Independently of his NASA work, then, Lovelace was interested in how women's bodies fared during these tests, which spanned a week. Just as women were the secretaries and telephone operators on Earth, so too they would be in space, this line of thinking went, according to Weitekamp.
NASA used the tests to evaluate the military test pilots it had recruited for the young human spaceflight program.īut where the agency was focused on reaching milestones in space exploration, Lovelace had a bigger picture in mind, an ideal pulled from science fiction of whole offices lofted from 1950s America into orbit. Those tests were developed for NASA by a team led by William Randolph Lovelace and were designed to identify any weaknesses that might identify hidden health issues before flight. Related: As space billionaires take flight, 'the right stuff' for space travel enters a new era Funk, already an accomplished pilot in her early 20s, learned about the project in 1960 when she read about Jerrie Cobb, a female pilot who volunteered to undergo tests meant to determine whether a human body could withstand the strain of spaceflight. "It was never a NASA project, it was really a privately funded investigation into women's physical capabilities for spaceflight," Weitekamp said. But Funk laid the groundwork for this flight during a brief period six decades ago, when she became one of the group that was, decades later, dubbed the Mercury 13 and is often misleadingly portrayed as a sort of women's counterpart for NASA's first group of astronauts, although the agency never endorsed their efforts and only began recruiting women for spaceflight in 1978.