Ian Sales - Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

Geraldyne M “Jerrie” Cobb

Janet Christine “Jan” Dietrich

Marion Dietrich

Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk

Bernice “B” Steadman

Jean Hixson

Myrtle “K” Cagle

Sarah Gorelick

Rhea Hurrle

Irene Leverton

Gene Nora Stumbough

Geraldine ”Jerri” Sloan

Jane Briggs “Janey” Hart

It is April 1962. NASA arranges a press conference and gets the astronauts all gussied up and puts them on a stage behind a big table in a conference room in Dolley Madison House. There’s maybe one hundred reporters in the room but not many men—and that includes the handful on the stage, like the NASA Administrator, Dr T Keith Glennan; and Dr W Randolph Lovelace and Brigadier General Donald D Flickinger, USAF, who started the whole thing when they put a group of women pilots through the astronaut tests.

The reporters ask lots of questions, about the selection process and the testing, and each of the thirteen gives the answers NASA has told them to give. Then a reporter sticks up her hand, Dr Glennan points at her and the reporter says, I would like to ask Mrs Hart if her husband has anything to say about this, and/or her eight children?

They are all as enthusiastic about the programme as I am, Janey Hart says; even the little ones.

How about the others? asks the reporter. Same question.

Suppose we go down the line, one, two, three, on that, says NASA Director of Public Relations Walter T Bonney. The question is: has your husband, or maybe he’s just your beau, has he had anything to say about this?

Not all of the astronauts are married, not all of them are courting. When you log thousands of flying hours, there’s not much room for cuddles and candle-lit dinners. Those who are married echo Hart’s answer—everything back home is peachy, hubby backs her to the hilt, the kids think mom is great.

Geraldine Sloan, Jerri, the year before she was testing top secret terrain-following radar for Texas Instruments, flying B-25s a handful of feet above the waves over the Gulf of Mexico, she leans toward her microphone and says, I don’t think any of us could really go on with something like this if we didn’t have pretty good backing at home. If it is what I want to do, my husband is behind it, and the kids are too, one hundred percent.

A couple of eyebrows behind the table go up—they all know Sloan’s marriage is pretty much over. If not for NASA public relations, Jerri and Lou would have gone their separate ways last year.

There is a shadow hanging over the conference though no one mentions it: the Russians have already put the first man into space, and followed him with a second; and it’s going to be a while before the US can follow suit. NASA, however, will have the first woman in space, they’re going to make sure of that—even though there are rumours coming out of the Soviet Union they’re training a female cosmonaut, some parachutist, not a pilot.

Once the press conference is over, the “lady astronauts” file out and are bussed back to the hotel through the warm Washington air. Jerrie Cobb stares out the window of the coach and she’s thinking about flying, about getting into the cockpit of one of those new supersonic jet fighters; while behind her she can hear one of the others wondering if they’ll get to keep the Bergdorf Goodman suits they’re wearing. They won’t let Cobb near a jet fighter, of course; she has ten thousand hours in over two-dozen types of aircraft, but she’s never flown a jet. Only men get to fly jets.

But pretty soon she’ll be going higher and faster than any jet pilot.

A week later—they’re still using Dolley Madison House, NASA headquarters, as a base of operations—Jackie Cochran joins them. NASA has signed her on as Head of the Astronaut Office, which means she’s now in charge of them. Cobb is not happy, she doesn’t trust Cochran, she has seen some of the letters Cochran wrote to the other women after they’d finished the first phase of the testing. Cochran’s hints about “favouritism”, her words that “one of the girls has an ‘in’ and expects to lead the pack”, all the poisonous little turns of phrase Cochran used to present herself as the true leader of the “lady astronauts”.

Now it is official.

Cobb knows she was not really the first, Ruth Rowland Nichols underwent some centrifuge and weightlessness testing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base six months before Cobb was invited to the Lovelace Clinic; but Cobb, she was the real guinea pig, she was the first to complete all three phases of the testing, she was the subject of Dr Lovelace’s talk at the Space and Naval Medicine Congress in Stockholm, she appeared in Life magazine.

And it was Cobb and Janey Hart who campaigned for NASA to push ahead with its Mercury programme using women. Cochran has always said, even when she ran the Women Airforce Service Pilots during the last war, she’s always said the men go first and the women follow after and take up the slack. But there’s no slack here now, all the men have gone out to Korea to fight the Soviets and the Chinese.

Cobb wants to go to Dr Glennan, but Hart argues against it. We were lucky, Hart tells Cobb, we were lucky the pilots they originally picked had to go back to active duty, we were lucky the other men NASA wanted are the kind that won’t stay here but have to go off to fight in Korea. You know Jackie has been working to take over right from the start, well now she’s done it.

Hart puts an arm around Cobb’s shoulders. She drops her voice and adds, But Jerrie, Jackie is an old woman and not in good health. We’re going into space, Jerrie. Jackie isn’t.

Later, Cobb has to admit there are some advantages to having Cochran in charge. They all get to visit the White House when Cochran arranges a dinner with President Eisenhower and the members of the US Senate Committee on Astronautics and Air and Space Sciences. In evening gowns by Oleg Cassini and Norman Norell, accompanied by husbands or uniformed chaperones—Cobb finds herself on the arm of a young USAF first lieutenant from Texas called Alan Bean—they all sit down to a five-course dinner in the State Dining Room. Cochran and Eisenhower go back years, and every time someone asks a question of one of the astronauts, Cochran jumps in with an answer—and the president just nods and gives his sunny smile. Hart catches Cobb’s eye and makes a face, but what can they do? The others, they’re too excited about eating in the White House, about the photo session—Cochran has arranged an exclusive contract with Life magazine—before they were led into the State Dining Room. Cobb is thinking about spacecraft and wondering what the Earth will look like from one hundred miles up, and she wants to be the first woman on the planet to see that.

The next day, the astronauts—the press calls them the Mercury 13 now—fly down to Cape Canaveral for a guided tour, in a chartered Douglas DC-6 piloted by Cochran, although they could have all flown there themselves. From the airport they’re bussed to the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach. That evening, as the sun sinks below the horizon, spraying red and orange across the palms and freeways, the women gather down by the pool, all except Cochran, and in the twilight they sip cocktails and chatter excitedly about the days ahead. It feels like some fevered dream, this group of well-dressed and well-spoken women with their martinis and manhattans and daiquiris, in the sharp heat of the lacquer-clear Florida night, and they’re all thinking they’re but a stone’s throw from Cape Canaveral… A couple of days ago, sitting in a conference room, they were being presented to the world as pioneers, explorers of a new frontier, and they could feel on them the paternal gaze of the NASA meatball on the curtain behind the table. But this… this could be a meeting of the 99s. There’s excitement in the voices but the laughter is brittle; the gestures are emphatic and the glasses are being drained faster than usual. Cobb watches the other women for a moment, then looks away. She’s standing at the edge of the terrace, before her is the space-dark sea and the moon-bright sand, and she’s barely touched the martini someone handed her.