A Cosmos of their Own
Historian, author and professor Martha Ackmann to speak on island about a secret, 1960s NASA program that tested potential female astronauts
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
When the national media recently went crazy over the story of a female astronaut who drove cross country to confront a romantic rival, national news big wigs, including Anderson Cooper, called historian Martha Ackmann with invitations to be a talking head on their shows. That's because Ackmann, who will come to Nantucket to speak this week, is the presiding national expert on the history of women in space. In 2003, Ackmann published "Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space." The book chronicles the secret group of female astronauts NASA tested for space travel in the 1960s, only to cancel the program - partially because the women scored too well.

Martha Ackermann, author of "The Mercury 13" (2005). The book relates the story of 13 female astronauts trained secretly by NASA during the Mercury space progrm.

(It should be noted that Ackmann declined the invitation to speak with Cooper because the story, which she described as "just very sad," had become too sensationalized by that point, she said.)

"Publisher's Weekly" called Ackmann's prose "dynamic" and described "Mercury 13" as an "utterly compelling … narrative of [these women's] dedication … and sacrifice in an attempt to aid the nation in the space race against the Soviets and to experience the thrill of space flight."

"They took the same physical tests as the Mercury Project astronauts, the same tests as John Glenn," said Ackmann, who originally learned about the women from a single sentence in a newspaper article printed in the late 1990s.

"I was reading an article in a Boston paper about John Glenn going up for the second time, and way down in something like the ninth paragraph, I saw a mention of the women NASA secretly tested for the Mercury program," Ackmann remembered. "This made me do a double take, because I grew up in St. Louis in the 1960s. And the McDonnell Douglas aerospace program, which was located in St. Louis, got the contract for the Mercury space capsule. Literally every dad on my block worked for McDonnell Douglas, so I didn't think there was anything this big that I wouldn't have known about the Mercury program."

A Gender Studies faculty member at Mount Holyoke, commentator for NPR and national columnist, Ackmann began researching the Mercury 13 soon after this news bit caught her attention. She became acquainted with the 10 surviving members of the Mercury 13, and with the family members of the three who were deceased. Ackmann meant initially to turn the story into a magazine article or series of columns.

"Then, in 1999, when Eileen Collins was the first woman to make commander of a space mission, Eileen invited the Mercury 13 women to the launch because she wanted them to witness what they were never able to do. And the Mercury 13 called me to invite me to witness the moment. I realized then that this story was more than a magazine piece," said Ackmann, who ended the book with this moment, attending the launch in 1999.

"What struck me about these women was their remarkable resilience," Ackmann said. "They went though an arduous program, and then experienced huge disappointment when NASA yanked it. But they were resilient. These women had intense pride, but they also didn't let the disappointment grind them down. They also had great senses of humor."

Ackmann also noted the women's competitive spirit, which remained even as the eldest was 85 and the youngest 65. "They still get together, and when they do, they are still competitive about physical things. It's that kind of competitive spirit typically found in people like test pilots."

A Mount Holyoke alumna, Atheneum Youth Librarian Maggie Head invited Ackmann to speak this weekend after meeting her last year at a college talk on island. Ackmann is also a longtime friend of Maria Mitchell Executive Director Janet Schulte, who will introduce the author. But the introduction makes sense on greater grounds than the women's friendship. Schulte's organization represents the fortitude and the defiance that female scientists have had to engender over the decades in order to make their contributions known. "There is a kind of a connection between Maria Mitchell looking up into the night sky and these women

trying to go up in them," Schulte said. I
  When: Sunday, March 31, 7 p.m.
  Where: Nantucket Atheneum (Great
      Hall), 1 India Street
  Cost: Free
  For more information,
      please call 228-1110.
MARTHA   ACKERMANN