Mercury 13

The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who in 1959–60 took part in a privately funded research program run by physician William Randolph Lovelace II, a private contractor to NASA, which aimed to test and screen the women for spaceflight. The first participant, pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb helped Lovelace identify and recruit the others. The participants successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury. While Lovelace called the project the Woman in Space Program, the thirteen women later became known as the "Mercury 13" – a term coined in 1995 as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The Mercury 13 were not allowed into the astronaut program, never trained as a group, and did not fly into space (with the 2021 exception of Wally Funk, more than 60 years later).

In the 1960s some of the women were among those who lobbied the White House and Congress to include women in the astronaut program. In 1963, Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for Life magazine publicizing the women and criticizing NASA for its failure to include women in the astronaut program. One of the thirteen, Wally Funk, flew aboard the sub-orbital Blue Origin New Shepard 4 on the 20 July 2021 Flight 16, making her the (then) oldest person to go into space at age 82 (Ed Dwight flew into space at the age of 90 in 2024).

The story of these women has been retold in books, exhibits, and movies, including the 2018 Netflix-produced documentary Mercury 13.

When NASA first planned to put people in space, they believed that the best candidates would be pilots, submarine crews or members of expeditions to the Antarctic or Arctic areas. They also thought people with more extreme sports backgrounds, such as parachuting, climbing, deep sea diving, etc. would excel in the program.

NASA knew that numerous people would apply for this opportunity and testing would be expensive. President Dwight Eisenhower believed that military test pilots would make the best astronauts and had already passed rigorous testing and training within the government. This greatly altered the testing requirements and shifted the history of who was chosen to go to space originally.

William Randolph Lovelace II, former Flight Surgeon and later, chairman of the NASA Special Advisory Committee on Life Science, helped develop the tests for NASA's male astronauts and became curious to know how women would do taking the same tests. In 1960, Lovelace and Air Force Brig. General Don Flickinger invited Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb, known as an accomplished pilot, to undergo the same rigorous challenges as the men.

Lovelace became interested in beginning this program because he was a medical doctor who had done the NASA physical testing for the official program. He was able to fund the unofficial program, the Woman in Space program, and invited 25 women to come and take the physical tests. Lovelace was interested in the way that women's bodies would react to being in space.

Cobb was the first American woman (and the only one of the Mercury 13) to undergo and pass all three phases of testing. Lovelace announced her success to the public at the second International Symposium on Submarine and Space Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden in August 1960. Cobb's testing was reported publicly via the Associated Press (AP) newswire and articles appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times as well as Life magazine. These tests were never secret, just little noticed.