Behavioral Healtha time when engineers had to fret every extra pound of weight. After word of the
program’s existence leaked, it was abandoned by the Air Force and taken over by
Dr. Randall Lovelace, of the same Lovelace Clinic that conducted the physicals for
project Mercury. Aviatrix Jackie Cochran and her wealthy philanthropist husband,
Floyd Odlum, provided funding so that Lovelace could put the women through the
same rigorous evaluation. Of the 25 women who took the physical, 13 passed. The
next step in the process, which involved centrifuges and jet flights, depended on
the availability of military facilities and equipment. Although it appeared that the
procedures could be done at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, the abil-
ity to do so depended on NASA’s officially “requiring” and then reimbursing the
testing. Since the program was unofficial (despite widespread perceptions that it
was connected with NASA), the space agency did not intervene on the women’s
behalf. Some of the women continued to press for further testing and flight training,
and, eventually, there was a congressional hearing, but public clamor and aggres-
sive lobbying got no results. Kennedy’s decision to place a man on the Moon before
the decade was finished was interpreted by NASA to mean that it could not divert
resources to sending women to orbit. But there were other barriers to women’s par-
ticipation in space exploration, including the inability of some of the people in
NASA’s white-male-dominated culture to conceive of women in the “masculine”
role of astronaut. Weitekamp writes:
At a very basic level, it never occurred to American decision
makers to seriously consider a woman astronaut. In the late 1950s
and early 1960s, NASA officials and other American space pol-
icy makers remained unconscious of the way their calculations
implicitly incorporated postwar beliefs about men’s and women’s
roles. Within the civilian space agency, the macho ethos of test
piloting and military aviation remained intact. The tacit accep-
tance that military jet test pilots sometimes drank too much (and
often drove too fast) complemented the expectation that women
wore gloves and high heels—and did not fly spaceships.^74- Ibid., p. 3.