Lovelace imagined a future full of space stations circling Earth, carrying people busy at work. Lovelace may sound progressive for his time, but his reasoning for including women wasn’t. The women did particularly better than the men in isolation tests. Thirteen of 19 women passed the tests, compared to 18 of 32 men. So he started testing female pilots at his clinic in New Mexico in 1960, subjecting them to the same tests the male candidates faced. After all, women are, on average, lighter and smaller than men, and require less oxygen. As NASA’s first, all-male astronaut class was undergoing rigorous medical and physiological tests to make sure they could survive the shakes and sounds of a rocket launch, Randolph Lovelace, the doctor in charge of the examinations, suspected women might do as well or even better than the men. In the 1950s, before any American had been to space, women were considered good potential candidates for spaceflight. Today, if aliens dropped into low-Earth orbit, as Jemison imagined as a young girl, they’d find Peggy Whitson in command of the International Space Station. As more and more women went up, people stopped, for the most part, wondering how they’d handle their periods in space, or asking them how many tampons they’d need for a weeklong mission. American astronauts were starting to look less and less like the pioneers that first pierced the boundary between the atmosphere and what lies beyond. By that time, the United States had been sending women to space for about 10 years, starting with Sally Ride’s mission in 1983. She flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor in September 1992 for a weeklong mission, becoming the first African-American woman in space. Jemison made her own trip to space three decades later. “I just thought, Well, would the aliens actually think this is all there is to humanity?” “I thought that was the most absurd thing in the entire world,” Jemison says. Where were the women, she wondered, or anyone of color? She remembers being irritated that the crew members all looked the same: They were all white men. When the Apollo astronauts went to space in the 1960s, Mae Jemison was a little girl in Chicago, watching the historic launches along with the rest of the country.
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