Mercury 13

The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who took part in a privately funded program run by William Randolph Lovelace II aiming to test and screen women for spaceflight. The participants—First Lady Astronaut Trainees (or FLATs) as Jerrie Cobb called them—successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as had the astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959, for Project Mercury. While Lovelace called the project Woman in Space Program, the thirteen women became later known as the Mercury 13—a term coined in 1995 by Hollywood producer James Cross as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The Mercury 13 women were not part of NASA's official astronaut program, never flew in space as part of a NASA mission, and never met as a whole group. In the 1960s some of these women were among those who lobbied the White House and US Congress to have women included in the astronaut program. They testified before a congressional committee in 1962. In 1963, Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for LIFE magazine publicizing the women and criticizing NASA for its failure to include women as astronauts. One of the thirteen, Wally Funk, was launched into space in a suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's July 20, 2021 New Shepard 4 mission Flight 16, making her the (then) oldest person to go into space at age 82. The story of these women was celebrated in numerous books, exhibits, and movies, including the 2018 Netflix-produced documentary Mercury 13. When NASA first planned to put people in space, they believed that the best candidates would be pilots, submarine crews or members of expeditions to the Antarctic or Arctic areas. They also thought people with more extreme sports backgrounds, such as parachuting, climbing, deep sea diving, etc. would excel in the program. NASA knew that numerous people would apply for this opportunity and testing would be expensive. President Dwight Eisenhower believed that military test pilots would make the best astronauts and had already passed rigorous testing and training within the government.