The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts

by Loren Grush

Scribner, 2023. 422 pages. Nonfiction

When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000, six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon. In The Six, acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run.

If you had asked me before reading this book, the only female astronaut I could have named was Sally Ride. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that there were at least five other female astronauts working along with Sally, all with their individual specialties and interests, and all of them got to go to space! This book also covers the intrepid women who came before "the Six," fighting make the case that women really can be astronauts, even though they weren't allowed to do so themselves. Of additional interest to Utah-based readers, this book also covers the spaceflight of Utah senator Jake Garn, since he shared a spaceflight with Rhea Seddon. This book is a great read for those who are interested in NASA, the 80s, and learning about awesome real-life women who accomplished amazing things.

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