Wally Funk

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, but he did one incredibly cool thing regarding his trip into space last week aboard his own rocket ship, he invited Wally Funk to join him,

Wally Funk

In case your feelings about the current  billionaires' race to space range from blase to shitting bricks pissed off and you haven't been paying attention, Wally Funk is a pilot who in the early sixties was chosen to be part of a group of women who were tested to see how they would fare during space flight. The tests ran concurrently with the Mercury Program, the United States' first foray into manned space exploration. 

I guess it's appropriate to use the term "manned" here because in the end, the program that Ms. Funk took part in was ignobly scrubbed and the United States wouldn't send a woman into space until 1983 when Sally Ride climbed aboard the space shuttle Challenger for her first of two missions, both aboard that ill fated spacecraft. Ride joined NASA after seeing an ad in her college newspaper soliciting women to become applicants for astronaut training.

Much like everything during the early days of the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, the USSR was way out in the lead as their first female Cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova ventured into space inside her Vostok 6 capsule in June of 1963. Having orbited the earth 48 times in just shy of three days, Tereshkova logged more hours in space than all seven of the American Mercury astronauts combined. She remains the only woman to have flown a solo mission. 

The group of women which included Ms. Funk, took part in a privately funded  initiative called "The Women in Space Program" which was conceived in order to test whether women would make good candidates for space travel. It all began when the program's founder, Dr. William Lovelace who designed many of the tests that NASA used on their candidates for the Mercury Program, invited the highly decorated pilot Jerrie Cobb to take those same tests, all of which she passed. Lovelace's friend, Jacqueline Cochran, another noted pilot and businesswoman, agreed to finance a project that would test more. In all about 25 women, all elite pilots in their own right, were recruited for the project. Thirteen of the women passed the same insanely rigorous tests as the seven men who were chosen for the Mercury Project.

That is until Phase III of the tests which would have been held at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine. After Jerry Cobb took and passed all those as well, the Navy cancelled the tests as NASA, who was not  involved in the project, refused to sign off on it. 

There were a plethora of reasons why NASA might have been reticent to include women astronauts. Some were legitimate concerns (all subsequently put to rest) about how the female anatomy would handle space travel. Along those lines, probably the number one concern was menstruation in a weightless environment. I know that sounds ludicrous, simply a pretext to exclude women, but in space, an environment where even farting is cause for concern, no stone can remain unturned. Another cause for concern was how space would affect a woman's fertility. Apparently it doesn't. Then there were the  typically male concerns such as whether a woman's natural temperament, especially during her period, might prove problematic during a space flight.

On the other hand, the chief motivator for the study of the Women in Space Program, was the idea that there might be several advantages of having women astronauts over men. For example on average, women are smaller then men, they eat less, and consume less oxygen. As prosaic as that sounds, all that adds up to a significant reduction in cargo weight, meaning less fuel required per astronaut, a precious commodity in space travel. Women were also found to do better than men in isolation tests suggesting that they would fare better on very long missions such as a trip to Mars.

But all that would be way in the future and NASA had in the early sixties one and only goal, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade as President Kennedy proposed during his speech before Congress on May 25, 1961, and no obstacle was going to get in its way.

Perhaps the biggest red flag of all for the ever PR conscious space agency was public opinion. I don't have the stats to back this up, but my guess is that despite the tens of thousands of young American women or maybe more at the time, tingling to get a chance at becoming an astronaut, the very real prospect of sending a woman to her death on a space mission, even if she willingly accepted the risk, would have been unacceptable for the majority of Americans at the time, and almost certainly would have killed the program. 

Pretexts aside, all that was moot. NASA's ace in the hole for not allowing women in space was the requirement imposed on them by President Eisenhower, that candidates for the astronaut corps all be selected from the ranks of elite military test pilots. By elite I mean jet pilots and guess what? The military did not allow women to fly jets in those days. 

Now it must be pointed out that in reality, at least during the Mercury program, there was little flying involved on the part of the astronauts as the flights were controlled remotely from the ground. The original astronauts in fact had to lobby for systems inside their capsules that would enable them to control the spacecraft, if ever so slightly. As I pointed out in my last post, the very first Mercury astronauts were chimpanzees, both of whom I'm guessing never flew planes, let alone jets. Truth be told, the original astronauts didn't need to be pilots at all, (Valentina Tereshkova wasn't) let alone jet pilots. Like practically everything involved with the space program in those days, the jet pilot requirement was pure PR. 

But rules are rules.

However there was another requirement that was waived for one of the male astronauts, a college degree, something John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, did not possess at the time.

Cobb and her fellow astronaut hopeful Janey Hart hoping to take advantage of that Glenn exception, appealed to President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson (who oversaw NASA) and the issue was brought before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics who examined the possibility that gender discrimination may have played a role in the matter, (ya think?). 

Among those testifying before the committee against having women astronauts was none other than John Glenn himself.

 At those hearings, Glenn said:

The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.

As unenlightened as those words sound today, Glenn, definitely a man of his time, wasn't too far off base, at least in describing the social norms if not necessarily the reality of 1962 America. If you're not old enough to remember, take a look at the way popular culture prescribed gender based roles for men and women. It was a world filled with women who served predominantly as homemakers married to professional men. They had names like June Cleaver, Laura Petry, and just plain Jeannie whose fictional partner whom she called Master, was an astronaut. 

Perhaps the baddest pilot of all,
Jerrie Cobb, who when all was said and done,
in William Lovelace's rigorous astronaut tests
finished in the top 2 percentile of all
potential astronauts, male and female. 

What you never saw on TV or in the movies movies in the late fifties and early to mid sixties were bad ass female pilots with names like Myrtle Cagle or Wally Funk, or physicists turned astronauts named Sally Ride. That name did however serve as the refrain to a very cool soul tune from the era made famous by Wilson Pickett called "Mustang Sally."

But it wasn't just pop culture where women's options were limited. Check out this video of clips of John F. Kennedy press conferences and see how he dismissive he was of the woman reporter who sincerely questioned him about promoting equal rights for women in this country.

That reporter, Mae Craig, a highly respected veteran journalist who marched with Suffragists in the twenties, implied in her question that despite working hard to promote the rights "of others", the Kennedy administration was doing little to advance the rights of women. As you can see from Kennedy's response, the issue of equal rights for women was simply not taken very seriously by him, or for that matter mainstream America in the early sixties.  

Mae Craig's question to the president turned out to be prophetic insofar as women astronauts were concerned. While Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin and should have opened the doors for women astronauts, it didn't. It would take another eight years when an amendment was added to the title which granted women the right to legal representation in their quest to become astronauts. Consequently in 1978, NASA dropped its requirement that astronauts be jet pilots and started recruiting female candidates for the corps, precisely the time Sally Ride found the brochure that would change her life.  

Since Sally Ride's first mission in 1983, as of a week ago, 51 American women astronauts have flown into space.

Last Tuesday, Wally Funk raised that number to 52. Coincidentally that day was the 52nd anniversary of the first "manned" lunar landing, 

At age 21, Funk was the youngest member of the Women in Space program and one of the 13 who passed all of the astronaut tests given to them. She also passed equivalents of the Phase III tests, having taken them privately, outside of the naval facilities.

Her background was similar to that of her fellow Women in Space members in that she fell in love with planes and aviation at a very early age, in her case at about the same time that she learned to walk. She had her first flight lesson at nine, and received her pilot's license, AND became a professional pilot at 19. 

Wally Funk was thwarted from pursuing her dreams to their fullest her entire life because of her gender. Perhaps it started in high school when she wanted to take electives in shop and technical drawing but was told she could only take home economics classes. So she did what any sensible person would do, she left high school early and enrolled in a college where she would thrive. I guess you could do that in those days. 

Later when she applied for a job as a commercial airline pilot, a position she was more than qualified for, she was rejected on the pretext that there were no rest rooms for women in their training facilities.  

And on and on. Yet despite that, up to this point by all accounts she has led a very rewarding life in the field of aviation including high level positions in both the FAA and the FTSB. 

I say up to this point because clearly she's not finished. As she emerged from the capsule after her brief encounter with space last week, she was clearly exhilerated but bemoaned the fact that the experience was way too short and couldn't wait to do it again. Long before Bezos asked her to accompany him aboard the maiden passenger flight of his spacecraft, Ms. Funk put down a deposit to fly aboard Richard Branson's spacecraft when it goes into service shuttling passengers for brief trips outside the earth's atmosphere. That spacecraft unlike Bezos's, is a space plane, controlled by two pilots who like the old Space Shuttles, guide their craft to a landing on a runway rather than a capsule parachuting to the ground.

As part of the competition between the two billionaires, perhaps Branson will top Bezos by asking Funk to take over the controls in one of his space planes. 

Now THAT would be sweet justice.

In that vein, John Glenn finally got the comeuppance he deserved for the words he spoke at that hearing so many years ago. For twenty three years he held the record as the oldest person, at 77, to have been in space. Wally Funk at 82 beat Glenn's record last Tuesday. Given the current push to send paying customers into space, I'm sure that record will not hold for long. I also wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Ms. Funk breaks her own record. 

Wally Funk's list of accomplishments in aviation as well as other fields is too numerous to list here but in case you're interested, as you should be, you can read all about them here.

Today she is only one of two surviving members of that elite group of pilots who participated in the Women in Space program who long after the fact, received the moniker "The Mercury 13". 

Ironically, most of the members of The Mercury 13 never met one another during the project as their tests were held separately. Many of them finally got together on the occasion of the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-63, the first shuttle mission to be piloted by a woman, Eileen Collins. Here is a photo of them taken at Cape Canaveral in front of the launch pad in 1995:

Seven members of the Mercury 13 from left to right:
Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley,
Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman.

The total number of women of all nationalities who have logged hours in space is 65.* Needless to say all of them owe their careers to these pioneers of space and the rest of their remarkable bad ass comrades. 

Here in alphabetical order, is the list of the Mercury 13:

Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, her twin sister Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane Briggs Hart, Jean Hixson, Irene Leverton, Jerri Truhill Sloan, Bernice Stedman, Gene Nora Stumbough,  and Rhea Woltmann.

In reflecting on the women who could have been astronauts, Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter had this to say:

"NASA never had any intention of putting those women in space. The whole idea was foisted upon it, and it was happy to have the research data, but those women were before their time."

That's for sure.

* Sadly, Christa McAuliffe, NASA's first civilian on a space mission is not counted among the 65 because her one mission which ended tragically aboard the Shuttle Challenger, never technically made it into space.

Including McAuliffe, a total of four women have lost their lives during space missions. The other three are Judith Resnik, McAuliffe's crewmate aboard Challenger, and Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark, both of whom perished as a result of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. 

Tragic as the loss of their lives was, the lessons learned from the mistakes that led to the catastrophic accidents that caused their deaths have helped make space travel a little less risky for their successors. 

I have no doubt that to a woman, each of them would look at their ultimate sacrifice that way.

They and their crewmates who perished aboard Challenger in 1986, and Columbia in 2003, fourteen in all, will never be forgotten. 

Billionaires in Space

I didn't have plans to watch Richard Branson's foray out of the atmosphere last week, but the TV was on at my mom's house and I didn't have anything better to do so...

Quite honestly, having horrible memories of two space shuttle tragedies that claimed the lives of 14 astronauts, I was a little worried about being witness to another horrific event. That's exactly why I'm not an auto racing fan, just not into seeing people die in front of my eyes.

Fortunately my fears were not realized as Branson and his five fellow astronauts, two pilots and three other passengers or in the official space travel jargon, "mission specialists", arrived safe and sound back on terra firma about 45 minutes after their brief experience of the weightlessness of inner space.

I use that term because there is some disagreement as to where the earth's atmosphere ends and space begins. In the fifties, physicist Theodore von Kármná calculated that the atmosphere became too thin to support aerodynamic flight at around 100k or 62 miles above sea level. Branson's spacecraft did not cross the "Kármán Line" therefore to some, including his chief competitor in the current billionaire's space race Jeff Bezos, who is scheduled to blast off in his own space ship in about oh T-minus 58 minutes and counting from this writing, Branson didn't quite get there.

However NASA, who I'd say has a little experience with the subject, draws its space line at 50 miles above sea level and (something I just learned the other day) awards astronaut wings to folks who pass that threshold. For the record, Branson's craft reached 53.5 miles.  

Before the flight I was hopelessly ignorant of Branson's, Bezos's or Elon Musk's SpaceX missions. Such a far cry from when I was a kid glued to the TV for every US space launch from sometime during the early Gemini missions, through Apollo and the moon landings, SkyLab, the first American "space station" and into the era of the Space Shuttle. 

Then after about three or four shuttle missions, I lost interest, as there didn't seem to be a glamorous objective for the space program anymore, at least the manned part of it. I wasn't alone in my indifference which I'm sure inspired NASA, in order to attract more public attention and political support to their efforts, announced through President Reagan in 1984 that it would send their first civilian, a teacher into space on the shuttle. The person selected out of 11,000 applicants was middle school teacher Christa McAuliffe from, Concord, NH. 

That got my attention.. But the Chicago Bears had just won the Super Bowl and the rest of the city and I were thawing out after the glorious victory parade in single digit degree temperatures in the Loop the day before the launch of the Challenger. Let's just say my mind was elsewhere. I was at work that Tuesday and will never forget exactly where I was when I learned that Challenger had exploded shortly after the launch, killing McAuliffe and her six crew mates.

Needless to say, like practically everyone, I was deeply affected by the tragedy, I can only imagine how it must have impacted the people who were watching the doomed launch as it unfolded live on TV, especially the tens of thousands of students in their classrooms watching because of McAuliffe's involvement in the mission. 

It had been nearly twenty years since the last fatal NASA accident involving astronauts (which took place on the launch pad during a pre-flight test) and Americans had become accustomed to seeing astronauts blasting off into space and returning safely. Even the near disaster of Apollo 13 only proved that the brilliance, ingenuity and quick thinking of the team of professionals who ran the space program, made a tragedy like the one that befell Challenger, inconceivable.

Well that's what it seemed like anyway. Because of the perpetual chin up attitude (at least in public) of the folks at NASA and let's face it, a little luck, few of us I think really had any idea until January 28, 1986, how truly dangerous going into space was.  

Just as after the tragedy of Apollo I, the issues that caused the Challenger disaster were addressed, the appropriate heads rolled, and we were back in business, up in in space after an appropriate hiatus.

Then it happened again, 17 years later. Once again I had by and large little if any interest in the Shuttle program and had no idea there was even a mission taking place. But by chance I happened that day to be on my way to an all day retreat when I heard a report on the radio that the Space Shuttle Columbia, the first of the shuttles to be launched 22 years before and on its 27th mission, was preparing for re-entry after a two week mission. I said a little prayer for the astronauts' safe return, then didn't think about them for the rest of the day. The retreat went without a hitch until the end of the day when one of the leaders of the retreat announced that early that morning, Columbia broke up upon re-entry, killing everyone on board. 

Space travel is serious business indeed. 

That fact was brought up during the broadcast of Branson's flight to one of the fellows involved in the current race to space by private entities who hope to very soon be sending paying customers into space. When the interviewer pointed out that the current mortality rate of astronauts on missions into space is a little over three percent, (therefore not a very good business model), space guy assured us that today we have computer modeling systems that can predict and correct far more problems before they occur that ever before.

I'm sure he's right. I can remember when you could bank on there being at least one or two major airline crashes every year in this country alone and many more around the world. Because of artificial intelligence systems detecting problems in time, and greatly reducing the chance of pilot error, and because of ever more stringent safety regulations in place, crashes such as those common in the past, taking the lives of hundreds of people every year, are rare indeed, at least in the US and Europe.  

But they still do happen. Of course, even back when airplane crashes were fairly commonplace, your chances of surviving a commercial air flight were greater than your chances of surviving a ride in the car. Today they're far greater. 

Obviously space flight is a different matter which begs the question, what's the point of investing all the time and money into a venture that when you come to think of it at these early stages anyway, is little more than providing very rich people the world's most expensive and dangerous amusement park ride? And of course the inevitable lament that I've been hearing all my life: "just think if all that money going up into space was spent down here on earth, all the problems we could solve."

Personally I'm on the fence with this one. What Branson, Bezos, Musk and others are doing is what people have been doing since we've been people, exploring the unknown and challenging themselves to get there. It's in our DNA. Without it, the species Homo sapiens would have never left its ancestral home in Africa. 

Some say that would have been a good thing, especially for our planet. Perhaps. 

But given the fact that didn't happen, it's pointless to get on a soapbox harping about these people and their ambitions to get into space. Whether we like it or not, they're going ahead with their plans. Like all innovation, there will be discoveries made that right now we can't even imagine. ones that will in fact address many of the problems we have down here on earth. There will also be discoveries that may make matters worse for us as well, that's just how innovation works, no matter how good the intention. 

We will certainly see our home planet in a different light. You can't see national borders from space for one thing, but you can see much of the impact human existence has had on the earth's environment, most of it not for the good. From all I've ever heard, the experience of being in space is a profound, life-altering experience, perhaps it will dawn on some of the movers and shakers floating around during their magic carpet rides in space to rethink their attitudes about how we treat our home and our fellow space travelers who inhabit it.

On the other hand, I've heard arguments for expansion into space that say it's necessary to explore and develop other worlds because one day, our old world may not be inhabitable anymore.

I have a better idea.

Let's not let that happen.

POST SCRIPT:

Jeff Bezos's flight this morning came off seemingly without a hitch. The passengers which included both the oldest person who has ever been to space (and who deserves a post of her own) and the youngest ever, along with Bezos and his brother, all grinned from ear to ear as they disembarked from their capsule minutes after it touched down. The flight was seemingly so flawless, it inspired one reporter to remark that space travel was no longer dangerous.

That struck me as a wildly ignorant comment, and reminded me of the first passenger aboard a US space flight, Ham the chimpanzee.

That event inspired this comment from the film The Right Stuff, uttered by Sam Shepard in the role of Chuck Yaeger, regarding the character of astronauts at the time who unlike pilots, had very little if any control of their spacecraft and were essentially replacing chimps in space:

 Think a monkey knows he's sitting on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys, they know that, see? Well, I'll tell you somethin' - it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that's on TV.

While going into space is no longer exactly a suicide mission, there is still a good amount of risk involved. I'm afraid once Bezos' and Branson's space tour buses get a few successful journeys under their belts, folks both working on them on the ground and those paying top dollar to fly in them are going to become complacent and forget this process still involves human beings sitting atop a glorified stick of dynamite. That complacency is where the real danger lies I'm afraid.

Real astronauts, and by that I mean the ones who train for years to get their chance to work on a mission are another story. They know exactly all of the risks involved, and that any moment, especially during launch or re-entry, may be their last. Perhaps one of the most enlightened writers I've read, explaining the experience of being in space is former astronaut, Chris Hadfield. Here is an interview he gave with NPR's Terry Gross in 2013.

If you have even the slightest interest in space travel, or for that matter life on earth, trust me, listening to this interview is 43 minutes well spent.

Anyway here's the deal. Having just said everything above about my reticence of sending civilians into space, if someone offered me a free ride in either Bezos's of Branson's space buggies, would I take them up on it?

You bet I would.