 Hello everyone, welcome back and I have a guest for the first time ever on Vintage Space and I'm super excited about it. This is my dear friend Francis French. Would you like to shamelessly point to your book? Well, shamelessly point to our book because this is something we worked on together, Apollo Pilot and I can do this shamelessly because neither of us get any of the money from this. This goes to a library program for kids. This is the memoir of Apollo 7 pilot Don Eisley, an astronaut who died in 1987. We found his manuscript in his widow's closet. We worked on this book because it needed extra stuff about Apollo so Amy did a great chapter in here all about what Apollo was and then astronaut Don Eisley talked about what he did so it's the memoir of the very first person to ever fly an Apollo mission. Francis, as many of you guys I've talked about his books before I'm sure in kind of other things that I think you should read. He's an expert in all things space history but more importantly for the purposes of today he has met a lot of the women that are the I'm gonna say quote unquote Mercury 13 or the women that took the medical test at the Lovelace Clinic that my upcoming book is about. So I thought it'd be really fun to sit down and talk to Francis a little bit today about his experience meeting the women because as you know I only got to talk to one of them. I got to speak to Genora Jessen for an interview but you talked to all of them almost all of them so I feel like we should maybe start with we should maybe backtrack a little bit about when did you first hear the story and what made you want to jump in to exploring it because I assume that's how you met the women for the first time. The first time I wrote about the Mercury 13 was for a magazine article and I kind of went with the general story about them which was these were women who could have been astronauts they were denied because of their gender that's as far as I got with it and then because of that I got to know some of these women and I got an invite to the very first shuttle launch commanded by a woman Eileen Collins commander of a space shuttle mission back in 1999 invited as many of the historic pioneering women that she could to her own launch and it was amazing and most of the living Mercury 13 were there along with a whole bunch of women pilots from World War two it was it was an incredible thing and that's where I got to actually meet these people and my idea of the story really started changing when I started talking to them so was that the first time you met them you you didn't work on the story about these women before you actually got to meet them at that launch so for the magazine article I got to email them a lot I got to talk to them on the phone but as I recall the first time I'd actually met any of them in person was at a shuttle launch which is an incredible way of doing it yeah we got invited to the family party the night before normally with a shuttle commander it was always a guy so it was the wife and kids putting on a party at the local holiday Inn this time for the first time ever in history it's the husband of a shuttle commander and their daughter giving this party and here are all these little old grandmas I mean literally grandmas you know they the blue rinse hair and the pearls and they look like the most sedate conservative ladies you can imagine they were the most raucous drinking you know it was a very interesting party I'm looking at all these women going wow I can't keep up with these ladies yeah they started that in World War 2 and they were still partying which is not surprising when you think about the kind of women that they were that they would have they were the women that were kind of defying norms as it were in the 40s in the 50s so why why would they stop doing that now I think so I think you've got women who are not it's not philosophically I am a feminist I'm doing this I'm doing that though there may have been some of that it was more just like who are these guys to tell me not to do that I just want to do it I just got on and did it and most of them have this thing of I'm just gonna go out there and do that and if some guy tells me no I'm gonna push him out of my way and keep going yeah really interesting people yeah it's like that well I like these word people because it's like that idea of you know if I I don't ever want to drive a like a semi-truck because that scares me but people can drive semi-trucks I am people therefore I can do that if I want to so it's kind of the same thing of like people do that I am people I'm gonna do that because why would I say no absolutely which I love that's what I love about them and kind of this like screw it I'm doing it attitude oh you watch these little old ladies and you think they were flying not just jets I mean they were flying bomber planes these huge things and this is bombers like v-17 right did not have hydraulic controls this is like you are pulling your I don't know how to fly plane but you are you are using this thing to control your flight surfaces with the power in your body yeah old-school sheepskin jackets unpressurized really cold every World War two movie you've ever seen replace the guy with a little old lady well there it is not an old lady at the time but a little lady it's amazing I was just looking at these women going you did that yeah 50 years ago so so you you knew the story before the launch right and you'd met some of the women so what was your who did you meet so Wally Funk was the first woman who really she was the one who invited me Eileen Collins invited her right plus guests right and Wally just filled her guest list up and it was so it was really nice the first time I'd ever been to a shuttle launch it was shuttle Columbia I gotta admit that came around the corner there is there is a space shuttle Columbia sitting on the pad I little tear came out of my eye I'm like there is a shuttle on the launch pad for the very first time had never seen that now you can see them in museums at that time you saw them operational yeah so got to see a shuttle got to see an incredible night launch with all those women there and so what a great introduction to your first ever launch my first ever launch yeah it took a few times at least three times it took to actually get going yeah because they had to it there's nothing worse than sitting there and the countdown gets to under 10 seconds and then they stop you've got that it's gonna go and it's not gonna go we all come back 48 hours later then we all came back I think 24 hours later first time I was there they had singers they had first lady at the time Hillary Clinton they had a huge women astronaut sort of colloquium so you had all these different women astronauts from history Sally Ride a bunch of people there by the third one the time it actually went it was like me and the janitor and a couple of other people but but Jerry was still there she was gonna see that go right so let's let's talk about Jerry for a second because you met Jerry Jerry Cobb of course passed away earlier this year in I think March but you had a chance to meet her what was she like so Jerry Cobb you know it's a very interesting person in history as the many say the first woman to go through anything like an astronaut test we're using around all of this interesting and Amy's book is really good on this this is this is the book to learn about it but she is a she was quite a shy person but quite driven it's an interesting combination when somebody's almost sort of mumbling in an Oklahoma accent is my impression is almost like this very low voice and yet the determination of this is what I want to do it's an interesting balance somebody who frankly I couldn't see doing that well in a huge public position because there was a there was a shy side to her but you never know people sometimes rise to it but in this occasion she was seeing something she had dreamed about for herself right you know a quarter of a century earlier she's finally seeing it happen not just a woman as a passenger on an American spaceflight of course the Russians had had somebody who's essentially a commander on a Russian spaceflight who's a woman because she's the only one on board so she has to be the commander right but it was mostly automatic mission but somewhere in the middle of all this you've got this woman who is now she's piloted the space shuttle before and now she's going to command an American mission for the first time exactly what Jerry wanted to do and she's there at the launch pad watching it and so to be literally standing next to her in some of those moments was fascinating history what if kind of moment yeah and and because you told me the story before but I want you to share it with my audience just describe watching Jerry that night watching the launch and then that whole because you described it beautifully and since I ended up cutting this out of my book I want I do want to capture the story and I figure I'd rather get it direct from you instead of through me so sure yeah so the first time there was going to be a launch everybody's there all the VIPs the first lady is there Judy Collins sings a song it's very much a female empowerment kind of events by the third time they try and launch the time it actually goes off you're down to like the real hardcore fans you're down to people who yeah you're there people who've managed to extend their stays people who managed to get extra hotel nights change their flights they're there they're gonna see it they're gonna stay there until it goes and Jerry was one of those people so even though she's in the middle of a huge crowd and it's a very public thing she's still a loner she's still an individual she's gonna do it her way so while everybody else we are as close as you can be to a launch without being inside the shuttle we are a few miles away in the VIP stands next to what is now the sat and five building so we're as close as you can get there's water and then there's the pad and so she decides to go that little bit closer you've probably seen the pictures of the stands of the countdown clock and then there's the water just in front of that water to make sure none of the lovely Florida wildlife come and eat you as a as a chain link fence at that time she goes down there she puts her hands on this fence and it's a night launch and she holds that fence because she wants to feel the vibration of the launch through her so there's this silhouette of this figure as this shuttle takes off the light comes across the water and eventually there's that shockwave that hits you here's this tiny little woman standing there feeling it watching Eileen Collins do what she'd always dreamed about and then comes the horrible bit you've all got to get back on a bus even though there's a lot fewer people there at that time you've got to wait they've been around the earth at least once by the time you get to the edge of the Kennedy Space Center on that bus weird like it was exciting okay now we have to it's like it's like leaving a concert that was fun now we're in the parking lot exactly like leaving the worst rock show parking lot ever and yet Jerry's loving it the moon is out it's been it's 1999 so it's 30 years July since the very first moon landing it's a historic time to be there and there's the moon and now Eileen Collins Collins is this little dot going around the earth and I just look at Jerry sitting in the bus and I took a picture of this she's got this beautiful smile on her face she is calm she's at peace there's a little checkbox in her head a whole life that just went check wasn't me but check yeah and it was nice to see she's something you could see it she was very very happy which is really nice I mean I love that story just because it does give her a little bit of closure yeah in a way sort of I mean she's complicated she's a very complicated person she's a very complicated figure to deal with but so in addition to that I mean you you met her you corresponded did you I mean was she how did she talk about everything she I ran into her in person one more time and that was the spaceship one launch so back in the right up in Mojave you know Edwards Air Force Base where the sound barrier is broken the space shuttle first landed all kinds of other historic aviation feats they were doing the very first commercial private launch Virgin Galactic were doing spaceship one it got into graze the atmosphere three times technically was in space and history was made incredible thing to be at a very different from a shuttle launch shuttle launch is big government this is like you drive up in a truck and you spend the night in your car your truck as the gusting wind blows you around or you're in somebody's hangar you wake up in the morning you watch a space shot the guy lands in front of you walks over shakes your hand goes down the fence and you might go for drinks with them later I mean it's that and so there she was there was a much more intimate kind of thing the head of NASA showed up and watch somebody else fly in space for the first time in America which is really cool but that was Sean O'Keefe at the time yeah a lot of other astronauts administrators were there it was a really interesting time to be there and there's Jerry just enjoying it was she invited or did she just kind of show up I don't know but what I do know is I asked her do you want to do this because that was the the moment was okay in a couple of years time everybody's gonna be a passenger on these this is coming right now they've already done it for space tourism right so I asked her do you want to be a passenger and she was very emphatic she's like nope I want to fly the thing I want to actually pilot the thing and I'm about there's an insight into somebody who even if they could finally do what they've been wanting to do all their life go into space wants to do it their way right and that was very interesting that she she wanted to actually feel the controls and I thought that that's good and bad in different ways but I understood where she was going from yeah I think that and that makes sense I mean everything that you read about her kind of going through this campaign in the 60s to try to get be heard by NASA it all really does have this feeling of I I want to be it I want to open space for women but I want to be the one to do it I think that's something you capture really well in the drafts of your book I've read so far which is while she was doing a campaign for an American woman to become the first woman in space before the Russians essentially she was the prime candidate at that time and it was pretty clear that she was saying I want to do that yeah and she said some things that most people wouldn't say like I would go into space even if I wouldn't come back I would give my life for this yeah and while that even the mercury astronauts said that I think I because the famous one at the press conference is who thinks they're gonna go up and come back and they all you know to hands up yeah yeah I don't think anybody thought well I'm gonna go and not come back right and while I understand putting your life on your line for the country this seemed to be a little bit more this seemed to be this is my calling this is what I meant to do and that scares me a little bit that somebody is so into something that they'd be willing to die and I don't think that's what America wanted or needed at the time either God definitely not no that would have been a disaster for a lot of reasons I think yeah yeah she's an interesting one so you also mentioned that you met Wally and I know you had a lot of correspondence and are still friends with Wally absolutely yeah tell me a little bit about Wally because I think what's what's really interesting here and I feel like I should maybe preface this a little bit for the my my lovely audience hello is that you know all of these women's women for each of them this whole idea of this testing program they all had a different experience of it for some of them it was just a thing that was neat and for some of them they imagined that it was going to lead into space and what how they interpreted it changed the way they related to it and how they related to each other it's I mean it's a it's a it's all a rich tapestry to quote Marge Simpson's therapist so yeah Wally is similar in in tone and kind of approach to Jerry and that she wanted to do it she would give her life and she actually applied to the astronaut core what three times I think so yeah I'm right up into the mid 80s I believe and was you know always just like missing a requirement missing something and then too old and so yeah a little bit about meeting Wally and how you came up to Wally and feel like this is where we shamelessly plug your other book which is on my desk so in into that silence see that's the one I was gonna say in the shout of the moon but that's your other other book into that silence see fantastic book about early space program kind of pre-apollo so Mercury Gemini days but there's a chapter in there about Wally so tell me a little bit about meeting Wally Funk and what she's like cuz I've also never spoken to her and I'd like to kind of get feel oh you should yeah because no in writing into that silence see my whole opinion on the mercury-13 change one one is I realized the mercury-13 the name is a 1980s media invention they never met as a group they some of them died before they ever got together so the 13 women never met they went individually through this testing and as you just said their idea of what it was was very different they were told different things I was just hearing a talk by two of them last last week and one of them Sarah Ratley said I was told that this was a pre-astronaut training program I was gonna be one of America's first women astronauts one of the other ladies Genora Jessen said I knew this was a medical testing program to see whether women could pass some of the physical tests that male astronauts went through as a as a interesting medical experiment yeah totally different ideas so every woman as you say is different and everybody has a different story like as you said these two these two perspectives from these two women on this panel recently they did the this is them at they're at the exact same location they're both of Lovelace Clinic both doing the exact same tests and they're both getting very different information absolutely said it was Sarah was there when Randy Lovelace was there if Randy Lovelace the head of the clinic was there you thought you were going into space if he was out of the week you knew you were in a medical testing program so yeah he crossed a line he's he told he may have hoped that these women were going to be the very first American female astronauts but he had no position saying that but this was like the Wild West of American space program at the time this was the early days a lot of the decisions as to who to pick for the men was made on were made on medical things who's the fittest who's the strongest it was but as the program started coming into formation it was like actually we need pilots we need test pilots we need test pilots with advanced engineering degrees they go very specific so by the time you get to somebody like Neil Armstrong he's a jet test pilot next 15 pilot he's got a master's degree that's the second group of astronauts right like this is it's not like it developed over years and years and years this is like 50 59 to 62 NASA realize like we need intense engineering brains right now and then was a group five was the first scientist astronauts so that was all we need scientists and geologists for do all this lunar exploration stuff so Wally you know Wally must I don't I don't I off top of my head don't know I should double check this insert caption but she must have been there when Randy was there because she believed that it was a real thing as well what Wally is a great example of how to deal with things with great positivity and when you meet her am I really it's gonna happen she is just a ball of fire she is an incredibly energetic woman who has been that way all her life and you know what happens when you've been told or you are allowed to assume that you're gonna become a want America's first woman astronauts and then you realize it isn't going anywhere do you go back and sulk do you complain do you what do you do she has a great expression she says throw it a fish she's like throw it a fish throw it a fish like like whatever no just literally like whatever cast it aside forget about it well maybe not forget about it but move on in life take it for what it was don't let it eat you up and move on and that's not to say allow yourself to fail that's not to say don't go and campaign to change things but don't let it kill you you know allow yourself to be like that was that this isn't happening yeah what else can I do she became the first female NTSB investigator she became the first female FAA inspector you know incredibly important things you know act when a plane crashes you need accident investigators right there you need experts no woman had ever done that in a lead before like she did she went on to pioneer all kinds of stuff in her own way incredible woman and a great advocate I did took some flying lessons with her and which was fun I got to land a plane with her the dual control and she's a great instructor she yeah I really hope you get to do that too she's she's one of those people you still flying still teaching other people to fly to most of the young women who are wanting to be her so she doesn't stop and it's wonderful to see it doesn't mean you should just give up on your dreams that it means you should put them in perspective and go you know if this really isn't gonna happen for me it doesn't mean I can't just move everything forward in my own life and for everybody else's life she's fun yeah and as you're talking and I just thought of this now when Jerry started her whole crusade she was 28 29 Wally was 21 when she first wrote to Jay Shirley and Randy Lovelace to get herself involved the youngest one yeah so do you think and I'm positing this for the first time ever out loud to you on a video do you think her age might have had something to do with kind of her gung-ho-ness I mean I can only imagine having been both 21 and in late 20s when something happens at that age that kind of becomes more formative maybe than when you're a little bit older possible except she's still like that now I guess so I just mean her her sort of like you know her diehardness of wanting to go into space that she did apply for the Astro program that she does want to fly on spaceship one and she wanted to command it I think you said recently that she's now gonna be a passenger mm-hmm if she can still she still wants to go that that became something that was so so important so early in our life that it kind of created this I think all of those women including going back to World War two and the wasps I think everybody has that yeah sometimes there are windows that open in life and all of those women aviators had to push if you were a woman in that era thankfully a lot so much has changed and you wanted to fly you had to work around your family a lot of the time you had to work around every man who said well we don't have women's bathrooms of this airport so no right you can be a stewardess that they that's a different application go over there if you wanted to fly a plane you had to have a lot of push yes you had to have a lot of courage to the point where you sometimes you had to take no for an answer but it wasn't going to be the last answer you were going to find a way so people like Wally just found a way she was going to find a way to get around all this stuff and make it happen and when it comes to the space program she's still pushing like you say she's talking with Virgin she's got some money in there she's got some other sponsorship she wants to be one of the first passengers yeah she the Discovery Channel many years ago took her over to Star City in Russia and she got to go in all the simulators and be a cosmonaut for a few weeks didn't get her any further into space but she got a really good sense of what it was like to train as a Russian cosmonaut and that was great she had a good time the company had a good time made for great television anything like that that she can push she will and it's good it's not just for her it's because it's good for everybody around her but fascinating lady I mean one of those people you know first time I met her I'm like wow you're this pioneering pilot yeah and then she shows up in an RV in my driveway and stays there for a couple of weeks and stuff and I'm like oh okay so now you know now we have a house guest you know and it was fun because you know who do you want to sit around and drink and have stories about somebody who's got all these stories people I know and I feel this is where we have to say you're also like buddies with Al Warden and like of all of the people that you get to hang out and drink with like Wally Funk and Al Warden are not bad people no I think I think I would much rather drink with you than me but I really enjoy I got to work with him on his book Fall into Earth you know that was on Apollo 15 got to hang around the moon for a few days on his own yeah the most people when they go around the moon on their own they think oh that's sad the poor isolated he loved it yeah and to me to sit down and hear what it was like to be around the moon on their own was wonderful and I just you know I really hope that those women had got that opportunity because our current NASA administrator is saying when a woman goes to the moon and you realize you know 24 people went to the moon all Americans all men yeah no woman has left Earth orbit yet and so he's making a real good point about the next person on the next flight at least one of them has got to be a woman just because it's about damn time you know I like that we will have her shelved the discussion of Artemis or I'm not going into the politics side of it I'm going into the gender politics side of it which I'm like whatever whatever they fly however it goes I'm really glad NASA is saying women's good women are gonna go to the moon finally that's good beyond Jerry and Wally you've you've emailed a bunch of the other women with varying degrees of success is there I mean and I don't I don't want to put you on the spot like who was maybe less fun to deal with or anything but you know what what other kind of interactions have you had with them right so when I first started writing about the Mercury 13 it was the late 90s so the the sad thing is many of those women have since passed away the great thing for me at that time was I was able to talk to many of them the opportunities that now won't no longer exist I'm not sure any of them were negative experiences but what I realized was these women who had never met who had been told various things about what program they were in sometimes verging on lied to about what could happen in their program they had very different ideas and when you have these very strong willed people as they have all had to be they're gonna disagree and when you have strong willed people they tend to disagree pretty strongly so I was careful not to get pulled too much into their internal politics but it was there you had some of the women saying well that woman only does this because of this and it it's got a little you know they're 30 years later like this isn't I can only imagine and I've and I've read in some of the letters that I've been able to find how they they talk about each other and the program it's a little bit of a it's interesting but yeah 30 years later they still have this feeling I mean this didn't go away for a lot of them a lot of them yeah when a lot of them died still with grievances yet settled what seems to be nice now is that everybody gets on and that they all still talk about Jerry with a level of respect even if they didn't think that this was a real program or if they did or they didn't they also say well she was our leader and she was trying to do this and they see that that is a good place to be yeah which is good I mean just in terms of preserving their story and the memory it's nice to not have it be a memory that's gonna you know be tinged with negativity right and perpetuity because that's that's not fun but yeah that's interesting the bit I really like about your book the bit I think you're nailing where so many other projects get wrong is why was NASA not allowing these women to become astronauts right when you look at it from the outside it looks like a clear case of NASA discriminating against women saying well we're only gonna have men NASA didn't actually specify gender in their criteria however when you look at what you had to do to become an astronaut no women were qualified the more I looked into this the more I went well while NASA could have done some kind of social engineering and maybe as it maybe because it was a big thing for the nation maybe they should have got into that but when you look at who could actually pilot the spacecraft at the time there were very specific requirements and men were the only people who were able to do that was that NASA's fault it really had nothing to do with NASA I ended up going back another 15 or 20 years to World War two when you had the wasps you had the wax you had some women flying combat damaged aircraft test piloting them making sure that yeah very very difficult things you were doing you know flying airplanes in a way that no woman had been allowed to fly before in America prove prove themselves beyond any doubt yeah that women could fly any plane that a guy could the end of World War two we get into the cozy 1950s of sort of American domesticity please go home and bake a cake as you said all the cakes and take care of all the children that you just pop out in sequence a while yeah well it led to some very tasty cakes it meant that women got a really it's a crappy crappy deal when it came to flying and all of those women and their experience were basically shunted to one side yeah so it meant what women were at the time allowed to serve in the Air Force reserves the Air Force becoming a separate service branch in 1947 but they were not on flight status which is the weirdest thing I don't get it thankfully we don't get it because we grew up in a very different era on the whole that's not to say this is totally gone away but there are there are incredible women examples role models everywhere now in every field oh yeah at that time you know women you had to look back to the 1940s to see women proving themselves beyond any doubt that they could do anything the guys did at the end of World War two they were sent back home as you say right at the worst possible time because this is the era of the jet is just beginning yeah so right as we go from propeller planes to jets women are pushed out yeah it's like this perfect time when like post-war technology like all of this stuff was starting to feed into the early space age and there was this new rivalry that spawned a lot of this competition that let satellites and stuff at the same time women are being told to go be homemakers and mothers and that's how you serve the country is by reinstating family values and it's and again it's just these two things are like happening yeah and they can't merge so here's NASA 15 years later yeah and they say we need people with jet test experience to fly the spacecraft otherwise you might want to fly the spacecraft but you will die yeah you will get in there you'll try and operate the controls and you will die because you need to have this experience if everything goes right never mind if everything goes wrong and now what what do all the mercury 13 women have as experience they have propeller plane experience they have a lot of experience they have as much experience as a woman is allowed in America at that time but it's not flying a test jet it just isn't the same yeah so that's a very difficult one does that mean that NASA were discriminating I think there's quite a big argument to say NASA had no choice but to choose the best and it was the country's fault going back 20 years at that point that no women were allowed I mean you could say NASA was discriminating against like 99.9% of the population because very few people had the skills that it decided it needed at the time I mean Neil Armstrong is the great the greatest example and you know I'll do this the the opening scene in first man when you're shaking around and it's a little bit nauseating but you're in the X-15 with Neil Armstrong I mean this is a space plane that was launched and you know jump in when I oversimplify launch underneath the wing of a B-52 went up to near space height some of them actually technically went into space and they got astronaut wings and you have a control stick in your right hand I believe it was right hand for reaction controls to manipulate in space and then that goes through hypersonic flight coming back through the atmosphere in the new control surfaces and then you go subsonic have to land it unpowered on a runway with skids and the whole flight took what I mean from launch launch from the B-52 to landing a matter of 15 minutes I mean 18 minutes these are not long flights all of that happened in span of like 15 minutes this is this is like a serious amount of skill and reaction time and and like wherewithal of what's happening I mean this isn't something you can you can unfortunately like you can fly you can fly around the world in a propeller plane and still not be able to jump into an X-15 and fly it yeah and that's the reality yeah the X-15 pilots that was one of the things you may have needed to be considered by NASA because even when they were incredibly good test pilots people landed the X-15 too hard and literally broke the back of it yes one pilot died going into a spin and who was in a very experienced pilot yeah even if you were the best in the world you could still die in that airplane so you're absolutely correct propeller airplanes it was wishful thinking you just so what do you do luckily this country eventually did the right thing in the 1970s women were beginning to be able to go to test pilot school and by the 1990s some in the 1980s basically the first three women to come out of the military test pilot school NASA picked all of them one of the work in mission control the other two became space shuttle pilots and one of them Eileen Collins got to command the first American mission commanded by a woman so the second women were qualified yeah coming out of the military to fly a spacecraft NASA took them I think by then too NASA had been under a decent amount of fire to like start being more inclusive sure that's that's another thing that happened at the time yeah you look at the 1970s the first people that NASA chose yeah as their shuttle astronauts you had a lot of women you had a lot of people from all kinds of different ethnic diverse yeah you look at the sad picture of the Challenger crew the crew that died yeah and people use that as an example of you know you have women you have an Asian person you have an African-American person you have all these different faces it wasn't just white guys humans in space humans in space yeah but those women was still passengers they weren't pilots yet so it really took Eileen Collins to be the one the distinction between this is and this is how I think NASA was able to open it up early on I don't know when when did Eileen Collins because it was a while before women were allowed in as pilots because they made the separation between pilots and mission specialists and the specialists were like the scientists that were doing things that were vital but they weren't actually like in the control or commander seat so yeah I believe well the first American woman was Sally ride in 83 she was a mission specialist absolutely she was she was doing the work for the shuttle was designed to do somebody else took it up there right and then she actually did the experiments but in terms of flying in the front Eileen Collins was flying as a pilot in 95 she was commanding in 99 yeah it took that long for this to work through the system so should NASA have done what Jerry Cobb answered asked them to do which is do a some kind of crash program training women yeah it's hard to say it is it because American space program is not only ever been about qualifications and about where you go it is in that thing of national pride yes there is a lot to be said for they should have allowed all kinds of different ways of other people to come in and do it but was that their job at that time the president had said moon eight years now go that was impossible you go now that was impossible and how the man fact they managed to do that to land people on the moon and bring them home safely by the end of the decade yeah that is literally doing the impossible I'm not sure we could do it now in 10 years doing it then in 10 years wow yeah my personal opinion yeah I'm not saying what I think should have happened but it is turning out to be very difficult to do it now yes so the fact that they did it yeah 50 years ago half a century ago impossible so NASA was given that mandate did they have time to do other things not with the budget they had not with the directive they had should they have that's if only they were a really good book that looked into that only they were really good book that looked into that question and worked out what was happening yeah exactly kind of how it it's all I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give away the ending and I'm definitely not giving away my opinion on this just yet but yeah it's it's um it's a big question and it's it can go a lot of ways yeah so what's great to see you know just the other week I am sitting in an audience where two of the mercury-13 men are on stage talking about their experiences next to Nicole Stott who is a wonderful former NASA female astronaut worked on the space station done spacewalks yeah and watercolors in space I mean everything you can imagine to do yeah I mean most of us can't do watercolors or spacewalk she just does both really well she's up there with them talking about what an inspiration they were yeah and in the audience we have one of the very first women chosen to fly the shuttle and she's then talking to them and you just realize there's this no Linda be on doing was there as well yeah we have Anna Fisher Anna Fisher the first person who defied all those 50 stereotypes you're talking about she was a mother at the time she flew in space became the first mother to fly in space yeah any idea that like well you should stay at home and have kids she's like I'll do that and fly on the space shuttle thank you very much well and I'm watching they're looking at this synergy and you know by the time everybody retires the ages kind of blur and they don't seem that far apart in decades and things like that and you're just thinking what an incredible conversation I'm witnessing the first the second the third all these different levels the question is now almost irrelevant but but what those women went through to have to push and it still didn't happen yeah but they're still pushing to talk about it and there are still young girls in the audience inspired by them and there are still retired women astronauts who are still inspired by them it's a wonderful story I'm so glad you are writing it thank you yeah I came here to see Pete the cat and that's why I'm here where I know that's the only reason I'm here he's got to be I didn't mean for you to stop I just wanted to say something stupid Pete is big I am tiny true story but you also speaking of women in space and not pecan or the cat for that matter you worked with Sally Rod you worked with her and you knew her quite well why don't you tell me a little bit about that because she was of course the first American woman to fly in space and she's very relevant to this discussion and you you have experience with her sure I mean I got to meet Pete Conrad I've got to meet Pete the cat and Sally ride was my boss yeah I was very fortunate to be offered a job by her she was running a company called Sally ride science which was her post astronaut career she could have and did in many cases take every high-paid speaking job you could imagine yeah but she could have just done that yeah she was a name and she's in a Billy Joel song I mean when you get to that kind of level of famous level you know you it's like Buzz Aldrin everybody knows Buzz Aldrin even if you don't know anything about the space program you know the name Sally ride was that yeah she was a famous person she could have just coasted on that made a lot of money but she decided post NASA to put back she was a first at a time when she really shouldn't have been the first as we were talking about why did it take till 1983 1983 not 63 until America foot that put their first woman in space on the space shuttle that was a long time you know people have been flying out of this country into space for over 20 years at that point so she didn't want anybody else to have to wait as long as she did until there was a first and so she started this company which is still going where they really aim at middle school girls and that's the age that she did a lot of research and she realized that's the age that girls begin to drop out of science and technology yeah and I I know that anecdotally from teachers and friends of mine friends of mine with kids at that age that they yeah that's when girls start to like you love science you love all stuff and then grade 8 it goes down and it's peer pressure they've been the studies that she did and and other studies that she looked at said you know in elementary school every kid's like oh I want to know this I want to be like try doing that with a high school group of kids it's all you know you know this they know this everybody knows this but somewhere in middle school where the boys and girls really separate on that and by the time you get to the level where they're starting to choose college it's almost too late which is why you see so fewer girls going into science and engineering in college than boys that plus all kinds of societal expectations that feels maybe not be doing that as much as boys it's terrifying I baked cakes we kind of joke about it but I've sat down with kids and I've said draw me a picture of a scientist and it is an old white guy with a bald head and big bushy white side hold with wearing a white lab coat holding a test tube in a basement on their own now I mean that's what kids drawn now more than any other picture you ask a a young girl hey do you want to be an old white guy who's bald sitting in a basement on their own it's the furthest thing they want to be and that's what they see a scientist being so what Sally right did was really invest a lot of her time the rest of her life essentially into reaching those middle school girls and trying to get them through that time and she went well what do middle school girls like they like to be social they like music they like festivals they like big public events so she put on these big festivals around the country where the girls would go and go hey this is what science is there are 700 of my peers here there's music going on there's hands-on science experiments there's Sally or another female astronaut giving a great talk they went if I thought science was this solitary boring profession apparently not because this is science yeah it was really clever so she was really interesting to work with as a person really interesting too because when you get to that level of fame you have to be really careful just like any rock star just like any media person you get you get a lot of weird stuff and if you're a woman sadly there's another level of strangeness that comes at you and so she had layers around layers around layers of protection people not talking about security though that was there sometimes but we were all trusted in ways that were never really even said you just sort of knew how to deal with people where to where to get her to and from places and how to protect her from some of that stuff in her workplace at these festivals and you realize that she's putting herself out there in a way that many guys would never even have to think about which again made me respect her a lot because it was quite a conundrum she was a very intensely private person particularly in her own private social life nobody knew what she was actually like at home the general public never had any idea and that was deliberate you know she was she had a public persona that she was the vanguard of getting girls into STEM fields and that is what you saw and that's what she gave but that was a lot of energy and she managed to do that while keeping her own personal life very personal and it was really impressive to see that happen very interesting person shy person not the kind of person you think to put themselves out there like that but she believed in it so much that's what she did I gotta admit if I had come out of the space program and somebody had said you can do whatever you want you can be the head of NASA you can we'll throw millions at you just to endorse things I may not have gone I'm gonna go dig into some research and and yeah it's pretty admirable that she spent the rest of her life doing that