01/08/2025
Fun Friday fact!
Do you know that long before Sally Ride orbited the earth, Jerrie Cobb was the first woman to pass all the same preflight tests as NASA's seven Mercury astronauts?
"Cobb was the first test subject recruited in 1960 by Dr. William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace II and Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger to undergo the physical testing regimen Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, developed to help select NASA’s first astronauts. When Lovelace announced Cobb’s success at a 1960 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, she immediately became the subject of media coverage. At the same time, she continued helping Lovelace find additional women pilots to examine, eventually compiling a list of 25 pilots to invite. Jacqueline Cochran, the famous pilot and businesswoman, and Lovelace’s old friend, joined the project as an advisor and paid all of the women’s testing expenses. The result was Lovelace’s Woman in Space Program, a short-lived, privately-funded project testing women pilots for astronaut fitness in the early 1960s.
In the end, thirteen women passed the same physical examinations that the Lovelace Foundation had developed for NASA’s astronaut selection process. They were: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle "K" Cagle, Jan Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Sarah Gorelick [Ratley], Jane B. Hart, Rhea Hurrle [Woltman], Jerri Sloan [Truhill], Gene Nora Stumbough [Jessen], and Bernice "B" Trimble Steadman. Although the group has been called the “Mercury 13,” a misleading and ahistorical moniker, Cobb called them her “Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees."
Learn more about Jerrie Cobb from the National Space and Air Museum-->
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/geraldyn-jerrie-cobb-pioneering-woman-aviator
