Wally Funk and the sexist space race

Wally Funk was one of the Mercury 13 but she has [still] not given up. The youngest of the group, she had been a flight instructor at Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma when she discovered that a privately funded programme wanted to see if women also had the right stuff for space. It was led by Dr Randolph Lovelace, chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee for Project Mercury and the man who had helped devise America’s first astronaut tests.

The tests ranged from exercising until the point of collapse, swallowing a one metre long piece of rubber tubing to measure the stomach’s gastric juices, and having ice water dripped into their ears – a process so unpleasant it often made people lose control of their body. During the isolation test, which could mess with people’s minds, she performed better than all the potential astronauts – male and female. She remained in a dark soundproof room, floating in water, for 10 hours and 35 minutes. They ended the test. Not her.

When you get to the stage of demolishing all objective tests and they still don't take you seriously, there really isn't any explanation but endemic sexism.

Tereshkova also faced significant distrust within the space industry with rumours undermining her achievements circulating for several decades. Many were from Soviet scientists who reported that Tereshkova had had last-minute nerves and vomited in space. This implication was that nausea, a common side effect of space travel, was a sign of weakness.

Even Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director for human spaceflight, judged Tereshkova harshly. “Their first woman was an absolute basket case when she was in orbit and they were damned lucky to get her back,” Kraft told me in 1997, after I had asked why NASA didn’t select female astronauts in the 1960s. The US space agency didn’t admit women into its astronaut corps until 1978. “She was nothing but hysterical while she flew,” Kraft replied. “How do you know we wouldn’t have gotten into that situation as well?”

The reality, of course, was somewhat different. In 2004 the (now) professor of engineering revealed that during her flight she had noticed that her spacecraft, Vostok 6, was pointing in the wrong direction on entering orbit. There had been an error in the automatic orientation system. This meant that, if she was instructed to fire the retrorockets on returning to Earth, the spacecraft would have been propelled into a higher orbit and Tereshkova would have died in space from starvation.

Instead Tereshkova informed ground control and, once confirmed, they sent commands to correct the problem. I heard Tereshkova speak in London’s Science Museum in 2015, when her spacecraft was being exhibited. She had kept this potentially fatal problem a secret for over thirty years so that the engineer responsible was not punished.

Once commercial spaceflight is underway, the number of female astronauts will increase even further. Funk hopes to be one of them. In 2010 she bought a $200,000 ticket from Virgin Galactic to fly on board their spaceplane SpaceShipTwo. Their first passenger flight is expected within the next year. Funk hopes to be on board. An astronaut at last.

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