People · Betty Skelton · Chapter 8 of 9

The Girl Astronaut

San Antonio, Texas — 1959

In April 1959, NASA introduces the Mercury Seven — the first American astronaut corps, seven military test pilots chosen from a much larger field, about to become the most famous men in the country. Look magazine, sensing a story nobody else is asking, wants to know something more provocative: could a woman have qualified? Their answer is to find out directly. They select Betty Skelton — already thirty-three, already the most decorated woman in American speed sports, and, not incidentally, a face the public already half-recognizes — and arrange for her to undergo the same battery of physical and psychological tests given to the Mercury astronaut candidates, administered at an Air Force base in San Antonio.

It is important to be precise about what this is and isn't. Skelton is not a NASA astronaut candidate; there is, in 1959, no women's astronaut program for her to be a candidate in. This is a magazine assignment — an editorial stunt, cannily conceived, using a genuinely exceptional pilot to test a genuinely interesting question. But the testing itself is not staged. The centrifuge runs, the isolation chambers, the physical endurance evaluations, the psychological screening — all of it is the real Mercury battery, and Skelton goes through it for real.

“Should a Girl Be First in Space?” — Look magazine's fall 1959 headline on Skelton's testing

Look publishes the results that fall under exactly that question, and puts Skelton on the cover of its February 2, 1960 issue. The story becomes a genuine sensation — not because it proves anything NASA is obligated to act on, but because it demonstrates, publicly and with real data, that a civilian woman could pass the same tests as the military's handpicked best.

“Eight”

The most telling detail of the whole episode isn't the test scores. It's how the actual Mercury Seven respond to her. Rather than treating the stunt as a publicity sideshow beneath them, the astronauts come to respect Skelton enough that they informally adopt her as one of their own — nicknaming her “eight,” an honorary eighth member of a program that, on paper, has no room for her at all. For men who have every professional reason to be territorial about the most exclusive flying job in American history, it's a remarkable gesture, and it says as much about her credibility among actual test pilots as any trophy on her shelf.

Skelton's testing happens a few months before the more formally organized Lovelace Woman in Space Program — the effort, running from February 1960 through July 1961, in which thirteen women (later remembered as the “Mercury 13”) would undergo similar medical screening at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque and pass it in numbers that embarrassed the very idea that women couldn't handle spaceflight. Skelton is not one of the thirteen — her test came earlier, and through a different door — but she is, in every sense that matters, part of the same overlooked story: proof, years before NASA would act on it, that the only thing standing between American women and the astronaut corps was a decision nobody in charge was willing to make.