Mercury 13

Woman in Space Program

Seven surviving FLATs attending the STS-63 launch (1995). (From left to right: Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Sloan Truhill, Sarah Ratley, Myrtle Cagle, and Bernice Steadman.)
Program overview
Country	United States
Organization	Privately funded program
Purpose	Medical and physiological astronaut testing
Status	Discontinued
Program history
Duration	1959–1962

The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who in 1959-60 took part in a privately funded research program run by physician William Randolph Lovelace II, a private contractor to NASA, which aimed to test and screen the women for spaceflight. The first participant, pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb helped Lovelace identify and recruit the others. The participants successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury. While Lovelace called the project Woman in Space Program,^[1] the thirteen women later became known as the "Mercury 13"— a term coined in 1995 as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The Mercury 13 were not allowed into the astronaut program, never trained as a group, and did not fly into space.

In the 1960's some of the women were among those who lobbied the White House and Congress to include women in the astronaut program. In 1963, Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for LIFE magazine publicizing the women and criticizing NASA for its failure to include women in the astronaut program.^[2] One of the thirteen, Wally Funk, flew aboard the sub-orbital Blue Origin New Shepard 4 on the 20 July, 2021 Flight 16, making her the (then) oldest person to go into space at age 82 (Ed Dwight flew into space at the age of 90 in 2024).^[3]

The story of these women has been retold in books, exhibits, and movies, including the 2018 Netflix-produced documentary Mercury 13.