Women space pioneers topic of movie

‘Mercury 13’ is part of Salon Series

MOSES LAKE — A movie that tells the story of an experiment to see if women were ready for spaceflight will be presented at 3 p.m. tomorrow at the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center. Admission to “Mercury 13” is free. The museum is located at 401 S. Balsam St.

The 13 women who became the Mercury 13 were selected from a larger group of women who were invited to apply at the dawn of the Space Age for a private program to test their ability for space flight.

It was the early 1960s, and space travel was a completely unknown quantity; because it was completely experimental, the candidate pool for the U.S. space program was limited to military test pilots — all of them men.

But a doctor involved with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was thinking about the long term. William Lovelace envisioned large space stations in Earth orbit, populated by women as well as men. That led him to start a program to see if women could meet the qualifications for space flight. “Women in Space,” as it was called, was a private effort and never part of the official space program.

More than 700 women applied; 25 made the cut. Only those with more than 1,000 hours of flight experience were considered. Some were aviation pioneers, others were World War II veterans with experience in the WASP program, women who ferried military planes across the country. Some were flight instructors, others had commercial ratings.

Thirteen of the women passed the physical tests — in some areas doing better than the men. But there was only room for seven astronauts in the original Mercury program, and none of them were women. Nor was there any room for women in the Gemini and Apollo programs that followed.

Because of the way the testing was conducted, the women never knew how many actually met the standard. The 13 women who met the qualifications didn’t learn the whole story until the early 1990s.

“Mercury 13” is part of the museum’s Salon Series, which hosts speakers, many of them local, on a variety of topics. Wednesday’s showing runs from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the Moses Lake Civic Center Auditorium. Call 509-764-3830 for information.