 Hey everyone, I'm Amy and today on The Vintage Space, I wanted to give you a brief introduction to Miss Jerry Cobb. The cover of my brand new book, Fighting for Space, features two women. The one on the bottom half is Jerry Cobb. So I thought before the book comes out, it might be a good idea to give you guys a brief introduction into who she was and why and how she plays into the story of women trying to get a role in space in the 1960s. Jerry Cobb was born in March of 1931, which meant she grew up in a very interesting time both for women as well as female aviators. She grew up in a world where women had a lot of opportunities, far more than her mother's generation had had. She also grew up in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a woman to learn to fly. After Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane and then flew the route herself a couple years later, the world knew that women weren't capable aviators or at least could be capable aviators. So when Jerry's father learned to fly himself during the Second World War, it wasn't really a question of whether or not it was right for a girl to learn to fly. Jerry, then 12, demanded her father take her up in the plane and start giving her lessons and he did. Thus Jerry grew up in a world where there were no barriers to women wanting to fly and as such imbued her with a sense of confidence in her world and her life as a female pilot. But that was when Jerry was 12. When she was about 20 and starting to look for a work, she realized there were still a lot of barriers barring women from flying. That's largely because all of the male pilots coming home from the war in the mid 1940s meant the country was flush with very capable aviators, many of them fighter pilots or pilots who'd been in combat in dangerous situations, not girls who had learned to fly with their dad as teenagers and had never seen anything really challenging in the air. Nevertheless, she did find ways to fly for a living and had her fair share of adventures. And it just so happened that she was in the right place at the right time and had the right background and was the right age around the time the Mercury astronauts were selected in 1959. Without giving away any spoilers, Jerry managed to take the same medical test as the astronauts, albeit in a private pilot program. What happened next was quite interesting. We've all seen the media circus that can erupt around basically anything in the social media era. And turns out it was pretty much the same in the 1950s and 60s, only with newspapers instead of Twitter. At the end of the day, everyone's opinion on female astronauts was very different. And that is what my book is about. So I'm not going to go into it here, at least not before the book is released. Needless to say, Jerry was right in the thick of things, standing firm by her own opinions the entire time. It's not a spoiler to say that Jerry did not make it into space in the 1960s. We know that because, well, history is out there to read. What she did end up doing is working largely as a missionary pilot between Florida and South America for a number of years. But she never let that part of her that wanted to be an astronaut die. She defined herself so firmly in that quest to become an astronaut that when she died in 2019, most of her obituaries called her America's first female astronaut. I would say very much erroneously. Even though I've spent a lot of time digging into Jerry as part of the research for my book, there are still some facets of her that I'd like to dig into more, largely her personal life. She wrote about things in her memoirs that have been refuted elsewhere. And the more I dig, the more there is that refutes what she wrote in her books. In light of all the little bits and pieces of tangential information I keep finding about Jerry, she's a very complicated and difficult person to deal with. And so we are going to be digging into her personality just a little bit more on this channel down the line. I still have some more research to do. Nevertheless, you'll get a fairly thorough introduction to Jerry in my new book, Fighting for Space, as well as how she fits into the entire large question of where women fit into spaceflight in the 1960s. My book is currently available for pre-order and will be hitting shelves on February 18th all across the United States and Canada.