Flight Deck Podcast

When the United States was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the race to space, the Soviet space agency announced plans to send women into space, which spurred American astronaut trainers to consider what might happen if they did the same. In the late 1950s, Dr. Randy Lovelace and General Donald Flickinger of the Air Force heard about how the Soviet Union was planning to send women cosmonauts into space. Their reasons were practical rather than political: women tended to handle stress better, weigh less, consume less oxygen and use less energy than men, making them great test subjects for spaceflight. Lovelace and Flickinger wanted to implement a similar testing program in the U.S., but NASA was already committed to using male military test pilots for astronaut testing. Undeterred, Lovelace and Flickinger found an ally in Jerrie Cobb, an accomplished woman aviator who earned her commercial license when she was just 18. When Lovelace and Flickinger told her about the idea of including women in an astronaut