In 1960 and 1961, thirteen American women pilots went through the same punishing medical tests used to pick the Mercury Seven astronauts. They swallowed rubber tubes, had ice water poured into their ears and pedalled weighted bicycles to exhaustion. They passed. Not one of them was ever allowed anywhere near a NASA spacecraft.

The press later named them the Mercury 13. In July 2026 the last of them, Wally Funk, died in Texas at 87, five years after finally flying to space on a private rocket at the age of 82. Their story is one of the great "what ifs" of the space race.

A doctor's private experiment

The tests were not a NASA programme. They were the work of Dr. William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace II, whose clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had examined the finalists for the Mercury Seven and who helped develop NASA's astronaut medical tests. In 1960, together with US Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger, he invited a record-setting pilot named Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb to take the same examinations.

Cobb had about 7,000 flying hours and a light-aircraft altitude record of 37,010 feet. She passed, and Lovelace announced her results at a space medicine symposium in Stockholm in August 1960. She went on to become the first American woman to pass all three phases of testing, ranking in the top 2 percent of all candidates of either sex.

Lovelace widened the programme. About 25 women pilots, many recruited through the Ninety-Nines, were invited; 19 were tested at the clinic by the summer of 1961, and 13 passed Phase I. Aviator Jacqueline Cochran and her husband paid for the testing. The tests included X-rays, swallowing a rubber tube to measure stomach acid, electric shocks to test nerve reflexes, ice water in the ears to induce vertigo and exhaustion runs on weighted stationary bicycles.

Cancelled by telegram

The next stage was to be at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. A few days before the women were due to report, telegrams cancelled it. Without an official NASA request, the US Navy would not allow its facilities to be used for an unofficial project, and NASA was not asking.

Cobb and Jane "Janey" Hart, a pilot and the wife of Senator Philip Hart, took the fight to Washington. In July 1962 a special House subcommittee held two days of hearings on whether women should be astronauts.

NASA's George Low and the astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified that NASA's requirements, a military jet test pilot background and an engineering degree, excluded women. Glenn conceded he had joined Project Mercury without the required degree. The subcommittee was sympathetic and did nothing.

Space historian Amy Shira Teitel on NASA, politics and the Mercury 13 (TEDx).

Tereshkova, Ride and the long wait

In June 1963 the Soviet Union put Valentina Tereshkova into orbit aboard Vostok 6, the first woman in space. NASA did not select its first women astronaut candidates until 1978, and Sally Ride flew in 1983. When Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle, on STS-63 in February 1995, she invited seven of the Mercury 13 women to watch her launch.

Wally Funk was the youngest of the group, only 21 when she volunteered in 1961. She went on to become the National Transportation Safety Board's first female air safety investigator, and she never stopped wanting to go to space. On 20 July 2021 she finally did, aboard Blue Origin's first crewed New Shepard flight from west Texas, alongside Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. At 82 she was, at the time, the oldest person ever to fly to space.

Funk died in Grapevine, Texas, in July 2026. With her, the last of the thirteen women who passed the astronaut tests in 1961 is gone, and so is the last living link to the space programme America almost had.

Jerrie Cobb on the need to send women to space, in a 1963 CBC interview.

Reuters on Wally Funk joining Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's first crewed flight in 2021.

Sources: NASA History (Margaret Weitekamp), NASA Glenn Research Center, Library of Congress, JSTOR Daily, History.com, collectSPACE, NBC News, Wikipedia