America’s first female astronaut candidate
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — America’s first female astronaut candidate, pilot Jerrie Cobb, who pushed for equality in space but never reached its heights, has died.
Ms. Cobb died in Florida at age 88 on March 18 following a brief illness. News of her death came Thursday from journalist Miles O’Brien, serving as a family spokesman.
In 1961, Ms. Cobb became the first woman to pass astronaut testing. Altogether, 13 women passed the arduous physical testing and became known as the Mercury 13. But NASA already had its Mercury 7 astronauts, all jet test pilots and all military men.
None of the Mercury 13 ever reached space, despite Ms. Cobb’s testimony in 1962 before a congressional panel.
“We seek, only, a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination,” she told a special House subcommittee on the selection of astronauts.
Instead of making her an astronaut, NASA tapped her as a consultant to talk up the space program. She was dismissed one week after commenting: “I’m the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency.”
She wrote in her 1997 autobiography “Jerrie Cobb, Solo Pilot,” “My country, my culture, was not ready to allow a woman to fly in space.”
Ms. Cobb served for decades as a humanitarian aid pilot in the Amazon jungle.
The Soviet Union ended up putting the first woman into space in 1963: Valentina Tereshkova. NASA didn’t fly a woman in space — Sally Ride — until 1983.
Ms. Cobb and other surviving members of the Mercury 13 attended the 1995 shuttle launch of Eileen Collins, NASA’s first female space pilot.
Still hopeful, Ms. Cobb emerged in 1998 to make another pitch for space as NASA prepared to launch Mercury astronaut John Glenn — the first American to orbit the world — on shuttle Discovery at age 77.
Ms. Cobb maintained that the geriatric space study should also include an older woman. It didn’t. NASA never flew another elderly person in space, male or female.
Geraldyn Cobb was born on March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma, the second daughter of a military pilot and his wife. She flew her father’s open cockpit Waco biplane at age 12 and got her private pilot’s license four years later.