Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream - Tanya Lee Stone, Margaret A. Weitekamp Stone tells the fascinating, dramatic true story of the “Mercury 13,” a group of women aviators who proved to be as courageous, intelligent, and fit as any man, but were nonetheless barred from NASA’s astronaut program because of their gender. When NASA was created in 1958 and the astronaut training program established, visionaries like Randolph Lovelace, the physician who tested the Mercury 7 astronauts, were determined to prove women as capable as men to meet the demands of space travel. At the center of the story is Jerrie Cobb, a veteran pilot who successfully completed every test given to male astronauts. Through the tests of Cobb and others, Lovelace proved women had the “right stuff,” but these findings were not enough to overcome the prevailing prejudices of the time. It took 20 years before NASA admitted women into the astronaut program. Stone poignantly chronicles how the efforts of Cobb and her colleagues were ridiculed and thwarted by everyone from Vice-President Lyndon Johnson to Mercury astronauts Scott Carpenter and John Glenn. In a bitter irony, their campaign was also sabotaged out of jealousy and spite by Jackie Cochran, a highly respected, trailblazing female pilot. Stone offers great insight into how deeply ingrained sexism was in American society and its institutions. Handsomely illustrated with photographs, this empowering story will leave readers inspired.