When NASA first planned to put people in space, they believed that the best candidates would be pilots, submarine crews or members of expeditions to the Antarctic or Arctic areas.

General Don Flickinger invited Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb, known as an accomplished pilot, to undergo the same rigorous challenges as the men.

Lovelace announced her success to the public at the second International Symposium on Submarine and Space Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden in August 1960.

[6][full citation needed] Cobb's testing was reported publicly via the Associated Press (AP) newswire and articles appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times as well as Life magazine.

Lovelace and Cobb recruited 24 more women to take the tests, financed by the husband of world-renowned aviator Jacqueline Cochran.

All total, thirteen women, including Cobb, passed the same tests that had been used to vet the Project Mercury astronaut candidates for NASA.

[1] This group of women, whom Jerrie Cobb called the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs), accepted the challenge to be tested for a research program.

[8]: 250–251 Wally Funk wrote an article saying that, given the isolation of the testing, with each woman going through the examination alone or at most in a pair, not all of the women candidates knew each other throughout their years of preparation.

These ranged from typical X-rays and general body physicals to the atypical; for instance, the women had to swallow a rubber tube in order to test the level of their stomach acids.

[12] In the end, thirteen women passed the same Phase I physical examinations that the Lovelace Foundation had developed as part of NASA's astronaut selection process.

Once Cobb had passed the Phase III tests (advanced aeromedical examinations using military equipment and jet aircraft), the group prepared to gather in Pensacola, Florida at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine to follow suit.

Finally, on 17 and 18 July 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso (D-NY) convened public hearings before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics.

[16] Significantly, the hearings investigated the possibility of gender discrimination two years before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that made such actions illegal.

She proposed a project with a large group of women, and expected a significant amount to drop out due to reasons like "marriage, childbirth, and other causes".

Historian Margaret Weitekamp discovered the letter in the late 1990s in the handwriting file of Johnson's Vice Presidential papers held in Austin, Texas and revealed its existence in her dissertation and book on the Lovelace women.

Pilot certification in the United States rates in 1960 were 244,662 males compared to only 4218 females, providing a much larger pool to draw from candidate wise.

The consensus sought jet test pilots from the military, a field where women were not allowed at the time, and by default excluded from consideration.

However, NASA also required potential astronauts to hold college degrees – a qualification that John Glenn of the Mercury 7 group did not possess.

[24] Some obvious concerns for NASA during the space race included, but were not limited to, oxygen consumption and weight for the drag effect on takeoff.

[25] It was not until 1972 that an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally granted women legal assistance for entering the realm of space.

[15] Lovelace's privately funded women's testing project received renewed media attention when Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963.

On June 17, 1963 New York Times published Jerrie Cobb's comments following the Soviet launch, saying it was "a shame that since we are eventually going to put a woman into space, we didn't go ahead and do it first.

The media often portrayed the women as unqualified candidates due what was called their frail and emotional structure that implied that they could not undergo the severity that men do.

[24] A scientific writer of The Dallas Times Herald went so far as to plead with Mr. Vice President Johnson to allow women to "wear pants and shoot pool, but please do not let them into space.

She was inspired while she was a child by the Mercury astronauts and by the time she was in high school and college, more opportunities were opening up for women who wanted a part in aviation.

Anne McClain and Christina Koch were supposed to make history that day, but complications arose when there was a lack of spacesuit availability.

The long-delayed first all-female spacewalk finally occurred on October 18, 2019, with Koch and Jessica Meir performing the task, and astronaut Stephanie Wilson acting as Capcom.