearing about the problems". Had the same thing when it was the rights of black people and the rights of gay people. Standard tactic to avoid addressing the issue directly.
The you throw in a few straw feminist arguments and some insults, revealing your true motive.
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I see this a lot. Women actually start getting talked about on a site or podcast, and some idiot like you pops out of the woodwork and acts likes that's all that is talked about.
100's of stories, and a few of the are about women an you freak out.
WTF is wrong with you?