until recently who actually built the foundations of this program. Is that theme present in your book, too? Flipping through it, it’s in there, but then they’re astronauts, and they are the face of the thing, and so it just felt a little different. How did that play out as you were working on the book?
How did NASA pick these six women? Was there a process? At one point in the book, you mentioned someone just had to choose. The administrator at NASA said: “Okay, you’re it.” How did that go? They also had to enclose themselves in a personal rescue sphere. It was basically a little ball just to make sure that you didn’t freak out when you were in enclosed space for hours at a time. But the real test was an interview, an hour and a half interview with the selection committee, and that was ultimately what decided your fate. As long as you passed all the other tests, it was really there that the astronauts sold themselves.
For instance, this was the first time for a lot of the astronauts and engineers working with women in a professional capacity, at an equal capacity. And a lot of them, a few of them have admitted that at the beginning, they were pretty skeptical that the women could hack it. And not just the women but also the researchers, those mission specialist roles. A lot of the military folks were skeptical that the job of an astronaut could be done by someone who had just had a postdoc.
So you’ve got the six back then, right? They’re slapping the Playboy calendar on the way out the door. You obviously are writing the book now. Everyone’s got the benefit of hindsight. What are their attitudes now about making that change? Because this is big — it’s an organizational change, it’s a cultural change. They had to be the face of it. There has been a long and winding conversation about that brand of feminism, even compared to today.