 So Amy, this is, she describes herself as a lifelong space history nerd who's turned a childhood fascination with moon landings into her career. I mean, I think that was a career that I wanted to, somewhere or another, I've got an old scrapbook of all the, I think Gemini was the main one when I was a kid. I've got a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings from it. It's my favorite program, I can't blame you. So over the years, he's written for well over a dozen online and print outlets including Discovery News and Al Jazeera English has appeared in a handful of TV series including NASA's unexplained files. And her first book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity, which one lucky person will get after tonight was released last year. She currently does maintain a YouTube channel with a lot of really great stuff on it called Vintage Space, so be sure to check that out, along with lots of other insane and awesome projects. So please welcome Amy Sherrod Tidal. Thank you for that introduction and I will say this is the first time I've done a distance talk like this in about six years and I'm so used to audience interaction that, yeah, I apologize if I go over things that some of you guys might know, because usually I do the show of hands who has heard of this and you all have, I skip it. So I'm just going to pretend that you don't know things. Okay, and I'm also going to attempt to share my screen. So Brian, if I do this wrong, please let me know as soon as possible. Okay, okay, are you able to see my full slides? We do. Okay, and are you able to see me or no? Well, I can because I can because I have two screens going. Okay, just want to make sure I'm sharing it correctly. Okay, we see in a little kind of postage view. Okay, okay. So, so yeah, here's where I usually do the show of hands who's heard of the Mercury 13 and there's a few hands that go up so assume within the people that there are a few hands going up but probably a lot of hands not going up. So the Mercury 13 as I have here, aka the women who didn't fly in space or go to the moon in the 1960s. These are the ladies that I want to talk about tonight for a little bit because their story is really fascinating and they're so often left as a footnote in space history. Their story is one that I mean, the Diyard nerds I feel know about but it's weirdly been left as this kind of unknown little sidebar in history. So we'll attempt tonight to make it less of a sidebar and more of an interesting little aside if that works. But before we get into their story, I'm going to take a minute and give you guys again, apologies if I'm going over things that you guys know because you're all into this. I'm going to take a step back and just look a little bit into why we had to get humans into space in the 60s in the first place and also why, like who were the right humans for the job. So the space race, the brief, the brief calls notes, which is the Canadian cliff notes, apologies. So after the Second World War, both the United States and the Soviet Union started ended this war of sort of rockets and things and began a new war based on ideologies. Both nations developed missiles using rocket scientists that had developed rockets for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. So not only were they involved in the war of ideologies being a democracy and communism, they were also starting to develop the weapons to make it into a very much a hot war. But the scientists who were developing the missiles weren't just looking at using them for a war. There were scientists in both nations interested in using these rockets that were being developed for warheads to launch satellites. And one of the one of the outlets of that kind of initial interest in using rockets for actually gathering research data on space and on the Earth's environment was the International Geophysical Year. So this was the year of International Scientific Cooperation between all nations, I forget off the top of my head, to be honest, how many, but to study the Earth's geophysical environment at a time of peak solar activity. So this was really going to be looking into the SolarWinds interaction with the Earth's magnetic field and all kinds of upper atmospheric science. And it was going to run between July of 1957 and December of 1958. That was a peak solar activity. And both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced at conferences in the early 1950s, but 53, 54, their intention to launch satellites on missiles or rockets within under the banner of the International Geophysical Year. But spoiler alert jumping ahead a bit, the Soviet Union gets there first with Sputnik. So the United States is trying to develop its missiles and then out of nowhere, the Soviet Union launches this little ball. So Sputnik, it weighs 184 pounds. It's shiny. It beeps. People in the West can see it or so they think you couldn't actually see Sputnik, even though it was polished to be as reflective as possible. You could actually see it was the upper stage of the rocket trailing it in orbit. And the beeping thing, I mean, it beeped, changed the tone, depending on temperature. It couldn't do anything. It wasn't going to drop bombs. Americans freaked out about it because it meant that the Soviets were now literally over the heads of Americans. American scientists weren't exactly concerned because they knew that it was a pretty innocuous satellite. But the implications were significant. It meant that the Soviet Union had far better rockets and therefore better missiles than the United States because if they could launch a 184 pound ball into orbit, they could launch something much heavier across an ocean and bomb the United States. So that's not good. And then the Soviet Union, I'm sorry, I should say the date, October 4th of 1957. I imagine everyone watching this knows that date. But anyways, so the Soviet Union follows the launch of Sputnik with Sputnik II on November 4th of the same year, or I don't remember 3rd, rather, with a slide advance. OK, with a Leica arm core. Leica, as you can see. This was a significant and an overspending one. Sputnik II, because it had a canine passenger, had a very rudimentary biomedical system on board to actually keep her alive. Now, she didn't stay alive very long. There was a failure of the cabin heating system. And she died before she got into space. But the West doesn't know that. And there's reports from the Soviet press machine tasks in the United States saying that Leica, as well, and that she will be landing from space, she had no way of coming back. There was no way she was going to live. But Americans didn't know that. So it's obvious that the Soviet Union is starting to gain a lot of traction in space. It's already looking ahead at launching biological payloads, a.k.a. humans into space. And the United States really doesn't want to be second. It wants to own space, because America, America wants to own all the things. So the long story short, because this is sort of the introductory footnotes, the United States establishes from preexisting parts in the country, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slash the NASA that we all know and love today. And the goal is to put an American in space before the Soviet Union that launches one of its own men. The question now, once we have a space agency in the United States, is who is that person going to be? So in looking at what the first astronauts might be, there were all kinds of people considered. Very briefly, NASA considered acrobats and daredevils and contortionists, because they were used to confined spaces. They looked at stuntmen, because they were used to things being on fire, and that's basically what riding on top of a rocket was going to be like. Someone once considered divers or brought them up in a meeting, because if the spacecraft is going to splash down, at least they'd be familiar with water. There was honestly no real understanding of what the challenges of spaceflight would be for an astronaut. So anyone that could stand a cramped environment and that wouldn't be put off by a dangerous job was pretty much open for the position of astronaut. But then it came out, and they realized at first that at least some of whatever was going to go on in the space program was about to be classified. Even though NASA was established as a civilian agency, there would definitely be something not completely publicly knowable within everything space agency was doing. So it's actually President Eisenhower in late 1958 who decided that all of the astronauts would be test pilots. And not everyone was happy with this decision, because it severely limited the pool of applicants, but it did simplify things. Because not only now did we have a pool of people that it would be based on test pilots, based on the rockets and the spacecraft that they would be launching it, the parameters were now set by default. So this is on the right is the redstone rocket that launched the first World Mercury missions. And on the right, sorry, the left is the Mercury spacecraft. They are not big. Neither of these are very large vehicles. You can see, I mean, I love this picture of the Mercury spacecraft with the guy for sale. You can't be huge and fit in there. And so the parameters for America's first astronauts were set as they had to be younger than 40 years of age, shorter than five foot 11 inches, because it were any taller, the hatch on the spacecraft would not really be able to close properly, or they'd be kind of like cramped in with a neck bend to the side. They had to be an excellent physical condition, which is super ambiguous, but is a thing that helps them figure out who they were looking for. They had to have a bachelor's degree or the equivalent experience of an engineering. They had to be a graduate of a test pilot school. They had to have 1500 hours of total flying time, be a qualified jet pilot and weigh less than 100 pounds. Again, the weight requirement was based purely on necessity. If they were any heavier, it might actually stop the rocket from getting off the ground because that redstone and even the larger Atlas that launched the Mercury missions into orbit were not exactly the biggest strongest rockets of all time. And because the pool was military-trained test pilots, that by default limited the pool to only myth. And winnowing the potential astronauts fell to Dr. Randy Lovelace. So when NASA took all of these considerations, the height, the weight, the training, the background, all the things, it found that a little over 100 active servicemen qualified for the basic astronaut qualifications. And then they were put through the most intensive physical testing probably ever done at Lovelace's Clinic in New Mexico. They were probed every which way, every possible thing that they could gather data on was gather data on. It was a physical that no men had ever really been through when they learned more about these people than anyone ever really needs to learn about another human being. Of the 110-34 went on to phase two of intensive psychological testing, including things like isolation testing and all kinds of very bizarre things. And also just working through the ink blot tests. And of those 34, seven emerged as the best possible physical specimens in the United States. The Mercury astronauts. And I love this picture of them because they look so fake happy with that model rocket and Vice President Nixon. So these St. Hansen men were announced as America's first astronauts on April 5th of 1959. And even though the whole world won't really the nation, I mean, half the world, but America really got super excited about it. I mean, these guys were heroes by the end of the press conference before they'd even done anything. Lovelace wasn't totally convinced that they were the right choice for the job because he knew that women are smaller, they're lighter, they consume fewer resources. There was research that said women are better at dealing with boredom and repetitive tasks, probably because of lifetimes spent ironing shirts and cooking dinner every night. Lovelace suspected that women would just be easier to launch. And he was really curious to see if any woman out there would be able to pass the same tests that the Mercury astronauts had passed to become America's first astronauts. And then by chance, one morning on a beach during a conference, he met Jerry Cobb. Jerry Cobb was a phenomenally successful pilot in her own right. When she met Lovelace, she was 28 years old. She had more than 7,000 hours in the air on her belt. She was extremely physically fit and super keen on flying. She had been awarded the pilot of the year awarded by the National Pilot Association. She'd won altitude, speed and distance records, not for women pilots, but for pilots in America. She was one of the few female pilots who was holding her own among all of her male counterparts. And it was kind of the perfect chance meeting. When the two of them met with a couple other people on the beach that morning, Cobb had mentioned something in passing about challenges Soviet pilots were facing in their jets. And Lovelace's ears pricked up and said, are you a pilot? Have you ever thought about going into space? How would you like to go through testing? And she did not hesitate at all. And she said, yes. And the two of them talked a bit and they met and they figured out, okay, here's how we're gonna do it. And he sort of arranged these very secretive tests for Cobb to go through without sort of identifying who she was or why she was going through these tests at his own clinic. So he didn't need anybody to say, yes, she can go or no, she can't. So Cobb was pretty excited once she got this opportunity to work with Lovelace. And she arrived in New Mexico on February 14th of 1960 and had very strange instructions waiting for her at a motel to not drink or eat anything after midnight and to sleep a certain number of hours since you can make yourself sleep a certain number of hours now. And she arrived at Lovelace's clinic the next morning under the name of Unit One Female. No one was allowed to know her name. She wasn't allowed to know anything that was going on. But she went through all of the same physical tests as the Mercury astronauts. So these were the tests, again, can't do a show of hands, but I assume some people out there have seen the right stuff. So the scenes where they're blowing into the tubes to raise the ball a certain height in a tube and hold it there and then riding the bicycle and measuring oxygen intake and output, she did all of these same tests. And not only did she pass every single physical test, she actually beat the Mercury astronauts in a lot of them. So Lovelace was thrilled that not only had he found a woman who could pass these insane physically demanding tests, but she was better than her male counterparts in a lot of ways. So Lovelace knew that he had something kind of phenomenal in his hands, but he didn't just kind of yell it out from the rooftops. He kept Cobb's results a secret until the fall of that year, the fall of 1960, an international symposium of space medicine in Stockholm. He released the results of this conference. And as soon as the word was out, everybody wanted to know who this woman was and every possible thing about her. And Cobb basically became a celebrity overnight. Somehow Life Magazine got the exclusive access to her story and all of a sudden she was just plastered in magazines and newspapers as already being touted as the woman who would fly into space, which was not necessarily true, but you know, media, this is how media works sometimes. But for Cobb, she didn't really want this sudden weird instant celebrity status, what she wanted was to continue her training to go through astronaut, to train to be an astronaut to fly in space and to stand as a role model for future female astronauts and for future female pilots who wanted to fly in space. And that's what she did. She sort of backed away from the limelight a bit. She was outspoken enough to sort of be somebody that girls could look up to, but really she sort of quietly continued on her training. So just like the Mercury astronauts went through a second round of tests, including the eight blot tests and the isolation testing, she did the same psychological tests, again with lovelace, and again she passed and beat the men in numerous instances. My favorite one that she describes is the sensory deprivation tank where she was floating in a tank of water, heated to her body temperature in air that was her body temperature in a soundproof room and just told to wait and completely dark. Just, you can't tell anything that's going on. The male astronaut candidates lasted about four hours on average in that container. She lasted nine and a half and they only took her out because it had been long enough and everyone was bored. So she was really, really in weird ways proving herself very capable of flying in space. I feel like we should reiterate flying in space in an era when no one really knew what flying in space was like. So she also went through a third phase of tests just like the Mercury astronauts did in Pensacola, Florida with the US Navy's cooperation and this included tests like airborne EEGs to see what her brain activity would be like when she was flying in jets. And again, across the board, Cobb proved that she was physically, emotionally, intellectually, totally competent and able to fly in space. But for Lovelace, he knew that he had one exceptional woman's hands. But he had to know whether it was just that she was awesome or whether he was right and that women were just good at things. So in early 1961, he invited 25 women to go through the same testing and they were all similar to Cobb. They were young, accomplished pilots. Some were single, some were married, some had children, one had eight children but they were all women who were capable and were able to do these tests and were more than willing to take time off work because women did not get leave for these kinds of things. They were leaving their families at home to try for their shot at going into space. But there was one female pilot who was probably the foremost female pilot in the nation at the time, who was a personal friend of Lovelace who did not make his list of possible candidates. And she was really, really not happy about it, Jackie Cochran. So Jackie Cochran learned to fly in the mid 1930s at the behest of her husband. She actually owned a cosmetics company and was constantly in meetings all around the country and her husband. She married an older wealthy man. Her husband suggested, why don't you learn to fly so you can just get yourself places? And she did. She got her license ridiculously fast. In the matter of months, she was qualified. And by the end of the 1930s, she learned to start training to fly in 1932. By the end of the decade, she'd set speed and altitude records, one air races that had been, to that point, exclusively the domain of male pilots and received multiple awards. And in most of these cases, she was the first woman to do this. So, and meanwhile, she's still running this cosmetics company. She's kind of like a bit of a badass. She's going for the things she wants and she's making it work. And her most notable claim to fame sort of came during the Second World War. When she recruited and trained female pilots to help with the American war efforts. This was the women's auxiliary service pilots. She had, during these closing months of the war, closing years of the war, she had more than a thousand women pilots under her control. And together, all of her girls had more than 60 million hours in the air. These were women who were doing all the jobs that male pilots just didn't really want to do, like towing targets for firing practice, like actively being shot at so that the male pilots who were going into battle could train. They were delivering planes all over the world. They were flying things that no one really wanted to be flying, just for the sake of testing them out, just if they could be used to train other people. They flew, these women flew every kind of plane that the U.S. Army Air Forces had. And Jackie Cochran loved it because she was the one in charge. But that was during the Second World War, right? We're 1942, 1943. Flash forward to 1961. She's getting way too old. She is pushing 50, and the male astronauts have to be under 40. So even though she may be a beautifully accomplished pilot and may be physically able to do a lot of things, she's just not within the age range that NASA's even considering for male astronauts, women, female astronauts. So if she can't fly in space, she tries to take over control of the women's training program. She basically wants to do for spaceflight what she did for Air Force training and turn the women's astronaut program into sort of a wasp of spaceflight thing, where she's the one training everything, she's the one calling the shots, she's really the one in control, even if other women are doing the flying. So her way of trying to sort of insert herself into this women's astronaut training is to use her husband's money, who by today's standards would make her a billionaire, to fund the girls' trips to New Mexico for testing at Love Laces Clinic. So we have a couple of, we have like a relationship development here, where it's a little bit of Cobb versus Copper. So Cobb, Jerry Cobb, wants to get women in space as soon as possible. As she's seeing in the newspapers men are training and as she and the other women that she's working with are going through their training, she realizes that it makes sense to try to get a woman in space as soon as possible. Because the Soviets keep scoring firsts over America in space, right? The Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik, they launched the first living being with Leica. Well, we're gonna flash forward here. They launched the first human into space with Yuri Gagarin on April 12th, 1961. And there's intelligence coming from the Soviet Union saying that the Soviets are looking at launching a phenyl pilot into space too, just to secure that first. Cobb says, why should we let them have that first when you have me and 12 other women who are training and capable and we can do it? So why can't we? She doesn't want a women in space program. She wants women in the space program and she wants them in the space program now. And she kind of also wants to be the one to go up first. Cochran, on the other hand, wants a separate program for women that she's in control of. She wants basically to stop Cobb from getting all of the media attention that she's given to stop Cobb talking about being the first woman in space and to maybe back off the whole women in space thing so that Cobb can't be the first one up. Cochran basically wants to rest control and then do it on her terms, even if she can't fly. But Cobb isn't exactly gonna give up without a fight. She, at this point, has been a career pilot. She's worked far too hard and given this opportunity, she's not gonna let it go without a fight. So she takes her case to the man in charge, Jim Webb. So Webb is NASA's administrator under President Kennedy's administration and he is basically the one in charge of the entire agency. And it's to Webb that Cobb takes her campaigning to join the astronaut corps now. And while Cobb is in Washington, pleading with Webb and trying to make her case, trying to just get in meetings with the man, the other 12 women who passed the first round of testing at Lovelace Clinic are invited to go through the second and third rounds of testing for the advanced mercury tests. So this is in about mid-May of 1961. So at this point, the Soviets have already launched a person year of year into space and the Americans have done L. Shepard's little pop gun civil orbital flight. It's clear that the race in space is heating up and NASA is thinking about what it's gonna do next. It's like it's big thing in space. And here's Cobb saying the next big thing in space should be launching a woman and you have me and you have 12 other women that wanna go, so why not give us a shot? And it very briefly looks like NASA's actually considering it. So on May 26th of 1961, there was a conference on the peaceful use of space in Oklahoma where Webb publicly appoints Jerry Cobb as a special consultant to NASA on women's role in space. And it looks awesome for Cobb. She's excited that finally she has a platform and finally people are going to be listening to what she has to say and she actually has the right audience finally to plead her case and to really work to get herself and her fellow female astronaut trainees in the space program to start taking strides for women in space. Of course, the problem is that on May 25th, 1961, at the day earlier, President Kennedy had challenged America to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back to Earth. And while technologically that was NASA's challenge, challenge monetarily, it was Webb's challenge to convince Congress that the man on the moon program was worth funding. So even though he's just given Cobb this assignment of being a consultant to NASA on the role of women in space, he's got a much bigger problem in that he has to figure out how to find enough money to send a man to the moon. So understandably, that takes up most of Webb's attention. Oops, sorry, I forgot to switch slides. So understandably, the race of the moon is taking most of Webb's attention, but Cobb does not let go of her own cause. On May 29th, Cobb writes to the other women that she knows had been through mercury testing. She's met some of them, they have not met each other. She writes to all of them and addresses them as fellow lady astronaut trainee, which gives them the colloquial name of the flat, that's where that comes from. And because she was the first to go through all the tests, she's the only one to have gone through all three phases of testing, and she's the only one who has the names of all the other women, she establishes herself as their leader and begins writing them updates about her fight to get women into the space program at NASA. So while she is start continuing her campaign in Washington to have her voice heard and have her women included in spaceflight, the other women, the other 12 women are starting to go through the later phases of testing. And Cochrane isn't entirely left out, right? Jackie Cochrane is still funding the other women's tricks to Florida. She's giving them money so that they can actually take time off work. But she's also increasingly frustrated that she's no more than a benefactor. She also wants to be included and she's making her displeasure very much known to Lovelace and to NASA. And because she is a fairly established pilot and recognized in the nation, and because her husband has a lot of powerful friends, she's leveraging a lot of these relationships to have her distaste known. So Cochrane's unhappy and she's unbeknownst to Cobb actively working against her. And Cobb is unhappy because even though she is a special consultant to NASA, she describes herself in one of her memoirs as the least consulted consultant in NASA's history. She's not getting anywhere. Cochrane's not getting anywhere. No one's really getting anywhere and everyone's getting annoyed. Then it gets worse for the women. On September 12th of 1961, all the flats get a telegram from Lovelace saying that the third phase of testing at the Navy's lab in Pensacola is on infinite hold. And this is days before they're all supposed to go out. This is days after they've all given up their jobs if they couldn't get time off. They've taken all their savings to travel across the country. They've made arrangements with their kids to not be home for a week. Cobb is really, really upset that this is happening suddenly without any explanation. So she wants to know why. So she goes back to Washington and she starts knocking on doors and hounding people to figure out why their training has been canceled at the last minute, but finds that there's absolutely no paper trail. NASA is just kind of brushing her off saying that it never specifically asked for the testing so it can't really say anything beyond that. And the Navy says, well, we can't do this stuff without NASA's approval so we can't say anything harder. So it's basically she's finding a bureaucratic game of pass the blame and no one wants to admit we canceled this because we didn't want to do it. No one is taking responsibility for this decision and that just fuels Cobb's fire and she starts campaigning more and she starts being more vocal and public, trying to get enough pressure on NASA to actually hear her out finally. And finally, all of her efforts come to a head during the Senate hearing in July of 1962. So this slide is Cobb in front and next to her is Jamie Hart who is another one of the fellow Lady Astronaut trainings. So on July 17th, 1962, a three day special hearing called by the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics is called. It is a subcommittee hearing to discuss and investigate the qualifications of the existing qualifications for NASA astronauts. Unofficially, it's really a hearing to figure out whether or not NASA is unduly discriminating against women. There are six witnesses who will be testifying over the course of the three days. Three representing a female perspective and three representing NASA. For the women's side, it's Cobb, Jerry Cobb, Jamie Hart and Jackie Cochran. On NASA's side, it's got some pretty star witnesses being John Glenn and Scott Carpenter who at this point are the only two Americans to have orbited the Earth. So the needless to say a fair number of the people in the room who went to that Senate hearing are pretty much just fanboying and fan-barreling over the astronauts. So once again, it becomes a bit of a Cobb versus Cochran in the Senate hearing. So Cobb testifies first and her line is that America needs women's space as soon as possible to score a first over the Soviet Union. She wants to join the astronaut corps right away. She doesn't see why she can't be trained the same way that the male astronauts have been trained. And she points out that even though she doesn't have jet-fly experience because she can't because she can't join the military because she's a woman, that she's flown solely different kinds of aircraft over more hours than any of the men. And that has given her a unique experience that she would absolutely be able to leverage in spaceflight. Not to mention the Mercury spacecraft is basically completely automated and the male astronauts went through about three years of training before they were in space. There's no reason that she can't be trained the same way and being ready to fly in space before the Soviet Union launches a woman. Cochran takes a very different approach and argues that there is absolutely no need to put a woman in space right away. She basically says that go into the moon and flying in space is a man's world. And the women should just be patient and let the men take their first steps into space and they would go when they're ready. She also points to her experience with the wasps during the Second World War to fight against women in space. So even though she trained all these women to fly as pilots in the Second World War to help with the war efforts, she says that they lost so many to marriage that it would be a waste of masses of money to actually train these women to fly in space knowing that as soon as they get pregnant or get married, if they're not already married, they would just disappear. Which is a pretty interesting line to take considering Cochran herself learned to fly after she was married and did not let that stop her and Janie Hart sitting next to Cobb in that Senate hearing was the mother of eight children. Also did not let that stop her hopping a flying career. And of course, Cochran was basically telling NASA's line, NASA's testimony was very much on the same bent, especially that of the celebrity witnesses, Glenn and Carpenter. Glenn was just months after becoming the national hero after being the first American to orbit the earth and argued that NASA just couldn't afford a whole new training program for women while also focusing on going to the moon. He basically said that the ladies would have to wait their turn and said that this was just the way things went in life. That if you look at war as an example, the men go off and fight and the women take care of the house. So why should this be any different? Let the men go out and figure out how it works and then eventually the women will have to go as well. Because everyone in that Senate hearing did acknowledge that eventually the goal of space flight would be to colonize other planets. You can't colonize without women. Therefore, that's the only reason you need women in space. This was a real argument that they made in a Senate hearing. So the Senate hearing went on for two days and was unceremoniously cut short a day early without giving Cobb a chance to really nail her argument hope. And there was just no positive outcome for the women. And unfortunately it looked like Cobb was very much right in her thinking and her pushing to be the first woman in space just to get that first over the Soviet Union. Because on June 16th in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space and she was from the Soviet Union. So it was first for the Soviets but it's also worth noting that Tereshkova wasn't exactly a blow for equality. The Soviets were not more concerned with giving women fair play in space so much as they were, it was concerned with scoring yet another first over the United States. Tereshkova's flight was very much a political move. She was the right pedigree of person to launch to show that the Soviet communist system was better than the American democratic system. She came from a workers family. She was picked because she had extensive training in parachuting which of course the Soviets didn't actually land in their spacecraft with Bostock because it didn't have a landing system. They had to parachute out at about 10,000 feet so she knew how to do that. She and Eureka Garin came from very similar backgrounds and were pretty much the poster children of if you work hard, you too can rise through the communist system to fly in space and become a national hero. Now it's not to say that Tereshkova didn't work hard, didn't have challenges on her mission but it's also worth noting that it's not like after Tereshkova the Soviet space program became gender balanced. It was 19 years before another woman flew in space and that was another Soviet Svetlana Savitskaya and she flew a matter of weeks before Sally Ride became the first American in space. So Savitskaya's flight was again very much a show of Soviet dominance over the United States because the Cold War was very much a thing still in 1982, right? So it was actually in response to NASA announcing Sally Ride's flight that Savitskaya was added to a mission. Don't know how much the Soviets would have put another woman in space if it hadn't been for that NASA announcement. That's one of those things that someone's gonna have to dig into Russian language archives and figure out a thing. But you could make the argument that Ride was arguably the first true female astronaut because she was part of a growing and diverse, growing and diversifying, that's the word, astronaut corps at NASA. It was Ride's class of 1976 that saw the first six women introduced into NASA's astronaut corps and also the first minorities introduced into NASA's astronaut corps. But for the flats, none of these women really felt like the first true women astronauts because all of the flats, the 13 women were all pilots. And what they wanted to see was a female piloting in space. And for them, the first true woman in space was Eileen Collins. Collins was the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, STS 93 in July of 1999. And it was with her flight that the flats felt like their cause had found some kind of resolution. Collins was an Air Force pilot. She was a career pilot, Ride was a scientist. Not to say she wasn't highly skilled, but they felt Collins was really one of them and that her commanding a mission and being in charge and doing her job as she had done it in the air in space was really the first true female astronaut taking their cause forward. And here are the surviving flats at Collins's launch in 1999. That's Jerry Cobb, a third from the left. Just if this is of any interest to anyone, it's from going from left to right. It's Jean Norris Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerry Cobb, Jerry Truhill, Sarah Rutley, Myrtle Cagle, and Burmese Stedman. They all came out to watch the first female pilot command a space shuttle mission. So the flats never flew in space, not because they weren't qualified or because for any reason that they weren't good enough or that they couldn't find a way up. It was really just the world wasn't ready for female astronauts. And it was really the same in aviation at the time. I mean, trying to find their place in space at the time was extremely difficult because they were already fighting in aviation and that was allowing women in. All of these women were making careers, doing jobs, flying that men didn't want to do. And if they were lucky, they would find very specific positions that didn't discriminate against women because they had at that point proven themselves worthy, but they had to go through so much more to prove themselves. And none of them ever ended up flying in space. Just to round out Jerry Cobb's story a little bit as their leader, she ended up in such a depression after losing her chance to fly in space. She did some flying, saved up money and got some help from her father to buy a plane and then flew missionary missions in South America, delivering medicine to un-contacted tribes, well, seldom contacted tribes and basically living with a plane in the jungle. That was the way she felt that flying was her gift from God and the only thing she could really do to help people with her gift was to use flying to help other people that didn't have access to things like better health and medicine. So even though none of the flats ever flew in space and really the closest they came was almost living through Eileen Collins's launch. Their story I think helps bring to light the issues that faced women not only in space but in aviation in the 60s and mark this very, very slow and I think ongoing shift towards gender equality and traditionally male dominated fields. NASA has been very good in the 70s and 80s at having gender balanced astronaut classes but still it's interesting to look back at this and see just how far women have actually come in the last 50 years especially where space flight is concerned because if anything, their fight and everything they went through just to try to get a place in space is inspirational I think and why I love their story so much is inspirational for any woman and anybody really trying to find their place in a field that doesn't necessarily have the perfect spot for them. They fought to get their place in space when there wasn't one and what they did opened the door for women of subsequent generations to actually realize their dreams of becoming astronauts and that's all I have and I can't hear what's happening on the other side because I was muted. Well, that's okay. We've been muted for a long time. So thank you very much. That was absolutely wonderful in this history. So why don't you go ahead and stop sharing your screen so that way everyone can see you in case there we go. So we do have a few questions coming in. And so David asks how many of the Flats are alive today? Off the top of my head, I would actually have to check but I think at least six of them are still with us. I know Jerry is still around but yeah, I'd have to double check to be honest. Okay. Yeah. And so whatever happened to Cochran? I'm still working that out. So this is actually, so I'm actually still doing a lot of research into this story and I've been focusing on Cobb in my own research. And I know Cochran, I mean, she was 50. She, Cochran's an odd one to deal with because she sort of created a backstory for herself when she married wealthy and no one really knows where she came from and no one really knows her real age. It was all very strange but I'm pretty sure she just, she continued flying. I mean, she continued flying as long as she could during aeros and stuff but yeah, I need to, I'm still digging through the resolution of her story. Okay. Stuart asks, actually he has a comment and a question. He says, this is a really interesting presentation since he knew nothing about this until tonight. What? Sure. And he knows a lot about space history and you know, Stuart's been on these for since the beginning of these webinars and always asks some really insightful questions. And so how did you first find out about this little known bit of American history? I don't even know. I feel like, I feel like this is one of those things that so when I was a kid, I would go on my parents' computer when I could and just like go through like, I can't remember what great images in NASA looked like in like the late 90s, but whatever that was, I always went to NASA site and I remember seeing that picture of Cobb that I showed where she's in the Mastiff which is like the access training thing. I remember seeing a picture of her there and a picture of her, the one on my opening slide with the Mercury spacecraft. And I couldn't tell what it was and why this like woman in a dress with white gloves was posing next to it. And I feel like I read about it, but because the story wasn't really presented very openly, I sort of knew who she was very vaguely and never really found out much about it until, so it was one of the things that I kind of like knew a little bit about them, but then started really digging into them a few years ago and found we've only been a few things published about it, but you can dig into the things like that Senate hearing archive. So I've been digging into them a lot more in the last couple of years through newspaper articles to piece the stories together a bit more. But yeah, it's one of those things that I found through a random picture and then sort of like knew it was there. And it wasn't until recently that I had wondered, why are they never written about? Like why do we talk about Mercury and not mention them at all? It's kind of like how come we never heard about Katherine Johnson and the other women that we featured in Hidden Figures and there's so many things that none of us know about. Yeah, so that's one thing that I'm working on with their story is figuring out how it really fits. So Andy asks, and I'm gonna embellish on this just a little bit, were any of the children or grandchildren of the Flats, did they get into the space program? Were they inspired in any way to do what their mothers and grandmothers weren't able to accomplish? Not that I know of, no. I mean, that would have been a great story though. That would have been a really good story. Maybe there is one out there that just hasn't been written about. Again, I feel like there's all the little family details. Everyone knows weirdly how to track down one of Neil Armstrong's sons. I think Mark comes to a lot of the space conferences. Yeah, you know what he's doing, but these ladies' children, if they have children, don't know. So yeah. So I feel like I'm not answering any of these questions. Oh yeah, I'm still researching. Well no, we're having a great conversation here. So Michael asks, do you think that the acceptance of women in the science has generally progressed since the Mercury 13? I mean, generally yes, completely no. I think it's still, I think there's still a lot. And I mean, I say this, I'm not in the sciences, but I am a woman in science and girls talk about these things. And I think there's still a lot of challenges, like the way that the Flats had just sort of proved themselves that they were able to have fun jobs to qualify, to do the astronaut testing, to prove that they could be trained to fly in space. That's a lot of hoops to go through to do something that a man wouldn't have to prove that he can do. And I think there's a lot of that that still hits women in not just in science, I think in a lot of fields, but definitely in science. And my hope is that the next generation won't have to deal with that. Like gradually that just becomes not a thing. Oh, we're all humans and humans can do things, humans. I'm on team human, so. Well, Bruce has a great question that's kind of a follow up to that. What do you think are the greatest challenges for today's women in both government and private space programs? These challenges, I think the biggest challenge probably comes, again, in sort of that need that you have to prove that you're deserved to be there. I think there's always just the implication or the false impression that if a woman's there it's not necessarily that, you know, if she's in a meeting it's because she's the secretary. That's still like a weird holdover that, you know, not that she's the CEO. Like you wouldn't, you still, there's still kind of a shifting perception of women's roles that like you kind of have to say, you know, no, I am here for this job, not that job. I think that's still just a thing you have to prove that you're worth your merit more than a man might. But I mean, I do think that's definitely changing, but, you know, this is like getting really negative, I'm sorry. Well, that's, we've got a question and Judy asks, and I'm gonna, Judy, I'm gonna kind of paraphrase this a little bit. So are there any books either by these women or from other people that have been written that are geared to teens or even younger children that could potentially inspire some girls? Not to younger people. I am still researching them for a reason. Oh, we have something to look forward to in the future then, don't we? There have been some books written, some of them. Embellished on a lot of things and some of them are just not quite for that kind of younger age, kind of the middle school, early high school age, which I think is, I know it's a very important time to get girls excited about this stuff because that's where they tend to drop off. I think some of the best might be, and I mean, the best way to look, I would just go up on Amazon and just look them up by name like Jerry Cobb has written two memoirs and they're quite good. One was later in life and she reflects a little bit more about kind of what that felt like and one was written in 63, most in 63 that really captures her frustration and this was her plea, her way of getting some work out to really make her cause known. So there are some books, I think the ones written by the astronauts or by the astronaut trainees are actually some of the most interesting just because it's such a unique perspective that you can't, it's hard to capture what that was like if you're not them. Yeah, so I handful of them have written memoirs and I mean it by the same token, I haven't gone through all of it yet because I'm still working on it earlier like but even a Jack-Pet Cochran has written some interesting things. It's basically conversations with her famous friends I think is the unofficial subtitle. Have any of the current or I guess over the last 30 years any of the astronauts who have flown mentioned one of the flats as their inspiration for what they did? None that I have, none that I know of I've met a handful of them and I've asked and most of them don't cite them as particularly inspiring women in their own journeys to become astronauts. And I wonder and I just don't know if it was because their story really hasn't been known and been very accessible unless you're sort of doing deep dives into this very specific bit of history. So I know, I mean I know I haven't met Eileen Collins but obviously she knew who they were but yeah I don't know if they were particularly an inspiration to her or if she felt kind of any kinship with them at all but if I do have a chance to meet her I'm gonna ask her about it. Yeah, well we're going a little over but I do wanna ask this one last question and I apologize to those of you who have some really good questions that we're just not don't have time to get all of them. But Jeff asks in your view, what are the most importance that we as educators and amateur astronomers who engage in outreach with the public can do to encourage more girls in STEM or STEAM? I think that the incorporation of A as arts is very important and Jeff does too. For example, you know interacting with them at star parties at talks and things like that. So what in your view is what can we do better? I don't even know if it's like doing something better. And I know, I mean I've had this conversation with teachers and parents and I don't have kids so I'm not good at parenting. But I know I've had this conversation a lot. I think the best thing to do to keep girls excited about this stuff and wanting to pursue it as they go into the teenage years and also wanting to date is to make it very clear that you can do science but you can also do other things. Cause I feel like that's where the divide happens and maybe I'm inferring a lot of things from my own teenage years. But I mean I personally never felt like I could do science things and also do fun things. I always felt like it was your science person so therefore that's all you do. And my big thing when I give talks to girls schools and engage with kind of younger girls is to be like, oh yeah, you can do this but that doesn't mean that you can't also, you know, want to date. You know, just encourage it as part of a well-rounded adolescence and just something that like, you know, keeps my interest alive and don't, you know, don't force a girl to do it cause I mean anybody who has parents can say, your parents say these are the things you're gonna say, no, cause when you're 13 your parents are wrong. Everyone does that. Yeah, I think I really think just looking back at sort of how I stuck with it was that it was like my own little thing that I loved but it wasn't the end all for me. So it allowed me to incorporate it into sort of a larger thing of interest and sort of, you know, just engage it and make it fun and accessible without being excluding other things. I don't know, yeah. We're still working on it, it's a work in progress. There's no good answer. I have had this conversation so many times and there's just, there's never a good, yeah, if there was an easy answer we wouldn't have the problem of girls dropping out of science after eighth grade. Yeah. Well, you know, that's all for tonight. This has been really, really great. We've come a long ways and we've got further to go still, I think. You'll be able to find this webinar along with many others on the Next Sky Network in the Outreach Resources section on our website. Each webinar's page also features additional resources and activities and some links to Amy's website. We'll also post tonight's presentation on the Next Sky Network YouTube channel in the next few days. And now for our drawing, David wanted to do something a little bit different and so I'm gonna turn it over to David to kind of tell us what he's got in mind. Okay, well, first of all, I just saw a message in our chat which was about a book for children and teens. Yeah, so Judy Weidtlich says, almost astronauts, 13 women who dared to dream by Tonya Lee Stone as geared towards children and teens. Have you? I actually haven't come across that one. The one that people like and cite a lot is, I forget the author, but it's called Promise the Moon and it's, I would say it's maybe a wee bit fictionalized. I think a lot of the sort of tensions are played up a little bit. But yeah, it's one of the more engaging ones but it's also like take it with a bit of a grain of salt. Yeah, I should check that one out if it's good for teens. I'm gonna write that down before I close this one down. Thank you for that. Okay, so. I'm also reminded, let me just pause for just a moment. One of our colleagues, Teresa Summer, she wasn't able to be here in person. She's just listening in and we are hoping to have her on here live. But she and Vivian White, who many of you know, are working very hard in partnership with the Peseti Institute on a NASA-supported program to engage Girl Scout troops in doing more astronomy and space science with their troops. And so they're working on some newly redesigned badges for the girls, which are gonna be more than just kind of the fluffy things that Girl Scouts have traditionally done when it comes to science. And so you can look forward to hearing more about that because the Night Sky Network is one of the important resources for this program. And so you can look forward to hearing more about that both from the Night Sky Network and from the National Girl Scouts. So, over to you, Dave. All right, so trivia for tonight. We're gonna do a little trivia this time and it's related to women in aerospace and aviation. And it's actually deals with a friend or rival or maybe friend of me of Jackie Cochran, Amelia Earhart. And the first person that types in this particular number into the chat wins a copy of the book. And the number is a year and it is what is the year that Amelia Earhart completed her transatlantic solo journey or flight across the Atlantic. Ooh, who's the first? Ooh, no, closer. No, ooh, right, the right decade. No, no, no. There we go, John Heasley. First one, 1932. All right. Well, John, make sure that you send us an email with your address and where we need to send the book. And so put in the chat, well, actually you can, well, Amy will sign the book up to you and we'll get that sent out to you as soon as we can. Email us at nightskyinfoastrossociety.org or the contact us link on the Night Sky Network homepage and that'll get to us. All right. Well, David, is there anything else for tonight? Just find this on YouTube and you can subscribe on there and subscribe to Vintage Space, of course, as well. Amy, any parting comments before we close out here? No, when I had the pence of luck when you were talking earlier, I was just thinking other ways to get girls engaged and stuff is just to be positive role models and just kind of find those positive role models in your community that are women who kind of have stood out in male dominated fields and just kind of gently say, here's a woman, just know them and then just show that woman someone that can be powerful and like, yeah, sorry, I think about these things a lot. But no, that's it I got. Thank you so much for having me and letting me ramble at you guys and I really hope you enjoyed this and if anyone out there does have other questions or anything, you can find my email fairly easily. Don't hesitate to drop me a note and I apologize that I'm very slow with emails but I will get back to you. That's okay. Okay, well mark your calendars for our next webinar on Wednesday, April 15th when we welcome three scientists outreach specialists, all women, by the way, from NASA's Johnson Space Center, who will share with us the background of astronaut photography from the International Space Station and how you can use it in your outreach. Keep looking up and we'll see you next month. Good night everyone. Good night. Thanks again.