Have your say Ask Promised the Moon author Stephanie Nolen a question about her book Click here  Photos Geraldyn (Jerrie) Cobb, the public face of the `girl astronaut' program, poses with the Mercury capsule prototype in 1960. Photo: courtesy of National Air and Space Museum Seven of the surviving Mercury-era female astronaut candidates reunited for the launch of Lt.-Col. Eileen Collins's space-shuttle flight at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1995. Left to right: Gene Nora Jessen, Jerri Truhill, Jerrie Cobb, B. Steadman, Sarah Ratley, Wally Funk, K. Cagle. Photo: courtesy of Jerri Truhill The Mercury 7 in 1959. Photo: courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jerrie Cobb at the controls of the MASTIF at a NASA test centre in 1960. Photo: courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Related Links http://www.tetheredmercury.com/ http://www.mercury13.com/ http://www.ninety-nines.org http://www.penguin.ca http://www.pjcomputing.flyer.co.uk

Jerrie Cobb was in the heart of the Amazon jungle. It was a summer night and the air was dense and hot. She lay in a rough woven hammock strung between a wingtip and a door of her grounded twin-engine Islander plane. She looked up and tried again to count the stars. Then there was a crackle from the radio.

She scrambled into the cockpit and fiddled with the dials, trying to bring in the voice. It was a priest at a missionary station a couple of hundred miles away, calling with news: A few hours earlier, two American men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had walked on the moon. It was July 20, 1969.

Ms. Cobb leaned out of the cockpit and pulled herself up on to the wing. She did a little dance from the tip of one wing to the end of the other. "Vaya con Dios," she whispered up at the night sky.

And then she looked down at the ground around her, and spoke again.

"It should have been me."

But shuttle launches barely make the news today, and with women making up a quarter of the National Air and Space Administration's astronaut corps, there is routinely one female on each flight.

The issue of female astronauts barely made the news in 1960, too. And you won't find the story in American history textbooks. But just at the dawn of the women's movement, a group of superbly qualified female pilots were poised to lead their country into space. As it turned out, the country wasn't ready for them.

Americans heard the crack of the starter's gun in the race for space on Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The American military scrambled to match the achievement, but produced a string of failures. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower, taking a pounding over the "space gap," created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and charged it with getting a human being into space before the Soviets did.

The president ruled that Air Force test pilots, elite flyers with security clearance who were already on his payroll, would be best suited for the new job, and a group of 30 men (military flying would not be open to women for another 30 years) was dispatched for medical screening - by Dr. Randy Lovelace, a pilot and a pioneer in aerospace medicine who now headed NASA's Life Sciences Committee, at his clinic in Albuquerque, N.M.

In 1959, no one had ever traveled beyond the pull of gravity, and no one knew what being in space would do to the human body: Would the heart cease to beat? Would eyeballs drift out of sockets? Would food stick in the throat? The Lovelace doctors did every test they could think of. They tried to shake the pilots' bones with blasts of sound, induced vertigo, analyzed every bodily fluid they could wring out of the men, subjected them to extremes of temperature and pushed them to the point of exhaustion.

With rockets blowing up or fizzling on the launch pad, NASA needed some good news, and on April 9, 1959, it introduced the word astronaut - and seven men to whom it gave the title - to the public: There were three Air Force Pilots (Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Gus Grissom), three Navy pilots (Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter) and one Marine, John Glenn. Asked by a reporter which one would be the first in space, each of the seven immediately raised a hand. Mr. Glenn raised both hands.

The men were all white Protestants from small towns, married with children. Four were named for their fathers; three were military-college graduates. This, America was told, was what an astronaut looked like. The country swooned at this image of laconic bravery, and pinned its hopes for the space race on seven pairs of broad shoulders. Dr. Lovelace sat up on the dais with them and described their testing ordeals.

Five months later, at an aviation conference, he met Jerrie Cobb.

In Sept. 1959, Geraldyn Cobb was 28 and an internationally renowned pilot. She had been flying since she was 12, taught by her father, who tied wood blocks on the pedals of his Waco biplane so her feet could reach them. Now she flew for the Aero Design and Engineering Company in Oklahoma City, one of only two or three women in the United States with a senior aeronautics post.

She had set world records for altitude, distance and speed in the Aero Commander, and just that summer she had been awarded the Gold Wings of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale in Paris, one of aviation's highest honours.

Freckled, shy, her hair in a long blond ponytail, she didn't look a pilot - but when Dr. Lovelace heard about her three world records, and her 7,000 hours in the cockpit, he had an idea.

NASA's engineers were struggling with the design of their first space capsule. They could not get it small or light enough to launch. But if the pilot were 40 precious pounds lighter, and required less food, fewer heavy oxygen cannisters - that might be enough. A Redstone rocket, the country's largest, just might be able to launch that capsule, with a lighter, female passenger.

The doctor pulled Ms. Cobb aside. "Medical and psychological investigations," he explained, "have long shown that women are better than men at withstanding pain, heat, cold, loneliness and monotony," and all those were sure to be factors in space flight. But there was no research on how women held up in space-stress tests.

Ms. Cobb was startled to hear it. The space race was consuming America, and the nation knew all about the elaborate tests of the Mercury 7 - but nobody had looked at women?

He told her the last testing of female pilots was done on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in World War II, a corps of 1,200 female ferry pilots. Research showed they had been better able to tolerate isolation and extremes of temperature than male pilots. But there had been no further study in 15 years; Dr. Lovelace thought it was high time to return to the quesion.

With an Air Force general he knew, he was designing a "girl astronaut" program for the Air Research and Development Command, the experimental wing of the Air Force trying to get America into space. And he had a question for Ms. Cobb: "Would you be willing to be a test subject for the first research on women as astronauts?"

He made the offer to a woman who had been flying since she was 12 at the cost of all else, ever faster and higher, pushing planes so far up into the darkening blue that her hands froze to the controls.

Would she volunteer for astronaut testing? Oh, yes.