Fighting for Space by Amy Shira Teitel

Author:Amy Shira Teitel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

On a Wednesday nearly a month after the world learned Jerrie had taken the astronauts’ medical tests at the Lovelace Clinic, she left work at noon. No one at Aero Design imagined that she was doing anything more interesting than her routine physical exams to maintain her advanced pilot ratings. Only Tom Harris knew that she was off to begin her psychiatric evaluation.

Everyone involved with the Mercury astronauts’ selection knew there was more to being an astronaut than physical fitness. Astronauts needed mental fortitude, too. The same way no one knew what would happen to a human body in space, there were some questions about what would happen to an astronaut mentally and emotionally when seeing the Earth from orbit for the first time. For the men, this testing had been done at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, but the air force had no operational need for a woman, especially a civilian woman, taking up time in a military laboratory. So Jerrie had taken it upon herself to find comparable testing.

Her searching uncovered Dr. Jay Talmadge Shurley at the Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Hospital. Jay Shurley, founder and director of the hospital’s behavioral science laboratory and professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Oklahoma’s College of Medicine, had been interested in the question of astronaut psychology since reading about the Mercury astronauts’ testing. Specifically, he was interested in how sensory isolation on Earth could approximate spaceflight. He hadn’t thought too highly of the men’s isolation test; sitting in a dark room at a writing desk for a couple of hours was, in his professional opinion, a poor approximation of the probable emotional stresses of flying in space. Out of curiosity, he’d developed a water flotation tank that he thought would create a more complete isolation experience and more accurately test a candidate’s mental fortitude for something as isolating as spaceflight. When Jerrie asked whether he would be willing to run some psychological exams on women pilots, giving him a chance to gather data in his tank, his own medical curiosity was piqued. After consulting with Randy Lovelace, Jay Shurley consented to run some psychological tests for the women who went through the medical checks at the Lovelace Clinic, starting with Jerrie.

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