Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb,Waco,TX -"almost astronaut"
An extract from an article in the GLOBE & MAIL, Canada's largest newspaper, about Stephanie Nolen's "Promised the Moon" (Penguin Books), going on sale Oct 23.
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By STEPHANIE NOLEN - Globe and Mail Update - Saturday, October 12, 2002
...In the early 1960s, a forgotten corps of extraordinary U.S. 'astronettes' passed torturous tests and training with flying colours - only to see a sexist society snatch their dream away. Today, The Globe's STEPHANIE NOLEN tells the untold story of the scandal that inspired her new book...
Americans heard the crack of the starter's gun in the race for space on Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The American military scrambled to match the achievement, but produced a string of failures. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower, taking a pounding over the "space gap," created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and charged it with getting a human being into space before the Soviets did.
In 1959, no one had ever traveled beyond the pull of gravity, and no one knew what being in space would do to the human body ... With rockets blowing up or fizzling on the launch pad, NASA needed some good news, and on April 9, 1959, it introduced the word astronaut ... The men were all white Protestants from small towns, married with children. Four were named for their fathers; three were military-college graduates. This, America was told, was what an astronaut looked like ...
In Sept. 1959, Geraldyn Cobb was 28 and an internationally renowned pilot. She had been flying since she was 12, taught by her father, who tied wood blocks on the pedals of his Waco biplane so her feet could reach them. Now she flew for the Aero Design and Engineering Company in Oklahoma City, one of only two or three women in the United States with a senior aeronautics post. She had set world records for altitude, distance and speed in the Aero Commander, and just that summer she had been awarded the Gold Wings of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in Paris, one of aviation's highest honours. Freckled, shy, her hair in a long blond ponytail, she didn't look like a pilot... but (she had) three world records, and 7,000 hours in the cockpit ...
NASA's engineers were struggling with the design of their first space capsule. They could not get it small or light enough to launch. But if the pilot were 40 precious pounds lighter, and required less food, fewer heavy oxygen cannisters - that might be enough. A Redstone rocket, the country's largest, just might be able to launch that capsule, with a lighter, female passenger ... the last testing of female pilots was done on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in World War II, a corps of 1,200 female ferry pilots. Research showed they had been better able to tolerate isolation and extremes of temperature than male pilots. But there had been no further study in 15 years ... (Jerrie) had been flying since she was 12 at the cost of all else, ever faster and higher, pushing planes so far up into the darkening blue that her hands froze to the controls ...
Ms. Cobb arrived in Albuquerque on a chilly Valentine's Day in 1960 ... Ms. Cobb took more tests that summer: Escaping from a spinning crashed "space ship" in a deep water tank, taking a jet through a punishing round of high G-force rolls, and ... a pioneering isolation-tank test, immersing in her a soundproof, lightproof, eight-foot tank of water heated to her exact body temperature. At the time, the tank was the closest thing scientists had to mimic the isolation of space. Ms. Cobb climbed in - and at the end of nine hours quietly asked over the microphone if she had done enough. None of the previous female subjects had lasted more than six hours, and no man more than six-and-a-half.
Ms. Cobb's extraordinary results (were made) public at the Space and Naval Medicine Congress, an international convention of aerospace scientists held in Stockholm in August (1961) ... At the end of the summer of 1961, 13 women whose scores mirrored Ms. Cobb's (made) plans to (go) to the naval base at Pensacola, (to be tested) in jet flying and (winnowed) down further ... the other women (whom Ms. Cobb had taken to addressing in correspondence as the Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees, or FLATs) were all due in Pensacola on Sept. 17, 1961. They had arranged for people to look after their children, and four of them had to quit their precious flying jobs because their bosses didn't like the idea of women messing with the space program ...
On September 16, Western Union (telegrams advised:) REGRET TO ADVISE ARRANGEMENTS AT PENSACOLA CANCELLED, LETTER WILL ADVISE OF ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENTS WHEN MATTER CLEARED FURTHER. But there never was another letter.
Ms. Cobb flew to Washington and banged on doors; NASA and the Navy shrugged her off. Dr. Lovelace was strangely silent. She got no explanation for the abrupt cancellation ... The word "discrimination" was just beginning to be used on matters of gender and jobs, and aftermonths of lobbying, the women managed to get a couple of politicians interested. (At) a hearing room on Capitol Hill on July 17, 1962. They took their seats at the witness table, facing the row of representatives on the House Space Committee. Ten of the 12 were men, and all but one of those a war veteran. One of the committee members noted that the Mercury astronauts were all jet test pilots, while few of the FLATs had jet time. Ms. Cobb patiently explained that women pilots were barred in the Air Force, which did almost all the jet flying at the time. She didn't think it was a problem, but if NASA did, they should simply let them do the jet runs they had been set for, and see how they performed. Ms. Cobb spoke eloquently of the women's thousands of hours of "equivalent experience" - "flawless judgment, fast reaction, and the ability to transmit that to the proper control of the craft," earned "the hard way," in as many as 10,000 hours and a million milesin flight.
... Col. (John) Glenn smoothly assured the committee that NASA had plenty of astronauts; they weren't looking for more ... (he) neatly put into words what most of those in the room had been thinking - and closed the debate on female astronauts in the United States for 20 years. "I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized, really. It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order."
None of the FLATs ever got to space. Though they could not know it, some of the most powerful people in the country were secretly working against them. Lyndon Johnson personally killed off any last hope of their joining the space program, only months before he pushed into law the Civil Rights Act making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender. Nobody in the United States saw any glory in having the most prestigious of American jobs being carried out by a girl with a ponytail. And so the Soviets won this space race too, launching cosmonaunt Valentina Tereshkova in June 1963. Most of the FLATs went back to their lives - they found new jobs, and kept flying. Most still fly today.
Ms. Cobb ran away to the Amazon jungle to serve as a missionary pilot shortly after the Congressional hearings and has lived there ever since. But she is now, at 71, the subject of an international lobby directed at NASA, whose supporters include Hillary Clinton and the National Organization for Women. "I would give my life to fly in space," Ms. Cobb says. "I would have then. I would now."
Stephanie Nolen's "Promised the Moon" (Penguin Books) tells the story of the women recruited in the Mercury era and, for the first time, details the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that kept them out of space. It goes on sale Oct. 23.
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Does Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb b. 1931 Waco, TX, fit into someone's family line ?
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Re: Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb,Waco,TX -"almost astronaut"
Michael R. Cobb 10/14/02