Your parents both worked on the space shuttle programme for decades, and you have gone on to write about Sally Ride, Anna Fisher, Judy Resnik, Shannon Lucid, Rhea Seddon and Kathy Sullivan – the first six American female astronauts. Were you always interested in space?
As a child growing up with two Nasa parents, I thought space was not cool at all. It wasn’t until I left my home town that I started to understand just how special my upbringing was. When I went into journalism, I realised that I was actually drawn to stories about space.
Nasa sent the first American man to space in 1961. The first American woman didn’t go up for another 22 years. Why the delay?
When Nasa was first created, the requirements were that you had to be able to be a jet pilot, but you couldn’t get jet pilot experience without being in the military. Women were banned from flying jets in the military. Nasa was so hellbent on getting to the moon that being inclusive and letting women into the programme was seen as a distraction. It went all the way up to Lyndon B Johnson. There is a memo of his where he writes “Stop this now” on a document related to getting women into the space programme.
What concerns did people have about women going into space?
There were crazy articles about whether they would be mentally unwell, and also the role that they thought women could play in space. How could women be subservient to men? How could they help them? Would they be a distraction to men in space? They were never considered astronauts outright.
How did the six women get selected by Nasa?
First they had to send in an application. The selection team narrowed down more than 8,000 applicants. Then they had to go on a week-long trip to Houston and were put through medical testing and psych evaluations with a “good cop” and “bad cop”. One of them would talk in very nice tones and ask “How’s your relationship with your parents?” or “Tell me about your childhood”. And then there was a bad cop who would demand they count backwards from 100 by seven, and if they messed up, he would proclaim it loudly and see how they reacted. There was also a “personal rescue sphere” – it was a very small enclosure, and they would zip them up and see how they handled claustrophobia.
There was a press frenzy around the women when they got selected, with one paper calling them “eye popping space gals”. And the atmosphere at Nasa itself was pretty masculine – one astronaut had a Playboy calendar on his door. How did that play out?
There were culture clashes. Some men weren’t accustomed to working with women at that level, some men’s wives didn’t like the women flying with them. But it was the press that asked them the most ridiculous questions. During Sally’s press conference before her flight, one of the reporters asked if she ever wept in the simulator if things went wrong. When Anna went into space she knew there was going to be a lot of talk about the fact she was a mum. She had fathers on her flight as well, but nobody asked them whether or not being an astronaut was compatible with being a father, they only asked her if being an astronaut was compatible with being a mother.
Did the women feel pressure to perform?
These women definitely understood that they were being watched much more closely than their male colleagues. If they made a mistake, the press would have a field day. Judy had a mishap with her hair in orbit [it got stuck in an Imax camera] and she made all the guys swear not to say anything. Even though they kept to their word, Judy’s hair was a big topic of discussion on the ground because it was large, and in zero gravity your hair doesn’t lay flat.
In the book, you chronicle the astronauts’ early flights. What happened to them after that?
Sally only spent about seven years at Nasa – she went back into academia. Many of the astronauts flew multiple times. Kathy flew the mission that deployed the Hubble space telescope, and she took a voyage down to Challenger Deep [the lowest known location on the planet] in 2020 on a submersible, so that makes her the only person to have walked in space and travelled to the deepest part of the ocean. Judy was one of the members of crew who sadly lost their lives when the Challenger exploded during its launch.
What other milestones is Nasa yet to achieve in terms of representation?
While new classes of astronauts are much more equal in terms of gender and racial breakdown, we still have quite a way to go. Less than one sixth of the people who’ve gone to space have been women, and the statistics for women of colour are much more dismal.
What surprised you most when you were writing the book?
How different the women were. They knew how to come together and provide a united front, but they had extremely diverse backgrounds – we had an astrophysicist, a geologist, doctors, chemists, an electrical engineer – which I found inspiring because it goes to show there really is no one clear path to space.
• The Six by Loren Grush will be published by Virago on 5 September. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
