Denied space travel for being female, Wally Funk, 82, is getting her chance | Hacker News Reader

Denied space travel for being female, Wally Funk, 82, is getting her chance

reuters.com

52 pointskdig241217 comments

“ In February 1961, Funk volunteered for the "Women in Space" Program. The program was run by William Randolph Lovelace and had the support of NASA, although it lacked official government sponsorship. Funk contacted Lovelace, detailing her experience and achievements. Despite being younger than the recruiting age range of 25-40, Funk was invited to take part.[2] Twenty-five women were invited, 19 enrolled, and 13 graduated, including Funk, who at 21 was the youngest. On some tests, she scored better than John Glenn.[1] The media dubbed the group the "Mercury 13", a reference to the Mercury 7.[11]

Like the other participants in the program, Funk was put through rigorous physical and mental testing. In one test, volunteers were placed in sensory deprivation tanks. Funk was in the tank, without hallucinating, for 10 hours and 35 minutes, a record. She passed her tests and was qualified to go into space. She scored higher than John Glenn did in his testing and was the third best in the Mercury 13 program. Despite this, the program was canceled before the women were to undergo their last test.[7]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Funk

Had she proven herself in combat?

She’s flown almost 20,000 hours, trained 3,000 pilots, and at 82 “can outrun you!” (And I believe her!) I’ll admit when I saw her age in the headline I was a bit apprehensive about sending her to space but having watched the video she’s definitely got the energy and exuberance of someone half of her age.

Only slightly related, it seems there will be four passengers: Wally, Bezos, his brother, and the mystery auction winner. Is all of the navigation done remotely or will one (or several) of them be piloting? I know space flights require a lot of work from mission control but I thought all of the flights still required quite a bit of work from the astronauts as well. In the video Wally mentions she has every FAA license and rating a person could get so I’m sure she’s qualified but what about the others? Is this just a ride along situation or are they all expected to participate in the operations as well?

It is a fully automated vehicle. They have done a few flights and the capsule is actually landing with a parachute so they don't have to worry about the rocket landing being a failure.

I find this incredibly interesting. Years ago I read a long and very detailed article about Jerri Cobb, another member of the Mercury 13 crew. A prime example of somebody to admire and revere. These women were robbed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrie_Cobb

tldr it's suborbital at 100 km altitude for a few minutes with Jeff Bezos.

But it is still awesome to see this lady's life long dream become reality.

>Funk, then a 21-year-old pilot, was the youngest of the 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA's program that first sent Americans into space between 1961 and 1963, but were denied the chance to become astronauts themselves because of their gender.

This is completely wrong.

The Mercury 13 were given (most of) the physical examinations that early astronaut candidates were given. While it is true that the US government was not actively looking for women astronauts, these women were not eligible because

* For NASA Astronaut Group 1 (1959, Mercury Seven), no applications were taken; the US identified military pilots and brought them in for further testing. No American woman was a military pilot.

* For Group 2 (1962, "The Next Nine"), applications were taken but being a fighter test pilot was a requirement, and there were no female test pilots.

* For Group 3 (1963), the test pilot requirement was dropped but having fighter pilot experience was not.

While women were among the first shuttle-dedicated astronauts (1978's Group 8), they were all mission specialists. The first NASA female pilot astronaut, Eileen Collins (fighter test pilot), was chosen in 1990.

>Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos will be joined by Wally Funk, one of the 13 women who passed NASA's astronaut training program

This is also wrong; the physical tests the Mercury 13 passed were not "NASA's astronaut training program", but part of the initial screening process. Not all male candidates who passed the physical tests became astronauts, either.

If "female" implies "not a [fighter/test] military pilot", and "not a [fighter/test] military pilot" implies "not eligible", then it is true to say that "female" implies "not eligible".

>If "female" implies "not a [fighter/test] military pilot", and "not a [fighter/test] military pilot" implies "not eligible", then it is true to say that "female" implies "not eligible".

My point is that the rules weren't put there to exclude women but to screen out the applicant pool to make easier identifying those that NASA thought would be the best candidates. By proactively choosing from active-duty military pilots, for example, the Mercury Seven evaluation board missed out on Neil Armstrong (a civilian). By screening for only those applicants with fighter pilot experience, the Group 2 evaluators would have missed out on Mercury Seven's Scott Carpenter, who flew multiengine planes. By excluding those with a minimum amount of flight hours, Group 3 missed out on Don Lind (physics PhD and Navy fighter vet who didn't meet the minimum). Etc., etc.

Taken literally, "Mercury 13" would imply that twice as many qualified women astronauts existed in 1959 as men. That's in and of itself ridiculous. Most men who passed the physical tests the Mercury 7 and Mercury 13 passed weren't chosen to become astronauts, either.

> My point is that the rules weren't put there to exclude women but to screen out the applicant pool to make easier identifying those that NASA thought would be the best candidates.

What makes you think the test/fight pilot rules weren’t just a pretext?

Maybe the skills just happened to overlap, like high-G maneuvers.

Because obviously. If you’re starting a new program to send people to outer space and beat the Commies, what drives your decision making? Is it

(a) getting the best people, who’ve already acquitted themselves under stressful conditions admirably

(b) making some women happy

If you want to be really accurate, the women actually participated in a private test that replicated the NASA training program, so NASA had nothing to do with it.

But the entire point of that private program was the show NASA "hey look women can do this too!". And that's kind of the point.

That they were only being denied because of their gender.

You mean their sex, not their gender. Gender as a concept hadn't even been invented yet:

> Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.

From the Wikipedia page for gender

>If you want to be really accurate, the women actually participated in a private test that replicated the NASA training program, so NASA had nothing to do with it.

Correct, except the word "training". The Mercury 13 took physiological tests that replicated NASA evaluations of prospective astronaut candidates, nothing more. The Mercury 7 didn't go through a "training program" after selection; such didn't formally start until the shuttle era.

>But the entire point of that private program was the show NASA "hey look women can do this too!". And that's kind of the point.

>That they were only being denied because of their gender.

My point is that the rules weren't put there to exclude women but to screen the applicant pool to make easier identifying those that NASA sincerely thought would be the best candidates. By proactively choosing from active-duty military pilots, for example, the Mercury Seven evaluation board missed out on Neil Armstrong (a civilian). By screening for only those applicants with fighter pilot experience, the Group 2 evaluators would have missed out on Mercury Seven's Scott Carpenter, who flew multiengine planes. By excluding those with a minimum amount of flight hours, Group 3 missed out on Don Lind (physics PhD and Navy fighter vet who didn't meet the minimum). Etc., etc.

Let me repeat: Most men who passed the tests the Mercury 7 and Mercury 13 passed weren't chosen to become astronauts, either. Taken literally, "Mercury 13" would imply that twice as many qualified women astronauts existed in 1959 as men. That's in and of itself ridiculous. To say that the only thing keeping the Mercury 13 from flying into space was an arbitrary NASA decision, and nothing else, is simply not true.

The first woman to become a US fighter pilot was Jeannie Leavitt in 1993. That's not a coincidence: until then, women were banned from flying combat missions. https://web.archive.org/web/20140111222628/http://articles.p...

So yes, requiring applicants to have fighter pilot experience in 1963 was exactly the same as denying women because of their gender.

The truth doesn’t make an interesting article, an appeal to injustice does. How did you manage to notice that the headline was false if you care about women? What sparked the idea of fact checking this article if you aren’t systemically sexist? How dare you

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