Loren Gush's recent book portrays six women breaking down barriers to become U.S. astronauts, writes Elizabeth Spiegel.
WHEN I WAS a little girl growing up in the 1960s, reading Heinlein and Asimov, I dreamed of space.
The six women profiled in this book – Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid and Rhea Seddon – also dreamed of space, but their dreams came true.
Each has been the subject of at least a brief biography, but Loren Grush’s The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women in Space is the first to draw the stories of all six together. Two of the six have died – Resnick in the Challenger disaster and Ride of cancer – but it’s clear that Grush had extensive access to the remaining four, their families and associates.
Until 1977, every American Astronaut had been a test pilot and every one of them a white man. But the advent of the shuttle program called for a new type of astronaut: mission specialists who didn’t need the indefinable “right stuff” that test pilots had demonstrated.
That year, the call went out for applications for this new category of astronaut, and the publicity – including appearances from Nichelle Nichols, familiar to all nerds as Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura – explicitly encouraged women and people of colour to apply. A total of 8,079 people applied, 1,544 of them women. After a gruelling selection process, NASA had 35 new astronaut candidates, of whom three were African American, one was Asian American and six were women.
Media focus, unsurprisingly, was on the women and the people of colour: one wit described the group as “ten interesting people and 25 white guys”.
Surprisingly, NASA didn’t provide any of the astronauts – male or female – with media training, despite the fact that public relations was an important part of all their jobs. Unsurprisingly, it was only the women who had to field questions about how they would balance their professional and personal lives; Fisher and Seddon were both surgeons and, like the other four, had plenty of experience in that juggling act. News reports included their ages, heights, weights and marital status. Sexist resistance came from astronauts’ wives, as well as male astronauts and engineers.
Initially, they were all keen to avoid being “difficult”; rolling with the girlie calendars, ill-fitting uniforms and sexist jokes, but over time were able to push back.
When Lucid was invited to Saudi Arabia as a member of the shuttle mission, which had included a Saudi man as a payload specialist, she refused to accept either the guardianship of a fellow astronaut or the status of “honorary man”.
Astronaut training lasted years; once the details of a mission were finalised, the crew underwent further months of mission-specific training and more demands from the media.
Each of the six women completed at least one shuttle mission. Ride also served on the commissions investigating the Challenger and Colombia disasters, and contributed to the report which recommended NASA’s “Mission to Planet Earth”.
Loren Grush’s engaging narrative offers insight into the lives of six remarkable pathfinders: anyone interested in the history – and future – of our exploration of space should take the time to read it.
Elizabeth Spiegel is a freelance editor and retired public servant.
'The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women in Space' by Loren Gush is available from Booktopia for $34.99 RRP (Hardback).
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