What Might Have Been: Women on the Moon

It goes unsaid that sexism and racism are the vilest forms of discrimination on Earth. It's boggles the mind to think how much further ahead we would be in all fields of human endeavor if these two insipid aspects of humanity didn't exist.

From Wired...

Imagine if the first person on the moon had proclaimed, “That’s one small step for woman, one giant leap for mankind.” It could have happened. In the late 1950s, the United States government contemplated training women as astronauts, and newly released medical test results show that they were just as cool and tough as the men who went to the moon.

The clinic’s founder, Randy Lovelace, developed the health assessments used to select the Mercury 7 team, and thought that women might make competent astronauts. It was a radical idea for the era. Women’s liberation had just begun to stir, and only a quarter of U.S. women had jobs. But Lovelace was practical: Women are lighter than men, requiring less fuel to transport them into space. They’re also less prone to heart attacks, and Lovelace considered them better-suited for the claustrophobic isolation of space.

Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts. Thirteen of them — later dubbed the Mercury 13 — passed “with no medical reservations,” a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men.