Women’s advocate, pioneer at NASA
Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb, a pioneering female pilot and the first woman to pass NASA’s astronaut training, has died in Florida after a brief illness. She was 88.
Cobb was a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women tapped in the 1950s and early 1960s who completed the same physically demanding astronaut training as male candidates. But Cobb never went into space — NASA halted the program before any of those women could fly.
She nonetheless remained a steadfast advocate for women pilots throughout her lifetime, even taking on revered Mercury 7 astronaut John Glenn in Congress to fight for a woman’s right to be an astronaut. When that didn’t work, she changed course, spending much of her
life as a missionary pilot in the Amazon jungle, delivering medicine, food and clothing to isolated regions. The work earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1981.
“Gone, but never forgotten,” The Oklahoma Hall of Fame at Gaylord-Pickens Museum tweeted Thursday morning. “A true pioneer, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) advocate & role model. You will be missed, Jerrie!”
She died on March 18, according to a statement from her family.
“After living 66 adventure filled years as a pilot and advocate for female pilots, and sharing over 50 years of her life with the indigenous Indian tribes of the Amazon, Jerrie’s humble smile and sky-blue eyes live on in our hearts,” the statement read. “It is fitting that Jerrie was born in, and would leave us in, Woman’s History Month.”
News of her death comes just one day after NASA announced that astronaut Christina Koch will make the longest female spaceflight in history, at 328 days.
The Mercury 13
Cobb, an Oklahoma native, was 12 years old when she learned to fly, earning her pilot’s license at 16.
By 28, she had logged 7,000 hours in the cockpit — more than Glenn. And that’s when she was approached in September 1959 by pioneering research scientist Randy Lovelace about taking the space stress test.
Lovelace helped NASA choose the first class of astronauts and thought that women would be good candidates: They were lighter, shorter, more resistant to radiation and could handle pain, heat, cold and loneliness better than men.
But the testing had to be done in secret. Women were not allowed to be military test pilots — a requirement of astronaut candidates at the time.
After Cobb was tapped by Lovelace, a dozen more women were chosen, but NASA shut the program down when they learned of it. Cobb and her female colleagues took their fight to Congress in 1962.
“As pilots, we fly and share mutual respect with male pilots in the primarily man’s world of aviation,” Cobb told Congressional members at the time. “We see, only, a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination . ... There are sound medical and scientific reasons for using women in space.”
But Glenn stood in their way, telling Congress that “the fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova rocketed into space the following year. It would be another two decades before American women finally got their chance, when Sally Ride strapped into the Space Shuttle Challenger in June 1983. Ride died in 2012.
Cobb went on to fly humanitarian aid missions in the Amazon
jungle, a calling she followed for decades.
“In what would perhaps become her greatest contribution to humanity, she flew dangerous humanitarian aid missions serving the indigenous people of the Amazon, discovering tribes of Indians never before known to man and helping them sustain life,” her family wrote. “Even in the Amazon she faced gender discrimination in trying to fly for humanitarian aid groups.”
For this work, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1981 and honored by the governments of Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. She received the Bishop Wright Air Industry Award for “Humanitarian Contributions to Modern Aviation.”
‘Opening the door for us’
But she stayed in tune with the fate of female astronauts at the space agency she dreamed of joining.
When NASA decided to allow Glenn in 1998 to fly at age 77, Cobb and others across the nation fought for Cobb to have a chance as well. She was never allowed the chance.
“So sad to hear of the passing of #JerrieCobb,” said Ellen Stofan, the John and Adrienne Mars director at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “She should have gone to space, but turned her life into one of service with grace.”
Anna Fisher, one of the first six women tapped by NASA in 1978 to join the astronaut corps, told the Houston Chronicle in June that she feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the Mercury 13 — and an overwhelming sense of guilt.
“They worked so hard, and they wanted it so badly, and then we came along and caught the wave at just the right time when society was changing,” said Fisher, who flew on the space shuttle just once, in 1984. “I felt so grateful to them and sad, in a way, that they weren’t able to achieve their dream. But they did, in a way, by opening the door for us.”