Lost in space race: Female pilots - USATODAY.com: Women had the 'right stuff,' too, back in the '60s. But the data on their performance tests were buried in the Mad Men era, and it was two decades before there was an American female astronaut.
A report in the current Advances in Physiology Education reveals that the 'Mercury 13' members of the private Woman in Space Program of the early 1960s did about as well as, or better than, male candidates identically tested.
'Some of these women were told they were as good as men. The data show it was true,' says lead author Kathy Ryan of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
But the 13 women who passed the astronaut tests at Lovelace saw their chance at 'one giant step for womankind' canceled in 1961. 'I quit my job teaching flight instruction, and … there I was, unemployed,' says Gene Nora Jessen, 72, of Boise.
