The Mercury 13: The Women Who Passed NASA’s Tests and Got Benched for 60 Years

In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. NASA was moving fast. But at the same time, a private testing program was quietly proving that women could handle the same brutal physical and psychological stress as the Mercury 7 astronauts. The program was run by Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II, a NASA consultant. The first candidate was Jerrie Cobb, a record-setting pilot with more than 10,000 flight hours. She didn’t just pass. She crushed it.

The tests were not a joke. Cobb and the other women went through isolation tanks, sensory deprivation, spinning chairs, X-rays, endurance bikes, and pain tests. They had water shot into their ears to mess with their balance. They swallowed tubes. They were pushed until their bodies and minds hit limits. Lovelace wanted to see if women could be astronauts. The answer was yes. Cobb passed all three phases. That got attention. More women were invited. Twenty-five showed up. Thirteen passed the same battery. They became known later as the Mercury 13.

These weren’t random people. They were experienced pilots. Some had more flight hours than the male astronauts. Jerrie Cobb had thousands. Wally Funk was a young flight instructor who would go on to log nearly 20,000 hours. Janey Hart was a mother of eight and a helicopter pilot. They were smart, tough, and competitive. What they didn’t have was a path. NASA never officially sponsored the program. The Navy wouldn’t provide jets for their next phase of training. Without military test pilot experience, they couldn’t meet NASA’s astronaut requirements. But the military wouldn’t train women as test pilots. It was a closed loop.

In 1962, Cobb and Hart testified before a congressional subcommittee. They argued that women should be allowed to compete. NASA officials said astronauts needed engineering degrees and jet test pilot time. That sounded reasonable until you looked at who was allowed to get those credentials. Women were barred from the pipeline. John Glenn testified that the social order was a factor. He said men go out and fight wars and fly airplanes. The committee didn’t open the door. The message was clear: women could be test subjects but not astronauts. The program died. The women went home with test results and no mission.

The name Mercury 13 came later. At the time, they were just women who had been tested and then ignored. Some kept flying. Some became doctors, scientists, and teachers. Wally Funk kept pushing. She applied to NASA. She got rejected. She became an FAA inspector and an NTSB investigator. She taught thousands of students. She never stopped flying. She also never stopped wanting space. For decades, she was the youngest Mercury 13 member and the one most likely to still get a shot.

That shot came in 2021. Blue Origin flew Funk on New Shepard when she was 82 years old. The flight lasted about ten minutes. It wasn’t NASA. It wasn’t the Mercury program. But it was space. She became the oldest person to fly to space at the time. The other Mercury 13 women mostly didn’t live to see it. Jerrie Cobb died in 2019. She never flew to space. That’s the gut punch. The woman who passed every test never got the ride.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. That was 22 years after Cobb’s tests. Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle in 1995 and the first to command one in 1999. Today women are mission commanders, space station residents, and commercial astronauts. The Mercury 13 didn’t fail. The system failed them. They proved the talent was there. The institutions just weren’t ready to use it.

If you care about the future of space travel, remember that progress isn’t automatic. It takes people who force the issue. The Mercury 13 forced it. They got benched. Wally Funk waited sixty years and still got her ride. That’s not just a cool footnote. It’s a reminder that space should be about who can do the job. The Mercury 13 could do the job. They just weren’t allowed to try.