Debunking the Myth of the “Mercury 13”
On Thursday, March 26, I’ll be doing a live-stream discussion about the Mercury 13 on my YouTube channel. This will be the first in a weekly series of live talks and readings; information and schedule is at the bottom of this article. Never miss an update: follow me on Twitter.
The “Mercury 13” might be a familiar name. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the FLATs, the First Lady Astronaut Trainees as Smithsonian Magazine calls them. Whatever name you know, you’ve probably heard the story: thirteen intrepid women have the right stuff to fly in space in the 1960s, but NASA keeps them grounded. It’s sexism, plain and simple. They are “spaceflight pioneers,” according to Forbes. Astronaut candidates, according to NBC, in what UPI called a secret NASA program. They trained for spaceflight, says Reuters, and Air&Space confirms they could have been Mercury astronauts. These accounts invariably feature a heroine named Jerrie Cobb and a villain named Jacqueline Cochran.
The story seems cut and dry — a feminist epic. Even my good friend and fellow space historian Francis French wondered what I could say that others hadn’t said before.
Those standard retellings never felt right to me. Jerrie’s fight against Washington is inspiring, especially in her getting to a congressional subcommittee hearing in 1962, but the story often ignores the state…
