Once again Jerrie Cobb has flown into John Glenn's airspace. She is a shadow on his wing, dimming the hero's aura that emanates from the first American to go into orbit.
The celebrated, 77-year-old senator is the focus of the next NASA space shuttle flight, on which he will reprise his historic 1962 trip into space -- and become the oldest human being ever lifted into the void. His mission during the nine-day flight on Discovery, starting Oct. 29, is to study the effects of weightlessness on the bodies of older people.
But there are some niggling doubts about the legitimacy of his mission, about his fitness for the project, about the fairness of choosing him.
Considerations of fairness are what is driving Don Dorough, an education instructor at Fresno State University in California. When he read that Glenn would get another chance to go into space, his thoughts turned to Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb.
Despite qualifications equal to most of the men in Glenn's original Mercury program, Cobb never got her chance to experience space flight. Many think she was unfairly deprived, as were other women who aspired to be astronauts in the early years of the space program.
"I knew Glenn had testified against women becoming astronauts," Dorough said. "Jerrie had testified to the Congress in 1962, urging NASA to put women in space. Glenn, at that same committee hearing, testified to the contrary."
What Glenn told a House subcommittee on the selection of astronauts was this:
"The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order."
He did add, "It may not be desirable."
Cobb, only 30 at the time and already the holder of four world aviation records for speed, distance and altitude, came to know how undesirable it really was. Her dreams smashed, she went off and spent much of the rest of her life flying humanitarian missions into the Amazon basin.
"I wanted to go to the most remote place in the world," she said recently from Sun City, Fla. "A place where an airplane is of the most use -- and a pilot."
She has been flying mercy missions -- carrying small amounts of seed, some vaccines, antibiotics, anti-venom -- ever since, with no fixed address either in this country or anywhere in South America.
"I live in the jungle. That is my home now, with the indigenous people. I fly between the tribes. ... It is all communal living."
Her work, commissioned by missionaries of various Protestant denominations and by Catholic bishops in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru, earned her a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1981.
Now, on behalf of Cobb, and 12 other pioneering women who never got a chance at space -- the so-called Mercury 13 -- Dorough has launched a campaign to include Cobb on a future shuttle flight. He has recruited the National Organization for Women, two organizations of female pilots, the National Association of University Women chapters of California, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine, and the National Women's History Project to the cause.
Also on board are Oklahoma's two U.S. senators, James Inhofe and Don Nickles -- Cobb was born in Norman, Okla., in 1931 -- and six of the 11 surviving Mercury 13: Wally Funk, Bea Steadman, Sarah Ratley, Janey Hart, Rhea Waltman, and Jerri Truhill.
This formidable array has generated "hundreds" of letters and calls to NASA, a "steady stream," in the words of Dwayne Brown, an agency spokesman. But Brown was anything but encouraging.
"We have no plans to fly Jerrie Cobb, or any other elderly individual at this time," he said. "We are expecting an extraordinary amount of data [from Glenn] which will take months, maybe even years, to analyze. If something shows up that may warrant additional research, the possibility does exist of NASA flying another elderly individual."
"Possibility," he emphasized, is the operative word.
The campaign to put the 67-year-old flier into space continues.
Reached at her Texas home, Jerri Truhill said, "We felt that Jerrie had been the first one to go through the astronauts' test, and Jerrie is still flying -- seriously flying -- as we all used to. ... If anybody had a chance, it would be Jerrie."
Truhill admits to a deep bitterness about being denied a chance to fly into space. "It's still there," she says. "It was pretty brutal."
Oh, those Russians
In the early 1960s a Russian satellite was circling the globe, and a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, had already become the first man in space. The United States was playing catch up under the intense scrutiny of an anxious public. Newspapers and magazines were full of articles about the space program and astronauts -- all men.
From a large group of male applicants to NASA only seven men survived the rigorous physical testing to qualify. They became -- the Mercury 7. Later, 25 women were invited to take the same tests by the same laboratory that tested the men. Thirteen passed. They became the Mercury 13.
The first and most thoroughly tested among them was Cobb. Now the newspaper articles were about female astronauts, and expectations among the aspirants were high. They were, at least, until NASA introduced a set of exclusionary qualifications: All astronauts had to be military jet pilots.
Since women were not allowed to fly in the service at the time, nor for commercial airlines, there was no way for a female pilot to get the necessary training on jets.
Most of the Mercury 13 group drifted back to the kind of flying they had done before: crop dusting, ferrying army aircraft overseas, carrying food and medicines into difficult places.
In 1963, Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. NASA dismissed it as propaganda. But two of the Mercury 13 returned to Capitol Hill to take the space agency to task: Cobb and Janey B. Hart, wife of the late Sen. Philip Hart.
Hart found it inconceivable "that the world of outer space would be restricted to men only, like some sort of stag club."
Full of ire over NASA's dismissal of the Tereshkova's feat, she snapped that the space agency would probably continue dithering "even if the Russians landed the whole Leningrad Symphony Orchestra on the moon and returned them."
Hart is currently one of the strongest advocates for getting Cobb on the shuttle.
Many changes have occurred in the ideology of NASA over its 30-year life. Of the 119 people in the Astronaut Corps today, 29 are women. So far, 27 American women have flown on the shuttle.
But it was a long time coming. Women weren't accepted into the space program until 1978, and the first one, Sally Ride, didn't go up until 1983.
The experience of the Mercury 13 was blamed largely on the Zeitgeist of the time. The idea of an astronaut was new then, the profile imprecise. It would be formed by the Cold War.
Women would be good
Said David Toomey, one of the authors of "Amelia Earhart's Daughters," a book about women in aviation in general and the Mercury 13 in particular: "There were people in authority, experts in that young field of space exploration, who did believe a woman would be the best candidate. They were lighter and the most powerful booster we had could barely lift 4,000 pounds. [Women] use less oxygen, they tolerated loneliness better."
But the times, the prevalent atmosphere of menace and strategic challenge, demanded traditional heroes, military heroes.
"When the astronauts were introduced it dawned on many people that these men were American heroes. They were Cold Warriors," said Toomey.
But to him, he added, Cobb's continuing efforts to go into space raises the question of just what constitutes a hero today, an American hero as role model.
"The question we might want to ask is, if in fact John Glenn is returning to space because he is an American hero, some kind of symbol, is he a symbol to everybody? He's certainly not a symbol to Jerri Truhill."
Cobb says she holds no grudge against Glenn for having the opportunity to do twice what she has not been able to do once.
"I think its great," she said. "I know why he wants to go. I'm glad he's getting the chance. I want to go to."
Why?
"To go higher, farther and faster. I devoted my life to the sky. It's just a natural thing for a pilot to want to go farther."
She is also aware that she was not the only one disappointed in her space pursuits. Glenn, too, had his setbacks, his aspirations for a career as an astronaut snuffed for political reasons.
After his first flight into space, Glenn was grounded on confidential orders from President Kennedy, presumably because the nation could not afford to lose its newly minted space hero in an accident.
Most of the articles that have been written since the announcement that Glenn would go back into space have been hagiographic.
But not everyone is so adoring of the hero of the heartland, or supportive of his purposes.
Astronaut Mike Mullane flew three missions in space before retiring in 1990. In September's Aviation Week & Space Technology, he wrote that Glenn's presence on the shuttle will raise the risk. Glenn is too old, too prone to physical problems unlikely to develop in a younger man or woman. His presence endangers the crew, and the mission.
"That's not 'geezer' bashing. It's an incontrovertible fact of life," he wrote. "Imagine the outrage if Glenn has chest pains early in the flight and a $400 million mission has to be cut short."
The rationale for Glenn's berth on the shuttle was his own idea. When he learned many of the malign effects of space travel -- weakening of the heart, loss of bone density and balance -- are similar to those experienced by elderly people on Earth, he volunteered to do tests on himself while in orbit. NASA bought his proposal.
It's a good idea, Mullane wrote. But why not use older, active, more experienced astronauts [Glenn has flown into space only once]? Mullane referred to astronauts Story Musgrave, 63, and a physician, and John Young, 68, who has flown six times. Musgrave recently left the space program; NASA told him he was too old to fly. Young is grounded.
Other astronauts and astronauts' kin agree with Mullane, but to varying degrees. Al Worden of the Apollo 15 program, and Betty Grissom, widow of Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, see it as a publicity stunt or joy ride. Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Scott Carpenter agree, but support Glenn and his mission anyway.
Many people, both inside and outside the space program, seem to expect a successful flight by Glenn will revive the sort of national enthusiasm for space exploration that attended the race to the moon. Such enthusiasm is significant, because it might justify and legitimize elevated spending levels for NASA and its endeavors. Prime among these now is a flight to Mars by human beings.
Americans believe in the rewards public relations always promise, though the promise is not always kept. It was the promise of public favor that many believe encouraged NASA in 1986 to put schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe into space. But that good will dissipated when McAuliffe died along with six astronauts when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch.
Of course, whatever their feelings about Glenn's shuttle trip, no one hopes for anything but a happy outcome of his flight this month. Personal disappointment aside, Jerrie Cobb has one wish for Glenn in his return to orbit:
"Godspeed, John Glenn."
Pub Date: 10/20/98