Before the space shuttle, there was the locker room.
This week marks the 29th anniversary of the launch of the space shuttle Challenger on its STS-7 mission. Even those who know nothing about the mission itself will most likely recognize the name of one of the members of its crew -- Sally Ride. The mission earned Ride a place in history as the first female NASA astronaut to fly.
In doing so, Ride went somewhere no woman had gone before. That place wasn't Earth orbit; Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova lay claim to that honor 20 years earlier. Rather, Ride and her female classmates in NASA's eighth class of astronauts were the first women to go somewhere even more rare -- the locker rooms at Johnson Space Center.
Women have been part of NASA's astronaut corps for well over three decades at this point, so it's easy to forget what a major change their hiring meant for the agency. At the time, not only had their been no female astronauts at NASA, there were very few female scientists or engineers in the agency. So male-dominant was the workforce that the agency had buildings that only had male restrooms. The gym at Johnson Space Center only had a locker room for men, and a debate was held as to whether it would be sufficient to curtain off an area for women.
Adding to the culture shock, most of the other astronauts had come from backgrounds in which they had rarely worked alongside women. Not only were they unused to female astronauts, they were unused to female co-workers. Astronaut Mike Mullane, who was selected in the same astronaut class as Ride and the other first female astronauts, recalled in an interview for a Johnson Space Center history project: “I’d be a liar if I didn’t say it was difficult to learn how to work with women, and not because of the women; because I had no life experience in working with women."
Mullane had gone from grade school classes that were often gender-segregated to the West Point military academy, which at the time had no female students, to an Air Force assignment with no female comrades to NASA. "So as a result, I was thirty-two years old when I was selected as an astronaut and I had never worked professionally with women, and I have to admit that I’m sure I was a jerk, in a word, because I just didn’t know how to act around them."
Gradually the culture shock was overcome, and by the time Ride flew on STS-7, no matter how much the media may have focused on one astronaut, the crew was just one unified team.
The anniversary of Ride's flight took on a new significance this year. When Ride launched in 1983, it came only two days after the 20th anniversary of Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space. This year, on the anniversary of Tereshkova's flight, China launched its first female astronaut, Liu Yang; she and her crew made the first Chinese docking with a space station on the June 18, the anniversary of Ride's launch.
Since Ride's flight, female astronauts have gone on to command the space shuttle and International Space Station and to serve as head of the astronaut office. And it all started with a locker room at the Johnson Space Center gym.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
