FTV: The Six

 

     Here are five names that are included in the above title:  Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, and Judy Resnik.  If you have an idea who these women are, then you are probably a space junky like me.  If none of these names rings a bell, then the sixth name will probably give you a big clue as to where we are headed:  Sally Ride.  The Six is the title of an excellent 2023 book by Bloomberg News reporter Loren Grush.  Published by Scribner under license from Simon and Schuster, the expanded title will take the mystery out of the abbreviated title:  The Six – The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts.

     For the record, the first woman in space was a Russian industrial worker by the name of Valentina Tereshkova.  A former textile factory worker and amateur skydiver, Tereshkova was commissioned as an officer when she joined the Air Force and became part of the Cosmonaut Corps..  Her father, Vladimir died in the Finnish Winter War when she was just two years old.

Her mother and her three children relocated for better employment opportunities.  She ended up working at a cotton mill and when Valentina graduated from school at 16, she began working at a tire factory and later at a textile mill.  She graduated from the Light Industry Technical School in 1960 having continued her education by taking correspondence courses.  

     Tereshkova’s path to space began when the director of cosmonaut training, Nicholai Kamanin, read American media reports that the United States was training woman pilots to become astronauts.  Kamanin said, “We can not allow that the first woman in space will be American.  This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.”  Kamanin was granted permission to train five females in the next cosmonaut group, scheduled to begin in 1963.  In the initial pool of 400 candidates, screeners found 58 who met the requirements and Kamanin then reduced that number to 23.  In February of 1962, Tereshkova and four other candidates began training – to ensure the first woman in space was Russian, the five women selected actually started their training before the Russian men selected for that cosmonaut group.

     Tereshkova’s flight on Vostok 6 began two days after another cosmonaut was launched aboard Vostok 5.  They spent three days communicating by radio while in orbit but never did see each other’s capsule in space.  With the call sign ‘Seagull’, Valentina became the youngest woman to fly in space (she was 26) and the only woman to fly a solo space mission.  Though she felt ill for most of her flight, she still managed more time in space than all of the American astronauts who had flown in space up to that time (48 orbits over 2 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes in space).  As with all Vostok flights, she was ejected from the capsule at about four miles above the Earth and parachuted to a safe landing in spite of violent gusts of wind that tore at her parachute.  The Russians kept their ‘cosmonauts and capsules landing separately’ secret for quite a long time so they could retain the illusion that they had completed the whole flight aboard their spacecraft. .

     Tereshkova’s achievement was celebrated and she spent many months traveling abroad as part of a Russian ‘Communism is better than Capitalism’ public relations blitz.  She was active in party politics even after the fall of the USSR.  She never flew in space again because the Soviet government did not want to lose another space hero after the untimely death of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.  She did, however, remain an instructor at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.  Though long retired from the space program, Tereshkova is still alive and the 87 year old is known for several quotes about her time in space.  Among them, “If women can be railroad workers in Russia, why can’t they fly in space?”, “Once you’ve been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is.” and “Anyone who has spent any time in space will love it for the rest of their lives.”

      As far as American women training for space flight, there were 13 females who were run through the same rigorous screening process as their male counterparts at the Lovelace Clinic in Colorado in 1959-60.  Jerrie Cobb was the only woman to successfully pass all three phases of the testing and scored in the top 2 percent of all candidates who were screened.  Unfortunately, the testing program for women ended and none were offered a chance to train for the astronaut corp.  One of the 13 did eventually fly in space.  Her name is Wally Funk and noted space geek Jeff Bezos offered her a seat on the same Blue Origin flight he flew aboard.  The 82 year old Funk joined Bezos, his brother Mark and an 18-year-old student on July 20, 2021.  Indeed, other women would not even be asked to apply for NASA’s program until many years after the original 13 women were screened.  When the newest group of astronauts was announced in January of 1978, six of the thirty five new NASA hires were The Six alluded to in the above title.

     Each of the original six woman astronauts came to the space program for their own reasons.

Shanon Lucid (nee: Wells) grew up in Oklahoma after her missionary parents ended their globe-trotting ways.  As a twelve year old, she was consuming science fiction and building models of rockets.  Having learned about the budding manned space program in Russia, she proclaimed she would need to become a communist and move there so she could fly in space.  She drove her family nuts talking endlessly about space and was thrilled when the first U.S. astronauts were announced in 1963, but she could not happen to notice that they were all men.

    When the Mercury 7 astronauts were introduced, she had written to editors of Science magazines inquiring if the astronaut corp was open ‘for all Americans’.  One wrote back and broke the ‘news’: “One day women will fly in space.”  A few months later, Shanon was about to graduate from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in chemistry.  Prior to getting her diploma, she asked her inorganic chemistry professor how she should go about getting a job in chemistry only to be told, “There’s absolutely no one who will hire you.”  The prof didn’t say it, but the implication was clear – no one would hire a woman chemist.  More disappointment would follow when she finally did wrangle a temporary job in that field only to find out she would not be paid the same rate as the man she was replacing because (pause for effect), she was a woman.

     While working at the Kerr-McGee Oil Company, she met her husband who also worked there.  When her bosses found out she was pregnant, they fired her.  Shanon’s husband suggested full time employment would be easier for her to find if she got a PhD.  The four year program would eventually land her at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.  In July of 1976, she spied an article in the foundation’s news magazine that said NASA was  recruiting astronauts for the Space Shuttle program…and this time the agency wanted women to apply.

     Anna Fisher (nee: Lee) told her friend and fellow candy striper at LA’s Harbor General Hospital something she never told anyone else:  “I’d really like to be an astronaut.”  They were talking about what their post-high school plans might be.  She confessed she had been thinking about it alot since May 5, 1961 when Mercury 7 astronaut Alan Shepard had donned his space suit and made the first sub-orbital flight in the United States manned space program.  An Army brat, she, too, had noticed that only male astronauts who previously piloted jets were flying in space.  Women were not allowed to fly jets in the military when she first thought about being an astronaut.

     Anna was working twelve hour shifts as a surgical intern at the same Harbor General Hospital when her doctor husband (future husband) called and left a message for her to call him.  She was exhausted but finally managed to get him on the phone.  He told her he had lunch with a fellow doctor who was a big space fan.  The doctor told Bill Fisher about NASA’s new recruitment class and Bill knew about her lifelong dream to be an astronaut.  There was only one problem, he explained, “The deadline for applications is in three weeks.”  

     The other four candidates shared similar stories about their paths to become astronauts even though their backgrounds were not cookie cutter tales.  Margaret ‘Rhea’ Seddon was also a surgical resident but in Nashville, Tennessee.  John Gaston Hospital’s ER was a busy place where all sorts of knife and gun club victims were treated.  When a fellow surgical resident named Russ asked her ‘what would you be doing if you weren’t here’ over lunch, Rhea replied, “I’d like to be an astronaut.”  Russ must have remembered this statement.  A few weeks later, he was buzzing through the doctor’s lounge and stopped to tell her, “Hey, some friends of mine say they’re taking applications for the Space Shuttle program…and I hear they have an affirmative action program.”

     Kathy Sullivan was set to become an explorer.  She loved the time she spent aboard Dalhousie University’s ocean going research vessel, the CSS Hudson.  She was influenced by her father who worked as an aerospace engineer in Van Nuys, California and the exposure to his work showed she was born to the field.  When she told her brother she wanted to pilot the submersible deep sea sub Alvin, he asked if she had ever considered becoming an astronaut.  She had not and wasn’t even sure she would be qualified when he told her about the new recruitment cycle that was including minorities and women.  He asked, “How many twenty-six-year-old women PhDs can there be in the world?”  She brushed off his idea until she ran into a NASA advertisement about the program in a science magazine.  It was then that she figured out her sea voyages might indeed translate perfectly to voyages in space.

     Judy Resnik’s keen mind wasn’t on space as she and her husband Michael Oldak zipped down the back roads of New Jersey in a Triumph TR6.  They were engaging in one of their shared passions, namely time-speed-distance (TDS) rallies where drivers and their navigators ‘race’ but not for speed.  The aim is to drive sections of a pre-designed route in order to reach check points in a certain amount of time.  It is a team sport and Judy had the calculating mind to navigate for their TR6.  When she met Michael, he was studying electrical engineering and she soon changed her major in math to the EE field.  Both ended up working at RCA but Michael decided to go to law school and Judy began questioning if she wanted to spend the rest of her life designing circuit boards.  They drifted apart and ended up sitting in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant dividing up their community property before going their separate ways.  In 1977, she heard or saw an announcement about NASA’s astronaut selection on radio or in an advertisement.  She loved the beach and one sunny day at the shore, a friend asked her what she was scribbling on.  “Applying to be an astronaut,” she said.

     Last but not the least, we have Sally Ride.  Sally holds a special place in the story because she would become the first American woman in space.  She didn’t actively seek the ‘honor’ and in some ways regretted being ‘the one’, but the rest of The Six didn’t hold it against her.  In fact, the other five pretty much agreed they were glad they had not been put in Sally’s position after all the hoopla was done.  Like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, she was a private person who became a major historical figure in the U.S. space program.  She and Armstrong shared a need for privacy and never really cashed in the ‘space card’ to profit from their new found fame.

     A native of California, Sally Ride had a less conventional childhood than most.  In 1960, her parents sold their Van Nuys home and took their two daughters on a year long road trip through Europe.  It was a great way to learn about new cultures and cuisine, but the day she stood on a tennis court and learned how to serve and close out a set, her ten-year-old mind pointed her toward a life in tennis.  She got her sports genes from her college professor father and the truth be told, she was also an avid baseball fan at an early age.  Following her beloved LA Dodgers, she could decipher a newspaper box score by age five, perhaps one of the things that led to her love of math.  Their father worked with UCLA athletes in his position at Santa Monica College which gave the Ride girls access to big college sports from the inside.

     Sally was always a good student if something interested her.  She had a self confessed lazy streak that would sometimes derail ‘work’ for ‘idle time’.  She was given a tennis scholarship to Swarthmore College but after three semesters, she decided to return to California and pursue professional tennis.  There was no slacking in her pursuit of a tennis career and she soon learned that it did not check enough boxes for her to make it a career.  She entered Stanford University on another tennis scholarship and it was there that her passion for science went into overdrive.

When informed that 60 percent of the students enrolled in physics would drop out, she buckled down and decided to major in astrophysics.

     A year and a half before she finished her studies at Stanford, she and her partner Bill were having discussions about the future.  Both figured they would end up as professors somewhere until Sally picked up a copy of The Stanford Daily to look over at lunch one day.  A headline on the front page caught her attention:  “NASA To Recruit Women.”  The article sparked her interest and she hastily penned a note on a sheet of paper with the Stanford Institute for Plasma Research on the letterhead.  She didn’t even bother to re-write it when she found a one word error – she simply scratched it out and re-wrote it.  The application she requested arrived a week later.

     Sally Ride gained the most historical notice from her ‘first US woman in space’ status while  the other Six would write their own histories.  Shannon Lucid was the last of them to fly in space, but she made five flights and at one time held the record for the longest continuous stay in space by an American and a woman.  Rhea Seddon was the fifth to fly and is a veteran of three Space Shuttle Flights.  Anna Fisher was the fourth to fly and the first mother to fly in space.  Kathy Sullivan, the third of the Six to fly made four Shuttle flights and was the first woman to perform a space walk.  She is the only person to have walked in space and traveled to the deepest part of the Earth’s ocean.

     Judy Resnik was the second to fly and sadly the first woman to die in space.  She was on the Space Shuttle Challenger’s ill-fated flight and had served as a mentor to Christa McAuliffe, the person selected to be the first ‘teacher in space’.  Sally Ride was asked to serve on both Boards of Inquiry that looked into the Challenger and Columbia disasters that claimed the lives of fourteen astronauts.  Ride was the lynch pin who had been given documentation that NASA had prior knowledge of the risk of failure in the solid booster rocket O-rings that ultimately doomed Challenger.  She made sure this information came to light in the hearings and it changed the lax oversight culture at NASA that had led to the loss of Challenger and its crew.

     I have only scratched the surface to give this overview of The Six.  A more detailed study of the lives of these remarkable women can be found in Grush’s excellent book The Six – The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (2023, Scribner).  I was gifted a copy but the book can easily be found at your favorite bookseller or via interlibrary loan. 

 

Top Piece Video – Okay, Telstar came out in 1962, but here it is, still being played by The Tornados in 2019!