In 1973, four years after Neil Armstrong’s space boot hit moon dust in the most celebrated step ever taken by a man, a Nasa report observed that: “There have been three females sent into space by Nasa. Two are Arabella and Anita – both spiders. The other is Miss Baker – a monkey.” The report’s co-author Ruth Bates Harris, who the space agency had originally hired to run its equal opportunities office, was described as a “disruptive force” and fired a month later.
The prospect of women in space was hardly outlandish. Ten years earlier, 26-year-old Soviet parachutist Valentina Tereshkova had orbited Earth 48 times – a feat not greeted with delight by US officials, who swapped rumours (which Tereshkova denied) that she had suffered “some kind of emotional breakdown” during the flight. At Nasa itself, Jerrie Cobb had already passed the same gruelling physical and psychological tests the agency set for its all-male Mercury crews by 1960. (This milestone achievement was marked by the headline: “No 1 Space Gal Seems a Little Astronaughty”.) In 1962, Cobb appeared before a House subcommittee to argue for women’s place in the US astronaut cadre. Her evidence was promptly dismissed by the Mercury hero John Glenn, who remarked flatly: “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
These switchbacks of breakthrough and frustration wind through reporter Loren Grush’s vivid account of women’s battle for spaceflight equality. For the first decades of the US space programme, would-be female astronauts were stonewalled by a bureaucracy intent on preventing change. But by the mid-1970s Nasa had a new vessel, the Space Shuttle, to crew – and it was dawning on even the most regressive elements of the agency that it could no longer afford to exclude women and people of colour. The Shuttle, Grush writes, was intended to transform space travel from “something dangerous and expensive to an endeavour that was cheap, routine and safe”, one that would require a diverse range of civilian specialists as well as the macho military test pilots of previous eras. Nasa asked the African American actor Nichelle Nichols – Lt Uhura in Star Trek – to front its new recruitment campaign, and the 35-strong cohort unveiled in January 1978 duly included four men of colour alongside “the six”, the US’s first female astronauts.
Grush paints a compelling picture of the rigours faced by these driven and accomplished women before one of them, Sally Ride, became the first American woman in space in June 1983. (A few months earlier the Soviets, intent as always on outdoing their rivals, had sent their second female cosmonaut to a space station, where she was greeted with flowers her colleagues had grown in orbit.) But The Six also has room for the entertaining trivia of zero-gravity life – the brainpower devoted to adapting space toilets for women; Nasa engineers asking solemnly if 100 tampons per female astronaut would be enough for a week in space; Ride telling mission control that spaceflight was like a VIP pass at Disneyland. Its more eye-popping details include the negotiations around “appropriate” spacewear for the biochemist Shannon Lucid when a Saudi prince was invited to join a 1985 Shuttle mission; and the arrival of the first lock in space, sent by Nasa officials for the shuttle’s outer hatch following a previous flight when “questions arose about a passenger’s emotional state”.
Readers encounter lurches in perspective similar to those experienced by the book’s astronaut subjects. One minute the book describes the awe-inducing experience of gazing at the division of night and day on the Earth’s surface, or the “thin royal blue line” of its atmosphere. The next it homes in on the tiny details that determine the outcome of a mission: the improvised tools the astronauts use to fix a malfunctioning satellite; the tiny, potentially fatal chip in the Shuttle’s windscreen; the cold, stiff O-rings that fail during the Challenger launch of 1986, killing seven crew members including Judy Resnik, one of “the six”.
That disaster, compounded by the loss of Columbia in 2003, changed Nasa’s approach to spaceflight. The Shuttle programme was a 20th-century vision of a future that was never realised; in the 21st century, superpower rivalry in space has given way to competition between tech billionaires. With the agency’s Artemis lunar programme still in its earliest phases, Elon Musk’s SpaceX currently provides the only means for Nasa astronauts to reach orbit. Grush writes optimistically that the growth of the commercial space industry will bring greater opportunities for female astronauts. Whatever happens next, The Six is an important record of their achievements so far.
• The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush is published by Virago (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
