Space invaders

The men were tested for three hours; Funk floated for 10 hours and 35 minutes, never hallucinating and only "sneaking a couple of quick naps." Women, the doctors surmised, could endure more deprivation than men.

(Funk later passed a centrifuge test in which she blew the minds of attending Marines by taking a full five G's without blacking out, even though regulations did not permit her to borrow a regulation G-suit. Unbeknown to the men present, she was wearing a full-length "merry widow," an old-fashioned cinching girdle borrowed from her mother, for support.)

Test results for the Mercury 13 were outstanding -- better than anyone expected, better on some tests than the men's. Donald Kilgore, who assisted Lovelace at the clinic, recalls that Funk and Cobb, in particular, were extraordinary candidates and "would have made excellent astronauts."

Lovelace was ecstatic and hurriedly worked to set up the next phase -- flight training -- at the Navy's aviation medicine school at Pensacola, Fla. But a hitch developed. The Navy wanted NASA to officially sign off on the project that Lovelace had begun out of his own curiosity. Delays set in. Tests were rescheduled several times.

Mercury 13 member Truhill recalls how frustrating it was to have the agency waffle. "I bought a ticket to Pensacola and had my bags packed," she says, her voice still filled with anger. "I was a mother. It wasn't easy to get things ready to go and then [be] dropped."

On Sept. 12, 1961, five days before the women were to report to Pensacola, Cobb received a phone call from Lovelace. The tests had been canceled. The other women received telegrams -- and no explanation.

Cobb plunged into action, first tracking down the Pensacola admiral who had rejected Lovelace's plan. The admiral sent Cobb to the Pentagon for an "official reason" for the rejection. She hopped a plane to D.C. and banged on doors until she found the chief of naval operations. "He told me," Cobb remembers, "that the tests were canceled because NASA did not want the tests run on women."

Today NASA is reluctant to say that the Mercury 13 tests were canceled as a result of its own sexism. According to Peggy Wilhide, a NASA spokeswoman, the agency was only following a federal policy set in place in 1959 by President Eisenhower that dictated that astronauts must come from the military.

Truhill sees it differently. She is convinced that NASA's sexism killed the program.

After the tests were scrapped, most of the women went back to their lives and jobs in the aviation industry, although some already had quit hard-won flying jobs to be available for the astronaut testing.

Cobb and Jane Hart carried on the fight, finally deciding to go public with their appeal and lobby Vice President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was privately sympathetic to the idea of women astronauts but refused to publicly endorse their right to go forward.

The women kept pressing, and thanks in part to Hart's husband, Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan, a congressional hearing on official astronaut qualifications was set for July 1962. Cobb and Hart would represent the Mercury 13. Called to testify for NASA were space agency administrators and astronauts Scott Carpenter and Glenn.

Next Page: "We would welcome them with open arms"

• View blog reactions