How NASA Chose Its First Woman In Space
In an exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming book,The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush traces how NASA picked Sally Ride, and why Ride’s struggle resonates today.
Ride monitoring control panels on the space shuttle’s flight deck.
Source: NASA
In early 1982, George Abbey, then NASA’s director of flight operations at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, had an important decision to make. NASA had already assigned astronauts to the first six flights of the newly operational space shuttle. For the next three, Abbey would be picking from among a group of about three dozen people the space agency had recruited a few years earlier. They called themselves the TFNGs, as in the military term “the f---ing new guy.” (The acronym hasn’t caught on like snafu or fubar.) Officially, the NASA recruits cleaned it up to the Thirty-Five New Guys.
Along with the usual military jet pilots, the trainees included doctors, engineers and scientists who could perform more specialized tasks. And the roster Abbey was reviewing looked more like America, too. The Thirty-Five New Guys included the first Black astronauts, the first Asian American astronaut—and the first six astronauts who weren’t guys. America was about to put its first woman in space.