 Hey everyone! Welcome back to The Vintage Space. I'm Amy and today I thought we'd do something that might be a little bit fun and a lot cringe-worthy. Three years ago I gave a TEDx talk at the University of Rochester about the Mercury 13. I have since written this book, which means I've done a lot more research than I'd done before I gave that talk. So today I'm actually going to tear apart my own TEDx talk before someone on the internet does it for me. Let's start with some backstory as to how I ended up doing a TEDx talk on the so-called Mercury 13. Back in 2016 I was asked to sit on a panel about the role of women in space, and being that I'm the space flight historian, I was asked to speak specifically about the women who took the same tests as the Mercury astronauts in the 1960s. I read the books that existed about the women, namely these three, and from there drew my conclusions for this relatively small panel. All of these books tell more or less the same story. Thirteen intrepid women led by Jerry Cobb have the right stuff to fly in space, but they are the wrong sex. They are kept out of space because of systemic sexism. It is a feminist epic end of story. That narrative was my own jumping off point before I started the deep dive into the story that led to fighting for space. Of course, we're at the jumping off point when I'm giving this TEDx talk. Now, I don't remember exactly what I said in this TEDx talk. I just remember it being really awkward. I almost forgot to mention Jackie Cochran, and also it was kind of terrifying to have both a timer and the inability to have notes with me on stage. Nevertheless, I muddled through, and even though I haven't ever watched the tape of this talk, I hate watching myself on video, I know from the title alone of this video that I got it wrong. I know I got it wrong because I hadn't yet done all the research that led to fighting for space. So instead of just giving a rebuttal, I thought I would actually watch it live, capture my reactions, and then tell me, well, tell past me exactly how wrong I was. I'm not actually going to show you guys my reaction to the entire video because it's 17 minutes long and it's going to be largely quite boring. So if you want to pause and watch the old TEDx talk before I dive in and tear myself apart, it's going to be up here in the card. These are seven surviving women who qualified for space flight in 1962 but never got to fly because it was 1962. Well, I'm not even 17 seconds in. And past Amy, they did not qualify for space flight. They were not qualified for space flight. In fact, if you guys want to know all of the details about space flight qualifications in the Apollo era, I did a live stream about it as part of my virtual book tour. It is up here. It's long, but it's thorough and proves this old Amy wrong. Oh gosh, let's continue. Has anyone ever heard of the Mercury 13 before? Show of hands? That also wasn't what they were called. That was a name given to them to kind of make a catchy phrase for the media by a dateline producer in 1995. They were never actually, my new joke, they were never actually the sisterhood of the traveling space pants. They actually never all met. This idea that they were the Mercury 13, like the male astronauts were the Mercury 7, is purely a modern media construct. Now, the guy who helped select them was this guy, Dr. William Lovelace. He did all the physical testing. Why don't I just call him Randy? I don't think he's ever gone by William. He's always Randy Lovelace. That was a weird move past Amy. He thought maybe it would actually be better to have women in the cockpit. Yeah, so Randy Lovelace wasn't actually convinced that women were better sued to space flight. He was more curious how women would stack up against men because he had all these male data points from doing the testing on behalf of NASA and he had no female benchmarks. A lot of the female benchmarks he was using were from the Second World War or involved his good friend Jackie Cochran. The way I phrase it here, I also seem to imply that he initiated the program and that's not the case. There are two versions of how Jerry Cobb ended up doing the medical testing. The one she tells in her memoirs, which is also in the main narrative of Fighting for Space, is that she happened to meet Randy Lovelace and Don Flickinger on a beach one day. They got to talking about space flight and she effectively volunteered to do the testing if he wanted a female benchmark, which he did. The other version of the story, which Floyd Odlem introduces and comes into the epilogue of Fighting for Space, is that Jerry actually went to the Lovelace Clinic herself and asked to be given the tests. I wanted to keep it in the epilogue because not only did this come to light in 1972, so after the main action, it also kind of calls into question everything else Jerry did leading up to that point. So yeah, he was not thinking that women were better suited to space flight, although I will say it's catchy, but it's wrong. I will say that it was wrong. And women also made really good pilots. He knew this. Case in point, Jerry Cobb. I hate that I did that. I really hate that I did that. To go from the segue of Randy Lovelace knew that women could be great pilots. Case in point, Jerry Cobb. When Jackie, oh, I'm annoyed with that to me right now. I've talked a lot about both of these women, both of these pilots. I'm not going to go through it all right now, but just as a quick benchmark, Jerry held three records and won one major aviation trophy. Jackie won like 20 major aviation trophies and had something like 70 records to her name when she died. So yeah, I hate that segue. Jerry Cobb held in 1959 dozens of international flight records, distance, speed, altitude. She'd been awarded from international aeronautical federations. So she had, I'm not entirely wrong on this, although I am definitely overplaying Jerry. The problem is all of the comps for my book, when I was researching this initially, they all play up the Jerry side because it's a great story. She did have more accolades than just the one major trophy. The one she won was the Harman Trophy in 1972. She had won also the Golden Wings from the FAI, the Fédération Aeronautique Internationale. So she was winning other awards because she was setting records and she was one of the few women setting records in the late 1950s. But it's still the case. I'm overplaying how good she was right now, which annoys me. Knew me is mad at old me because the awards she was winning were relatively minor compared to what Jackie had to her name. But let's continue. In February of 1960, she starts going through the exact same medical or physical testing that all the Mercury male astronauts went through. And not only does she pass every test, she scores higher than the men, almost across the board. So this is an interesting point. It's not really super contentious. It's just when I was writing the book, I kind of came up with this realization, helped by kind of talking about it with good friends of mine that you don't really pass a medical test like you either perform well or you perform poorly, but it's not like there's a magical benchmark of passing, especially when you're dealing with something like qualifications for spaceflight from a medical standpoint. It's not like you have to hear a certain hurts to be hearingly approved for space. It's are you fit or not? So I just I don't like it's a verbiage and this is actually verbiage that I try very hard to stay away from. Again, Jerry says she passed the tests and there is evidence that says she scored as well as some of the men on some of these tests. But this makes it sound like she was this medical miracle when really like her blood pressure was fine. Her blood work was clean. You know, it's one of those things where the way she describes it in the way it's usually played up overstates. And for a woman who's flown every kind of plane you can have all over the world, the next level is literally space. Okay, so the problem here, and this is the distinction that I tried to hammer home so hard in the book. Actually, I even have these little glyphs, these little images, you know, instead of, let me find one, instead of having like page breaks, we have these little spacecraft. And there's actually a prop plane, a jet and a spacecraft, such that the technology that we're currently dealing with in the narrative, that tells you where we are. Jerry had never flown a jet. That is the key distinction that I did not even think to make super clear at this point, because again, hadn't done all the research, we've said that a lot. So at the time, yeah, Jerry had flown a lot of different propeller planes, but she had never flown a jet. And that is the key difference. So he and Cobb worked together to recruit another 24 women to go through the exact same testing. Okay, so yes, they did, but he was also conferring with Jackie. The thing with all the other retellings of this story is they all underplayed Jackie's importance. It's not just that she was an ace pilot, it's not just that she sort of got involved and started to kind of take control of the program or try to, it's that she was one of Randy Lovelace's oldest and closest friends and that Floyd was bankrolling the clinic that did the testing and that Floyd was president of the board of directors of the Lovelace Foundation. So Randy Lovelace owed a lot to the Cochrane Odelums. This wasn't a relationship to gloss over and for some reason it took me a lot of digging. I only realized that Floyd was board of directors because I found a letter from Randy Lovelace from the foundation letterhead that lists Floyd as the president of the board of directors. It's one of those little details that is super important and somehow never in the story. So it's not the case that they work together, it's not the case that Jerry was the only one involved. Jackie was involved almost immediately. As soon as she started reading about it, she called Randy and Randy was like, yes, I want your help on this too. And in May 17th of 1961, he invites them to go through the second phase of testing, which is the psychological testing. No cop has done this as well. She passed. This is things like isolation chambers. Okay, so yeah, Jerry did psychological testing and again quote unquote passed, but she organized it herself and it had nothing to do with Randy Lovelace's program. When the Mercury astronaut candidates did their psychological testing, they did it at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The Air Force wanted nothing to do with this civilian woman who just kind of wanted to try her hand at psychological testing. So she found another doctor in Oklahoma City where she lived that could do an equivalent sensory deprivation testing. She actually felt so good about doing this that she had a life photographer and writer come with her when she redid the test just to have a public profile done of her mental fortitude. So yeah, it's not the case that she did everything amended. Although I am impressed at my past self remembering all the dates because I still like struggled to remember exactly when all of the things lined up. There's a lot of dates in this story. Also, the other thing I learned after this, and again, this only came out through letters. It's never explicitly written is that Jerry was supposed to go through all of this, this third phase of testing in Pensacola, the sort of simulation testing with the other women. But for whatever reason went down alone ahead of the other women and actually performed so poorly that this called the entire female testing program into question. May 17th, 1961. Well, there was a lot of other things happening in space around the time that these women were going through their testing. I forgot about Jackie Cochran. That's the worst. That's like literally the worst. Okay, I hate that. And I remember being like flustered because again, the typical retellings, I am bored with my own repeating of that statement right now. But the typical retelling of this story doesn't really get into Jackie, which is why when I started digging into her backstory and realizing not only how important an integral she is into the story, but how amazing her own story is. I'm like, why is she always the secondary or tertiary character that comes in at the 11th hour as the villain? She's not the villain. It's actually Jackie's story. So I actually remember how hard it was when I started getting into the story to remember exactly where Jackie fits in because like I said, she's just kind of plopped in when she's needed. So the typical narrative, it's so clean with like the history of the space program. We need astronauts. These are the men. What about women? Jerry, the other women, yadda yadda yadda, but then like plopping Jackie in is really awkward, which yeah. So I remember this moment and it like still makes me cringe because of course now I have like, I don't know, two dozen things from Jackie's makeup line. I have signed pictures, signed books, like we know I'm a Jackie fan. Sorry, Jackie. Jerry Cobb wants to be the first woman in space because she just wants to see a woman in space. She's qualified. Why can't she start to train? She's not qualified and she did not want to see a woman in space. She wanted to see her as the woman in space. Reading her letters to Jackie, to Randy Lovelace, to the other women, to NASA, to the president, you see the shift and almost the urgency in her tone. It goes from why not do a PR victory? Let's get women in space. Let's break down this barrier to I want to fly. Let me in an X-15. I want to go into technical space. It's not nearly this like feminist helping other women thing. It's not at all the case that she wanted to break barriers for her sex. It's almost like that was just the fallout of her being the first woman in space, which was her ultimate goal. Just being beaten in space, just had the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He sees space as this thing that he can leverage into saving his reputation and really putting himself back, putting the U.S. back on par with the Soviet Union. Okay, I'm really pleased with past Amy for giving the historical context because that's the other thing that is always lacking in retellings of the quote-unquote Mercury 13. It takes the women in almost a vacuum and you cannot do that, especially with a story like this. The fact that NASA was going on and beginning like this is the time when it was starting to come up with the idea of the moon landing. This is when Apollo was more than a glimmer in Jim Webb's eye. This was a very critical time for NASA. You start to understand why one goal, getting men on the moon, figuring out how to beat the Soviet Union, or at least show technological superiority over the Soviets in space, weighed heavier than having women go up for the sake of a propaganda victory. NASA's a little bit more focused on this guy right here. On February 2nd, 1962, Don Glenn finally goes into orbit. I said the wrong date. I just heard that. I had to go back and listen to it four times. This is the 20th. That's a speco. Specos, damn it. Then Jackie Cochran takes the stand and says she goes to her experience with the wasps in the Second World War and says, so I trained all these women to fly in the Second World War and they were great. They had a better safety rating than all the men. But then they got married and left. So why would you waste— Okay, this is another thing that I'm super annoyed about because, yeah, Jackie did say that. And I think she made a pretty poor argument in this instance to look at the attrition rate of female pilots who drop out to get married and to start families. There's so much more context behind what Jackie said in that testimony. She was the only woman in the country who really knew how to work a male-dominant system, especially a system based around aviation and technology and now getting into space flight. She knew how to work within that system because it was something that was really hard when you were a woman. And what she was doing in this hearing was arguing that the women not be rushed into space flight, but instead organize amongst themselves to take on the system and to create something. She wanted a large-scale program that would gather all the data such that when NASA was ready, she could just hand the report and say, here, here's your data. I did all the work for you. Now go. She wanted that because she knew that there was no way NASA was going to interrupt what it was doing to fly a woman. So work within the system such that as soon as the system comes to you, you're ready. You're anticipating how to break into it. But the most incredible part of her story, I think, is the fact that she fought as hard as she did for something that she blew. I think my biggest problem with the way I ended this is I always feel like this is a really hard story to wrap up because there isn't a clean ending. It's not like Tereshkova flew in space and that's the end of the issue of women in space from the 1960s. It continued on. Jerry continued to fight. She continued to fight into the 90s when John Glenn went up in his second mission in a space shuttle. What bothers me about the way I tied this up and I still do actually like the kind of you can take inspiration from the fight because I think it's it's a great takeaway that a story that doesn't necessarily wrap up that doesn't have a good ending can still inspire and can still spur people on to do something great. I don't like that I made it Jerry's story and I will tell you guys that when I started writing Fighting for Space it was actually going to be a dual biography between Jerry and John Glenn. That was actually how I was initially thinking about it because I wanted to have John Glenn be the the NASA the male the political counterpoint but everything was going to be funneled kind of through his perspective use him as the vehicle to understand what NASA was doing to give Jerry's story context. It was only once I started really digging into Jackie that I realized how important her role was not only in the immediate issue of the women in space in the 60s but the kind of lead up to all of that to establishing what women could do in aviation establishing how women were treated as pilots. So I like the way I kind of wrap this up but I just think the general thesis is wrong. I still don't really know how to end the story because it doesn't have a clean ending. It's one of those things like I don't know how to make this a morality tale beyond again still you fight for what you believe in and you fight for what you believe is right. I just think that it should more be about how neither of them were right. People have asked me who's the villain who's the hero in the story is it it's Jackie versus Jerry they're kind of antagonists. I don't think one is the hero and one's the villain. I think they both kind of alternate playing hero and villain in the narrative and they're ultimately only hero or villain within their own and each other's narrative. Jackie is not villainous until she's seen through Jerry's eyes. Jerry is not a hero until you see her through the media's eyes. So it becomes this really interesting interplay of how much the media can play into something and create something out of nothing or bring a whole new layer into something that isn't inherently there. So I think if I could go back and redo this talk what would I do? A lot differently. I think the the biggest thing that I would like to change in this and why I wanted to do this kind of rebuttal to my past self is because I want to I want to make it clear that the story as far as I'm concerned now is actually Jackie's story that it starts with Jackie. It starts with Jackie being the one to break barriers, the one to forge connections, the one to save LBJ's life, to have Randy Lovelace operate on her and her husband Floyd and then Jerry enters into the story. She becomes Jackie's adversary because she's in the right place at the right time, not because she's necessarily any more phenomenal as a pilot than any of the other women her age in the country. It's really Jackie who's such a standout and Jerry ends up feeding into that story and that at the end of the day this whole messy issue of you know she said she said fighting to control this program that played out very much in the media, in newspaper, in magazines, in public speeches that all of this tells you that it is about the fight. It is about kind of taking inspiration as we look back at history, taking inspiration from what people were able to accomplish even if they never got to their final goal, but that everything has so many more layers and is so much more nuanced than it appears at first blush. So to never take anything necessarily at face value. So if I could go back to three years ago me who would definitely tell me all of that. So anyways guys that's kind of my take down of my own TEDx talk. I will freely admit that the research I did in writing Fighting for Space changed my opinion on a lot of things. A letter you know that letter from Floyd that's in the epilogue changed a lot of my thinking about the story because it introduced this question of Jerry's motives and how real her retelling is. You know I found letters between Jackie and other military brass that tells me maybe where the decision to cancel the women's testing at Pensacola came from. There's a lot more to the story and that's really what Fighting for Space became. It became tearing apart all the layers and all the nuances in this story because it's not straightforward. It's actually extremely messy and still really hard to sum up succinctly when you add in all the context that's necessary. So that's my new would be TEDx talk if I could redo the talk on this subject. So speaking of Fighting for Space it is of course available wherever books are sold right now. It's available as an e-book as well as an audiobook narrated by me and I promise I speak more slowly in the audiobook. I was told to use my pauses very regularly. If you'd like to follow me for updates on when new videos go up when I have live streams and anything else that I'm doing be sure to follow me across social media. Twitter is probably the best for quick updates. I am at Amy Shira title across the board and if this is your first time at the Vintage Space welcome and I hope you consider subscribing so you never miss an episode. Thank you guys so much for sitting through that with me and I'll see you next time.