Women showed, in some ways, better astronaut potential than men, but various combinations of prejudice and politics prevented this early (privately funded) program from leading to actual female astronauts.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“In April, Netflix debuted Mercury 13, a documentary about a trailblazing group of 13 women in the 1960s who could have been the first US female astronauts, if their training program hadn’t been cancelled. The doc is a touching portrait of the women pilots, but it leaves some questions unanswered.

The Mercury 13 program was not officially run by NASA. It was created by NASA physician William Randolph Lovelace, who developed the physical and psychological tests used to select NASA’s first seven male astronauts for Project Mercury. The women completed physical and psychological tests, but before they could complete the training, the privately funded program was cancelled. Why did that happen?

In the Netflix documentary, one of the female pilots says NASA had “no need for women astronauts.” The space agency “didn’t want this program, pure and simple,” says Jackie Lovelace Johnson, Lovelace’s daughter. The documentary doesn’t provide NASA’s take, or feature interviews with historians. Directors David Sington and Heather Walsh tell the story through sit-down interviews with some of the Mercury 13 women and their relatives. The doc also leaves unclear why exactly one of the women, famous pilot Jacqueline Cochran, eventually testified against the program when the case was brought before Congress in 1962.

To answer these questions, and get more context, I spoke with Margaret Weitekamp, a historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and author of the book Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. Weitekamp hadn’t seen the documentary when I talked to her, but she did tell me right away that the women shouldn’t be called the Mercury 13. “It is ahistorical and misleading,” she told me.”