The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts

By Loren Grush

13 min read

Why does it matter? Because the women who broke the space barrier had to fight the same battle twice — once to get in, and once to be seen as more than symbols.

It's the night before a historic launch, and a pregnant woman is lying alone in the dark, eighteen stories above the Florida coast, inside a spacecraft loaded with half a million gallons of explosive fuel. She's not there by accident. She's there because she's the most qualified person for the job. Anna Fisher, medical doctor and NASA astronaut, eight months along, is the last human safeguard against a catastrophic launch abort — manually watching two thousand switches in the small hours of the morning so that, come sunrise, history can happen. That image — a pregnant woman watching switches so history can happen — is the part of the story that doesn't make the magazine covers. The real story is what happened before and after the cameras arrived: the institutional absurdity, the quiet grief, the improvised tools stitched together with surgical thread, and what six extraordinarily different women had to become in order to survive it.

The Door Was Never Accidentally Closed

Women weren't missing from NASA's early astronaut corps because nobody thought to include them. They were kept out by a policy — argued for, defended, and maintained all the way to a congressional hearing room in 1962.

President Eisenhower decided that only military test pilots could handle spaceflight. The military had banned women from flying its aircraft after 1944, when the wartime Women Airforce Service Pilots program was disbanded specifically to protect returning male pilots' job prospects. So women couldn't become test pilots. So women couldn't become astronauts. The loop was closed before the space program had a name.

Jerrie Cobb — an Oklahoma pilot with seven thousand logged hours who'd been flying since age twelve — exposed how circular that logic was. In early 1960, she traveled to Dr. Randy Lovelace's clinic in Albuquerque and spent the better part of a week enduring the same battery of physical and psychological tests that had produced the Mercury Seven. She passed. Twelve other women followed her through the same process the following year. Wally Funk lasted over ten hours in a sensory deprivation tank; the men had only been required to manage three. The data wasn't even close.

None of it mattered. When a House subcommittee convened in July 1962 to hear testimony on the matter, NASA sent John Glenn — America's most celebrated spaceman, fresh off orbiting the Earth — to explain why these women couldn't qualify. His logic was unhurried and almost bored. Women were barred from military jets, therefore they lacked test-pilot experience, therefore they weren't astronaut material. Asked to address the obvious problem with that chain of reasoning, Glenn shrugged it off as the natural way things were arranged. He compared Cobb's qualifications to his mother trying out for the Washington Redskins football team. The room laughed.

The hearing ended a day early. Jerrie Cobb and Janey Hart never got to deliver closing statements — Cobb reportedly sat very still as the chair called the session to a close, the kind of stillness that isn't calm. The program was finished. That's not timing — that's a door, deliberately shut.

Six Women Who Were Already More Than Qualified

Picture Shannon Lucid in her twenties, holding a rejection letter addressed to 'Mr. Shannon Wells.' She'd sent her résumé to chemistry employers after graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1963, and because Shannon wasn't a common name for a woman, some companies assumed she was a man. The ones who figured out she wasn't responded by asking for a photo — then firing back a letter by express mail to say they had absolutely no openings. When she tried federal science labs, they wouldn't look at a female applicant at all. Her own chemistry professor had warned her this would happen.

Shannon got herself a PhD in biochemistry anyway, bought a Piper Clipper with her savings, and flew her father to church meetings on weekends. She kept applying. When NASA announced in 1976 that it was recruiting for the Space Shuttle program and wanted women, Shannon already had her credentials stacked.

She was an unusually specific kind of person long before any institution recognized it. So were the others. Rhea Seddon nearly became someone's wife in the South, backing out when she realized her fiancé expected her to iron his shirts and stay home. Years later, exhausted from emergency surgery in the middle of the night and still smelling of the operating room, she told a colleague for the first time what she actually wanted: to be an astronaut. Judy Resnik scored a perfect 800 on the math SAT, played Chopin at concert level, and as a teenager went to court to legally transfer her own custody from her mother to her father. Kathy Sullivan was scraping volcanic rock samples from the floor of the Atlantic before she considered that the same scientific instincts might translate to orbit. Sally Ride was a ranked tennis player who quietly turned down a professional sports career because physics mattered more. Anna Fisher had been planning her NASA application since she was a candy striper developing X-rays in a hospital darkroom.

Six women, six entirely different routes to the same announcement — arriving at it not as a group, but one by one, on their own terms.

Getting In the Door Was the Easy Part

Getting selected was the beginning. The institutional habits that had built a whites-only, men-only corps for two decades didn't evaporate when George Abbey started dialing. They just became subtler.

Consider how T-38 training was structured. Because the six women were mission specialists rather than pilots, NASA confined them to the back seat. They couldn't take off or land — officially. Shannon Lucid, who had logged thousands of hours in her own Piper Clipper, burned quietly watching male colleagues with equivalent fixed-wing experience command from the front. When she pushed back, a NASA official told her the difference was that a male peer had flown in Vietnam and 'gotten shot at.' Shannon offered to go find someone to shoot at her over the Gulf of Mexico. The request was denied.

The back seat didn't stop Judy Resnik and Sally Ride from becoming, by every observer's account, naturals. Which is how the group ended up at Boeing's Seattle facility one afternoon, invited on a whim to fly a preproduction 747. A Boeing test pilot sat at the controls, assuming the astronauts beside him were experienced aviators. Judy went first, throttling the massive plane into the air and threading it east over the Cascades as if she'd done it before. Then Sally took the controls and landed the aircraft cleanly. When the pilot asked what planes she'd been checked out in, she shook her head: none. He went pale. Judy and Anna, standing nearby, confirmed the same. Three women without pilot's licenses had just touched down a jumbo jet, and they'd looked like pros doing it.

The test pilot just went pale and said nothing.

The System Wasn't Designed for Bodies Like Theirs

What happens when an institution decides to let women in, but the building was never built for them? At NASA in the late 1970s, the answer turned out to be measurable, specific, and occasionally absurd — baked into hardware and procedures rather than carried only in individual attitudes.

The most clarifying example involves Sally Ride's 1983 flight on STS-7. Preparing for a week in orbit, NASA's predominantly male engineering teams spent weeks designing a personal hygiene kit for her. Inside they placed a makeup kit stocked with Nivea cream — included partly because Anna Fisher, who'd stopped wearing makeup during medical school, remembered her German mother using it. Then the engineers tackled what they apparently considered the thorniest question: tampons. They strung a hundred of them together in a continuous chain and asked Sally whether that seemed like the right quantity for seven days. She stared at the caravan of products and told them they could cut the number in half with no problem at all. They wanted to be safe, they said. She let Kathy Sullivan, standing nearby, dissolve into laughter while she kept her voice level.

The comedy is real, but so is what it reveals. These were capable engineers who could calculate orbital mechanics to five decimal places. They simply had no framework for women as crew members — not attitudinally, but technically. The knowledge wasn't there because the people had never been there. When Kathy herself faced a more serious version of the same problem, the stakes were higher. A team of biomedical researchers tried to block her from performing NASA's first female spacewalk, citing a study suggesting women were more susceptible to decompression sickness in low-pressure environments like a space suit. Kathy requested their raw data, read it carefully, and found two fatal flaws: the study covered fewer than sixty people, and it hadn't controlled for body weight. She presented the analysis calmly, without framing it as a battle. She got her spacewalk, on the same pre-breathing protocol as any man.

The hardware problem didn't resolve as cleanly. NASA declined, for budget reasons, to manufacture extra-small space suits, effectively closing off spacewalks to the smallest women in the corps — a consequence whose ripple reached 2019, when the first all-female spacewalk was scrubbed because there weren't enough medium-sized suits available. The result was the same.

The First American Woman in Space Was Chosen by One Cell in a Spreadsheet

The selection of the first American woman in space came down to a single X in a spreadsheet cell — and that margin was almost never reached.

By early 1982, George Abbey had settled on Sally Ride for STS-7, a mission whose core task was delicate robotic arm work: deploying a free-flying satellite, hovering near it, then plucking it back out of orbit. Sally had mastered the arm, spent two missions as the voice relaying critical communications between Mission Control and the crew, and accumulated deeper overall systems knowledge than any other candidate. Abbey built a literal matrix — names down one side, skills across the top, X marks filling the cells — and submitted it to JSC director Chris Kraft. Kraft looked at the grid and said no. His instinct was Anna Fisher, a surgeon who generated magazine covers the way other people generated laundry. He felt at least two women ranked above Sally. Abbey went back to his office, tallied the Xs again, and returned with the same answer: Sally had one more mark than Judy Resnik, specifically in systems knowledge, and that was the margin. Kraft accepted it.

Running alongside that technical contest was a parallel one the institution was barely aware of conducting. From the moment the women arrived, the press sorted them by a different rubric entirely. Anna landed on the cover of Redbook before training had even begun. Kathy Sullivan, watching all of it, did the math out loud: the people making this choice were all men, she reasoned, and all other things being equal they would probably favor someone who already got on lots of covers. That calculation, she concluded, put her and Shannon Lucid at a structural disadvantage — not because of their work, but because of how the institution's gatekeepers saw the world.

A year later, at the pre-launch press conference for STS-7, a reporter from Time asked Sally how she responded when things went wrong in training — adding, almost as clarification: 'Do you weep?' Sally's expression answered before her voice did. Then she turned to the room and said, simply, 'Why doesn't anybody ask Rick those questions?' Commander Bob Crippen jumped in and volunteered that the commander weeps. The room laughed. But the question had already landed, and the laughter didn't quite cover what it revealed: that the country had accepted a woman could operate a robotic arm at the edge of space, but still wasn't sure she had the emotional architecture to handle a bad day at the office.

Even After She Got There, They Still Didn't Know What to Do With Her

Judy Resnik was floating in the mid-deck of Discovery, watching Hank Hartsfield hoist the IMAX camera to his shoulder to film a satellite drifting away from the orbiter, when a good chunk of her hair disappeared into the camera's drive belt. The belt cover had been left off. The mechanism ate steadily until her hair jammed the gears and tripped the circuit breaker. Her crewmates grabbed scissors and cut her free. Then Judy, still fuming, turned to Hank before he could reach the radio and told him — with a specificity that left no room for interpretation — that he would say nothing about her hair to Mission Control. Nothing. He would report a jammed camera and stop there. She made the same promise mandatory for the rest of the crew. They complied. Hank told Houston the mechanism had seized during filming. Nobody followed up.

The reason wasn't vanity. Judy had watched what happened to Sally Ride after STS-7, how a single image or offhand moment could be stripped of all context and reassembled into a statement about whether women belonged in space at all. Sally had handed a bouquet back to a protocol officer after her splashdown ceremony because she wanted her hands free. The press reconstructed it as a feminist manifesto — one wire service ran the headline "Ride Rejects Symbol of Femininity" and letters poured in for weeks, some praising her, some furious. If the story got out that the second American woman in space had jammed a million-dollar film camera with her hair, Judy knew exactly what the headline would not say: that she had also, on the same mission, successfully deployed a 102-foot solar array and guided her crew through a terrifying pad abort with her hand on the hatch. The hair was the detail the world would keep. So she sealed it.

Both incidents show the specific tax the Six were still paying long after they'd proven they could do the work. The competence was documented. The missions flew. The satellites deployed. But the symbolic weight each woman carried never actually decreased — it just changed shape. Sally's anxiety after STS-7 was severe enough that she eventually sought therapy, and at one point simply vanished to California for a week to avoid being booked on a television special. Rhea Seddon, on a later mission, improvised a satellite rescue with a bone saw, a sewing needle, and a strip of duct tape — and someone in Mission Control praised her as a good seamstress. Sally, standing nearby at the console, tapped him on the shoulder. The word, she said, was surgeon.

The Same System That Made Them Heroes Also Killed Judy Resnik

The same institutional tolerance that kept moving the goalposts for women also kept a known flaw flying until it killed seven people.

When engineers disassembled the solid rocket boosters after Judy's first flight on Discovery in 1984, they found something that had never appeared before: soot behind a primary O-ring, the thin rubber seal whose only job was to keep superheated gas from punching through the booster's casing. The seal had failed. Hot gases had breached it. A secondary O-ring had caught the leak, and everyone exhaled. Morton Thiokol, the contractor that built the boosters, reviewed the finding, noted that backup systems had functioned, and classified the anomaly as acceptable risk. Flights continued.

That is the same logic that had governed women's participation in the corps since 1978 — not overt hostility, just a practiced comfort with unresolved problems. Every prior compromise had been reclassified as manageable — the missing suits were a budget call, the O-ring soot was a backup-systems-held story. Each warning got reread as confirmation that the margins were sufficient.

They weren't. Eighteen months after Judy's first flight, she was sitting behind commander Dick Scobee on Challenger in freezing January air, cracking jokes over the intercom during the countdown, yelling 'COWABUNGA' when a technician asked for a comms check, genuinely relieved when the engines lit and held. Seventy-three seconds later, a primary O-ring on the right booster — stiffened by overnight temperatures that had dropped to twenty-four degrees — failed to seal. The crew cabin separated intact and fell for two and a half minutes before hitting the Atlantic. Investigators later found that three of the four recovered emergency air packs had been manually activated after the breakup. Someone in that falling cabin, probably more than one person, had been conscious and had reached for the switches. One of the packs was Mike Smith's, located on the back of his seat — reachable only by whoever sat behind him. Judy sat behind him.

The system had made Judy Resnik a hero by demanding she prove herself under every possible circumstance. It had asked her to be tougher than the men who doubted her, funnier than the ones who tested her, and more discreet than anyone should have to be about a jammed camera at forty-eight thousand feet. She cleared every bar. The system's other habit — the one where known problems got reclassified as tolerable until they weren't — she had no defense against. Nobody did.

The Problems the Six Fought Haven't Fully Gone Away — But Neither Have the Women They Inspired

Four decades after the Six arrived at JSC, NASA announced the first all-female spacewalk. Then cancelled it. The reason: the station had only one medium-sized suit available, and two medium-sized astronauts needed to go outside. A backup male crewmate in a large suit stepped in instead. The logistics finally aligned that October. The victory was real. So was the forty-year wait.

But the long tail belongs equally to the women themselves. When Sally Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, her partner of twenty-seven years, Tam O'Shaughnessy, posted the obituary on their shared company website. In it, she named herself Sally's partner — quietly, without press conference. The news spread anyway, making Sally the first known LGBTQ astronaut in history, a fact she had protected her whole career. Tam said the messages came from people she'd never met: strangers writing to say that seeing Sally named, finally and plainly, had given them the language or the courage to name themselves. Some said it changed their coming out entirely. A woman who had spent decades deflecting reporters asking whether she wept turned out, even in death, still to be showing people the door.

What Anna Fisher Was Really Doing in the Dark

The institution is still catching up. It cancelled its first all-female spacewalk in 2019 because nobody had bothered to build the right suits in the previous forty years. Sally Ride kept her private life sealed for twenty-seven years, and when it finally came out — after her death, in her obituary — people wrote in to say it changed something for them. The woman who spent her career deflecting questions about whether she wept turned out to be opening doors long after she'd stopped walking through any herself.

That's the long tail of showing up invisibly, in a program that never quite admitted you were there. You don't always live to see it land.