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The Woman Who Should Have Been the First Female Astronaut
StartsWithABang writes We like to think of the Mercury 7 — the very first group of NASA astronauts — as the "best of the best," having been chosen from a pool of over 500 of the top military test pilots after three rounds of intense physical and mental tests. Yet when women were allowed to take the same tests, one of them clearly distinguished herself, outperforming practically all of the men. If NASA had really believed in merit, Jerrie Cobb would have been the first female in space, even before Valentina Tereshkova, more than 50 years ago. She still deserves to go.
cos she has no sperm.
(and no I'm not kidding, they tested your sperm to see if you qualified as part of Project Mercury)
The public weren't prepared to accept female deaths - or at least, politicians didn't think they would.
Women performed better in many tests - particularly stress testing, sensory deprivation, etc.
Oh, please. Tereshkova was nothing but a political stunt (easily demonstrated by the fact that it took twenty years to get another woman into space). She wasn't even a pilot at all at the time when every astronaut candidate was expected to be an already accomplished test pilot. Cobb has more bragging rights that Tereshkova ever had. The same goes for the "Meanwhile, NASA wouldn’t open its astronaut ranks to women until 1978" sentence. The astronaut ranks in the USSR weren't really much better.
outperforming practically all of the men
It's ambiguous whether this means "practically all of the male candidates" or "practically all of the Mercury 7". The former is obvious, the latter isn't mentioned anywhere in TFA, and judging from the numbers ("the top 2% of all candidates", which counted five hundred), it's far from clear that this was the case.
Ezekiel 23:20
That reminds me of the old joke about the male athlete who planted someone else's urine to clear himself of doping charges. "We have two good news for you; first, you've been cleared of the charges, and second, you're pregnant."
It happened - was a racing cyclist in the 1970's, possibly in the Tour de France. Dope tests were relatively new then and only used in the topmost races.
The "other person" was his wife. The sample was given in front of a doctor, so "planting" someone else's urine would have been very difficult. The story I heard (as told in the "Cycling" newspaper) was that before the test he emptied his bladder behind the bushes and refilled with his wife's urine via a catheter. AFAIR he was not a top rider, just a lowly domestique desparate to stay in contact with the race. He was certainly not cleared of charges.
....Because none of them had the type of test pilot experience necessary for the Mercury program in the USA or the Vostok program in the Soviet Union..
We forget that at the time of the start of manned flights in 1961, it was an extreme unknown on how well an astronaut would handle a spacecraft in Earth orbit. As such, both the Americans and Russians chose trained test pilots, who had the ability to calmly handle any dangerous situation during a test flight. And in those days, only men met that qualification. It wasn't until the middle 1970's that both the Americans and Russians--based on their spaceflight experience--finally figured out how to choose females to become astronauts/cosmonauts on something besides a publicity stunt.
Which manned space program are you talking about?
Odds are Elon Musk will pick the crew for the next US manned mission, based on recruitment and testing done at SpaceX. There is something to be said for sending elderly people on the first test flights, since that minimizes the loss of life-years in the event of a fatal accident... But there are probably more important criteria. The top candidates will perhaps be ex-NASA astronauts in their early 60's / late 50's.