Mercury 13

MERCURY 13 exposes 1960s prejudices against white female pilots who passionately wanted to be astronauts but were rejected by NASA for being female. The documentary is a kind of Hidden Figures, but it showcases the difference between NASA and the government’s friendly, paternalistic bias against the female pilots — oh, those silly (white) women wanting to fly into space! — and the mean-spirited, demeaning bias demonstrated by NASA against certifiably brilliant people whose most terrible failings happened to be that they were black and female. In 1958, NASA launched its Mercury program, testing male military pilots for physical and psychological stamina. They ended up with a group of seven photogenic pilots with big smiles and comforting all-American masculinity who would seek to help the U.S. catch up with the Russian space program. Owing to the funding offered by a famed female pilot of the time, Jacqueline Cochran, the doctor associated with NASA’s pilot-testing regime also put 13 female pilots through the same program the men had undergone. The women outperformed the men, suggesting that women might actually be better suited to the rigors of space travel. But NASA, and the young, crew-cutted military men selected to be the first U.S. men in space argued condescendingly that women had no place in the space program. Not until 1995, when Eileen Collins piloted the Space Shuttle into the heavens, did the women who longed to launch into the stratosphere decades earlier finally feel vindicated. Collins cited them as the pioneers who made her career possible, and she invited the surviving pilots to her launch, a moving experience for them all. Interviews with the Mercury women, in their 80s now, reveal feisty, iconoclastic, smart, articulate women whose passion for flying gave them the guts to pursue their dreams in the face of social pressure to be more ladylike. It’s worth noting that one of the 13, Janey Hart, a pilot and wife of Senator Philip Hart, was moved by the prejudice women faced from NASA to become a founding member of the feminist organization NOW (National Organization of Women). Her children remember her admiringly in informative interviews.