But the 1950s weren’t kind to women looking for a career in aviation: flight attendants and other “women-only” roles were pretty much it. Not being ready to give up on her dreams, she took a job at the Miami airport in Florida where she met a former World War II pilot, Jack Ford, who had a service that ferried aircrafts all around the world. It wasn’t long before she talked him into a job, and not only proved herself up to the challenge, but distinguished herself as one of the top pilots of performance aircraft of the 1950s. She became the first woman to fly in the Paris Air show, after which she was named Pilot of the Year. Shortly thereafter, she set aviation world records for the following:

the world light plane speed record (set in 1959),

the world record for nonstop long-distance flight (also 1959), and

the world altitude record for lightweight aircraft of 37,010 ft (1960), breaking her own, earlier record from 1957.

It was no surprise, then, that she received a special invitation to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, NM.

Image source unknown.

And for those of you who don’t know, the Lovelace Clinic was the very location where the applicants for the very first astronauts reported for training, testing and, eventually, selection. The original NASA astronaut stipulation was that the applicants needed to be military test pilots, which excluded women. There were originally 508 applicants, of which 110 were invited for interviews. The Lovelace Clinic was where a series of physical and mental tests — developed by William Randolph Lovelace II — were performed on the candidates to determine their fitness for space. The first crew, the aforementioned Mercury 7, were chosen from among the top performers.

But about a year later, Lovelace became curious about how women would perform on this same test, and whether they would, perhaps, be equally well-suited for space?

Thirteen American women — today known as the Mercury 13 — were selected to participate in the three phases of testing. Jerrie Cobb was the only one who passed them all. Not only did she pass, her scores placed her in the top 2% of all candidates, meaning that if the same criteria that were applied to the Mercury 7 were applied to her as well, she would have been selected. But without official NASA backing, the testing and training programs for women were shut down.

In 1963, Cobb went to Washington DC to testify at a congressional hearing about women astronauts. Despite having more than 7,000 hours of flight experience, she was not an official military test pilot, and only one of her flights took place in a jet aircraft; all the rest were in propellor-powered planes, of which she had flown sixty-four different types at the time. Despite the testimony of many advocating that women were just as fit for spaceflight as men, including John Glenn, who stated,

[M]en go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes […] The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.

Despite the fact that exceptions had been made for other astronauts who didn’t meet all the prerequisite requirements (including Glenn himself), one was not granted for Cobb. A letter was drafted that questioned the requirements and made it as far as (then Vice-President) Lyndon Johnson’s desk, but was never sent to NASA. Later that year, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space for the USSR. Meanwhile, NASA wouldn’t open its astronaut ranks to women until 1978.

After working as a consultant for NASA for a brief time, Cobb quit, feeling that she was having no impact at all and that she wasn’t in the one place she needed to be the most: the skies. She scrounged up an old twin-engine Aero Commander, and spent the next thirty years flying peaceful supply missions to South America, even being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1981 for her humanitarian efforts. She has been honored by the governments of five countries for her work: Brazil, France, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.