Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [24]
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.
Shannon Lucid was from Bethany, Oklahoma, and had a cement-thick Sooner accent. I once heard her speaking with Apollo astronaut and fellow Okie, Tom Stafford, and wondered if they were speaking Klingon. At thirty-five, Shannon was the oldest TFNG female and the only mother (three children) at the time of her selection. She held a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma.
All of these women were feminists in the sense they were out to prove they were as good as any male astronaut. Only Sally Ride struck me as an activist, a woman bent on making a political statement as opposed to a personal one. She seemed to view the world through NOW prescription