NASA’s sexism couldn’t keep the first women astronauts from taking off

nypost.com:

“The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts” (Scribner).“Articles highlighted her ‘plump figure’ and her infrequent application of lipstick,” she writes.

Chris Kraft, a NASA flight director who would become the head of the Manned Spacecraft Center, described Tereshkova as “an absolute basket case when she was in orbit” and “nothing but hysterical.”Such responses, argues Grush, were typical of NASA’s reluctance to consider women for their astronaut training scheme.

Indeed, the very idea that women could ever become astronauts was seen not just as unlikely but even comical.In 1963, Robert Voas, NASA’s resident astronaut trainer, joked that having women onboard spacecraft would help to reduce the weight of the spacecraft but “only if they left their purses behind.”His colleague Randy Lovelace, NASA’s Director of Space Medicine, meanwhile, could see women in space, but only as secretaries on space stations.One article, published by the Associated Press, even argued that women would be needed on long space trips as “the question of man’s sexual needs on flights lasting two or three years has to be considered.”Essentially, Grush writes, “The only way people could conceive of women going into space was if they provided some kind of release or assistance for the male crewmates.”By the mid-1970s, however, questions were being asked of NASA and its discriminatory recruitment process.

In 1978, they relaxed their rules for applicants and allowed women and those without military test pilot experience. On January 18, 1978, NASA announced the 35 new astronauts that would form NASA Astronaut Group 8.