Jerrie Cobb Passed the Mercury Astronaut Tests in 1960. NASA Never Had a Seat for Her, Because She Had Never Been Allowed to Apply.

On February 15, 1960, a 28-year-old pilot from Oklahoma walked into a private clinic in Albuquerque and was logged as “unit one, female.” Over the following days, doctors ran her through the same battery of tests that had picked America’s first seven astronauts.

Her name was Jerrie Cobb, and she passed. She went on to clear every phase of the screening, testify before Congress and lend her name to a group later called the Mercury 13.

She never went to space. The usual explanation is that NASA tested her and turned her down. The record says something stranger: NASA never tested her at all, and its rules had shut her out before the first test began.

Who Was Jerrie Cobb?

Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb (1931 to 2019) was an American record-setting pilot and the first woman to pass all three phases of the Mercury astronaut screening. She set three world aviation records in an Aero Commander and was the first woman to fly at the Paris Air Show.

After the astronaut door closed, she spent decades as a solo humanitarian pilot in the Amazon, work that earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1981. She died in Florida on March 18, 2019, at 88.

A Pilot Before She Could Drive

Cobb was born on March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma. Her father, a pilot, took her up in his open-cockpit Waco biplane when she was 12.

At 16 she was barnstorming across the Great Plains in a Piper J-3 Cub, and she held her private pilot’s license by the same age. She earned her commercial license on her 18th birthday.

To buy her own airplane, a surplus World War II Fairchild PT-23, she played semiprofessional softball for the Oklahoma City Queens. With male pilots home from the war and taking the good jobs, she took what was left: pipeline patrol and crop dusting.

From 1953 she ferried war-surplus aircraft to foreign air forces, including Peru’s, and was once arrested on suspicion of espionage at a fueling stop in Ecuador. She added multi-engine, instrument, instructor and airline transport ratings along the way.

Three World Records in an Aero Commander

By the late 1950s Cobb was a pilot and manager at Aero Design and Engineering Company, the maker of the Aero Commander twin. It made her one of very few women executives in aviation.

In company airplanes she set a world record for nonstop long-distance flight in 1959 and a world light-plane speed record the same year. In 1960 she took a lightweight aircraft to 37,010 feet (11,280 m), a world altitude record for its class.

The National Pilots Association named her its 1959 Pilot of the Year. Around the same time, on a Florida beach, she met two men who were about to change her life.

The Tests She Passed

The two men were Brigadier General Donald Flickinger, an Air Force aerospace medicine leader, and Dr. Randy Lovelace. Lovelace chaired NASA’s Life Sciences Committee and had run the physical tests for the Mercury Seven at his clinic in Albuquerque.

Lovelace wanted to know whether women could handle spaceflight. Women are generally lighter and eat less, which mattered on a rocket where every pound cost fuel, so he wanted data rather than opinions.

Cobb was his first subject. Over a few days he ran her through 75 tests, from liver function and night vision to vertigo susceptibility, and she needed less oxygen than the average male astronaut.

Lovelace kept her results quiet until a space medicine symposium in Stockholm later in 1960. On August 29, 1960, Life magazine ran the story under the headline “A Lady Proves That She’s Fit for Space Flight.”

Lovelace then widened the study. Twenty-five more women pilots were invited, and 13 in all, Cobb included, passed the first phase. Cobb called the group FLATs, for First Lady Astronaut Trainees.

Cobb went on to become the first woman to pass all three phases of the screening. The Smithsonian’s archive of her papers describes her as ranking in the top 2 percent of all astronaut candidates who took the tests.

Why the Door Never Opened

The tests were never the real gate. On January 5, 1959, a year before Cobb reached Albuquerque, NASA had set its astronaut qualifications, and two of them could not be met by any American woman.

NASA requirement, January 1959	Jerrie Cobb in 1960
Age under 40	28
1,500 hours of flight time	About 7,000 hours
Excellent physical condition	Passed all three phases of the Lovelace tests
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent	One year at Oklahoma College for Women
Graduate of test pilot school	Not possible: there were no female military test pilots
Qualified jet pilot	Not possible: NASA meant military jet test pilot experience

The military test pilot rule came from President Eisenhower himself in December 1958. NASA insisted on military jet test pilot experience, and there were no female military test pilots, so the rule filtered out every woman before anyone measured her lungs.

That made Cobb’s flight time irrelevant. She had several times NASA’s 1,500-hour minimum, and the path that would have produced a test pilot like Chuck Yeager was simply not open to her.

In May 1961, NASA Administrator James Webb appointed her a consultant on the future use of women as astronauts. By her own account, nobody consulted her. She called herself “the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency,” and was let go a week after saying it.

The study itself ended on September 12, 1961. The women preparing to report to the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola received a telegram from Lovelace: the testing had been canceled. The Navy had refused the facilities because NASA had never officially asked for them.

Two Days Before Congress

Cobb took the fight to Washington. On July 17 and 18, 1962, a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics heard whether NASA was keeping qualified women out.

Cobb and fellow trainee Janey Hart testified for the women. “We seek, only, a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination,” Cobb told the panel.

Then came NASA’s side, including John Glenn, who had orbited the Earth months earlier and had been through Lovelace’s tests himself. “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes,” he said. “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”

Jackie Cochran, the famous record pilot whose husband had helped fund the women’s testing, broke with them in her own testimony. The hearings produced no action, two years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On June 16, 1963, the Soviet Union flew Valentina Tereshkova, making her the first woman in space.

Was Jerrie Cobb NASA’s First Female Astronaut Candidate?

Neither is true, and NASA’s own history office says so. The women’s testing was “never a NASA program.” Lovelace ran it privately at his clinic, and much of the money came from Cochran and her husband.

NASA did not accept women as astronaut candidates until its 1978 class, which brought in six women, including Sally Ride. So Cobb was never a NASA candidate who failed. She was a pilot who passed NASA-grade tests run outside NASA, for an agency whose rules said she could not apply.

Even the name is later. The women did not call themselves the Mercury 13; that label was applied in the 1990s, more than three decades after the tests. Cobb’s own word was FLATs.

The distinction matters because it moves the story. The women did not lose a fair competition. The competition was defined so that they could not enter it, and the tests only proved what that rule cost.

What She Did Instead

Cobb went back to flying. A devout Christian, she spent decades as a solo pilot delivering food, medicine and other aid to Indigenous communities across six South American countries, while surveying new air routes to remote areas.

Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, France and Peru honored her. In 1973 she received the Harmon International Trophy from President Richard Nixon at the White House, and in 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She never fully let go of space. In 1998, at 67, as NASA prepared to fly John Glenn again at 77, she asked to fly too. “I would give my life to fly in space, I really would,” she said. A National Organization for Women campaign for her flight failed the following year.

Her death on March 18, 2019, was not made public until a month later. She ranks third among the most-read famous female pilots in history, behind Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman, who had to go to France for her license.

The tank, the 75 tests and the 37,010-foot climb all happened. What was missing in 1960 was not ability but permission, and by the time NASA gave women that, Jerrie Cobb was flying medicine into the Amazon.