Motherboard

In 1959 Donald Flickinger, an Air Force general and NASA advisor involved with the Lovelace clinic – a mid-century centre of aeromedical research – founded the earliest Women in Space Program (WISP) in order for women to test their qualifications to become astronauts.

The clinic’s founder was practical: Women were lighter, requiring less fuel to send them into space. Women are also less prone to heart attacks, and Lovelace considered them more well suited to the claustrophobic isolation of space.

Nineteen women enrolled in the original WISP program, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male candidates. Thirteen of them passed with “no medical reservations” and with higher scores than the first male class.

Donald Kilgore, who evaluated both male and female space flight candidates at the Lovelace clinic said, “They were all motivated to a degree you could not measure. They knew they were ideal candidates, but NASA regulations kept them out of the game."

The results from the sensory deprivation tests proved especially striking:“Based on previous experiments in several hundred subjects, it was thought that 6 hours was the absolute limit of tolerance for this experience before the onset of hallucinations,” write Kilgore and his co-authors. “[Jerrie] Cobb, however, spent 9 hours and 40 minutes during the experiment, which was terminated by the staff. Subsequently, two other women (Rhea Hurrle and Wally Funk) were also tested, with each spending over 10 hours in the sensory isolation tank before termination by the staff.”

During the test, the women were immersed in a lightless tank of cold water. By contrast, John Glenn’s memoir recounts being tested in a dimly-lit room, where he was provided with a pen and paper. Glenn’s test lasted just three hours.

The would-be Mercury 13 astronauts would ultimately be held to a different standard than their male counterparts. Some NASA officials speculated that female performance could be impaired by menstruation. Others wanted pilots who had already flown experimental military aircraft — something only men could have done, since women were barred from the Air Force.

WISP was cancelled in August 1961.