Riding Rockets

The West Point of my era was another all-male bastion. Cadets joked that the mortar in the granite walls was actually semen. My Company K-1 marching song included the lyrics “We make the cum fly.” West Pointers of my era looked at women with the same leering eye as a convicted felon doing thirty to life. Flirtation Walk, so romantically depicted in the movies, was littered with more used rubber than a Firestone test track. My West Point experience reinforced what Catholicism had taught me—women were nothing more than sex objects.

The USAF officer corps that I entered in 1967 was also a male organization. I never encountered a female flyer. Strippers entertained us at the O’club on Wednesday and Friday nights. Military flyers saw women only as receptacles. If anyone from my era says otherwise, they must be running for Congress. Women may be from Venus and normal men may be from Mars, but military flyers are from the planetARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (AD).

When I walked into the astronaut office on day one, I didn’t have the slightest sense of how to incorporate the six TFNG females into my work life. My behavior and vocabulary around them was exactly as it was around men. I recall an early incident of telling a joke to a TFNG audience including Sally Ride that had the wordtits in it. Sally hardly said another word to me for the next ten years. But, at the time, I didn’t have a clue. I had no other experiences to draw upon. Professional women were as unknown and unknowable to me as sea life at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

I wasn’t the only one afflicted with an atrophied brain when it came to interacting with the women. On one occasion a few of the men found a live grass snake near the gym. They entered the ladies’ locker room and shoved the slithering creature into Judy Resnik’s purse. After she returned from her run, every man present gathered at the locker room door giggling like middle-schoolers. They heard the shower run, stop, then the shower door open. A few minutes later a scream right out of the moviePsycho echoed through the gym. The guilty parties evaporated faster than you could say “Tailhook.”

A navy TFNG probably best summarized the military male attitude about women. We were standing outside Sally Ride’s office. She was absent and I took the opportunity to point out the bumper sticker on the front of her desk. It read, “A woman’s place is in the cockpit.” My Top Gun companion looked at the sticker and chuckled. “A womanis a COCK pit.” That was exactly how most of the military astronauts saw women in general and good-looking women in particular. We were flying blind when it came to working with professional women. And now, we were thrown into a group of women who weren’t just professional. They were pioneers. They would be carrying the banner of feminism into the final frontier.

Who were these alien creatures we confronted?

Judy Resnik, twenty-eight, hometown Akron, Ohio, had a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland and was a classical pianist. She had been married briefly and was divorced. Prior to selection she had been working with the Xerox Corporation. Judy and I would fly our rookie mission together, an experience that would make us close friends. She would die onChallenger, her second mission.

Rhea Seddon was a thirty-year-old unmarried surgeon from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Besides being easy on the eye, she had an alluring Tennessee accent as smooth as Wild Turkey. She was a Berkeley graduate and held a doctorate in medicine from the University of Tennessee.

Anna Fisher, twenty-eight, was another very attractive medical doctor. She was born in New York City but called San Pedro, California, her hometown. She held a doctorate in medicine and a master’s in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. When Anna entered NASA she was married to another doctor, Bill Fisher, who would later be selected as an astronaut in the class of 1980. Anna would have her first baby a few years after her TFNG selection and would become the first mother to fly in space.

Sally Ride was a twenty-six-year-old physicist PhD from Stanford University. She was also a superb tennis player, having achieved national ranking on the junior circuit. At the time of her TFNG selection she was unmarried but would later marry and divorce Steve Hawley, another TFNG. Her hometown was Los Angeles, California.

Kathy Sullivan, twenty-six, was unmarried and held a doctorate in geology from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Kathy would later become the first American woman to do a spacewalk. Her hometown was Woodland Hills, California.