AMERICA’S FIRST WOMEN ASTRONAUTS

[Music] [Applause] [Music] Grumman forer is a leader in the property and liability insurance industry we're glad to be a part of the Morris County community and are pleased to bring you this edition of the screen news Digest [Music] space the final [Music] frontier and like most Frontiers space has been man's [Music] domain after six Mercury flights 10 Gemini 11 Apollos three Sky labs and numerous soyu Cosmos and bosss only two women have ever ventured into space both were Russians and both little more than Soviet style Barbie dolls neither had any technical skills or scientific training they were merely along for the ride allowing Tas the Russian news service to boast a brilliant star has flared up in the cosmic firmament never and in no country did women ever attain such [Music] height perhaps but in the United States space remained an exclusive male [Applause] domain it was American men who first walked in space and then set the first human footprints on a planet other than Earth and subsequent flights have remained a sort of free floating bachelor [Music] party until now main stage 4 3 2 1 America's first women astronauts are soaring into space as flight engineers and Mission Specialists aboard the space shuttle [Music] [Applause] from 1960 until 1977 for reasons that will forever remain unclear NASA was unable to find a single qualified woman candidate then after examining 8,000 applicants for the shuttle program 29 men and six women were selected as astronaut candidates among them Sally Ry and Judy Resnik the first American woman to venture into space will be Dr Sally K ride height 5'5 weight 115 lbs brown hair blue eyes a description that might well fit thousands of young women today but Sally rid's Vital Statistics include a string of academic credentials that at first glance seemed to belong to three people at Stanford University she simultaneously earned degrees in English and physics then a master's and PhD in physics specializing in astrophysics when first notified of her selection in 1978 ride immediately called her family they're um almost as excited as I am my mother's reaction was that my I have another sister who's in theology she's at a Theological Seminary and my mother said well you know one of the two of them is going to get to heaven for Dr Judy Resnik a graduate of Carnegie melan with a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland becoming an astronaut was an almost inevitable step I decided to apply to be an astronaut uh when I was a graduate student finishing up my research work uh it was not something that I had planned to do for my whole life it was a case of being in the right place at the right time NASA was advertising for astronauts at the time that I was looking for a job but flying jobs until recently have almost always belonged to Men of course women were allowed in the air but nobody dreamed they would actually be able to fly the plane save for an occasional woman such as Amelia aart who made daring solo flights across the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific before being lost on around the world flight in 1937 but for the most part women were trained to fly as stewardesses not pilots and when Visionaries such as Jules Vern began to dream that space flight was even possible they peopled their fantasies with male astronauts in this 1903 version of Jules Vern's a trip to the moon movie Pioneer George Melly used women as decorative accessories who never left the ground [Music] as America moved into the Space Age its first astronauts were monkeys males of course such Monkey Business LED Jerry Cobb an America's foremost Woman pilot to comment bitterly NASA won't let me take the actual training course but I see they have a chimpan who was being trained to take it then in 1959 Seven astronauts were chosen for America's first manned space flight program dubbed Mercury understandably NASA's first candidates were military test pilots and of course men they were after all little more than human cannonballs who would be fired into space and brought back to Earth by Ground Control surely a job for Superman and not Lois Lane arm light on Switching command to internal by 1965 space flight had become complicated a 2oman capsule part of the Gemini program was launched and in Gemini the astronauts were actually to fly the vehicle and to make de beautiful walks in space [Music] all this of course was preparation for the Apollo Mission which would set men on the [Music] moon now women astronauts are being trained alongside their male counterparts and NASA had to deal with the obvious differences in male female anatomy would they have to redesign the shuttle capsule to accommodate those differences it turned out only the space suits had to be made smaller to fit the smaller female form and with the increasing number of jobs to be done in space a new type of astronaut the mission specialist has evolved the mission specialist uh does things associated with uh the experiments uh on board or deploying the satellites while the pilots do most of the flying of the Orbiter on the mission that I've been assigned to the mission specialist will be doing work on deploy ing a communication satellite which will be done from the panels behind [Music] me one of Dr ride's on orbit jobs will be to manipulate the arm this super sophisticated 50t [Music] [Applause] crane articulated like a giant human arm it will launch and retrieve objects in space like a short stop fielding and throwing a ball Astronaut training is as physically demanding as any sport for ride Who as a teenager had been a nationally ranked junior tennis player and who still runs 5 miles a day it is no problem meetings are a constant feature of Astronaut training as is flying in Air Force t38 jet trainers ride Resnik and the other Mission Specialists learn radio and navigational systems in Flight prospective astronauts are introduced to G forces the increasing pull of gravity on the body during a rapid climb or pull out from a dive that can cause the inexperienced to black out for Sally Ride The Experience proved so exhilarating she went on and learned to fly and now holds a private pilot's [Music] license of course what goes up must eventually come down even spacecraft and so Astronaut training is filled with ups and downs and in the event vehicle must land in the water the astronauts must learn to get their feet [Music] wet in simulators such as this NASA can reproduce virtually every moment of the shuttle's flight from blastoff to orbit every sequence of the flight is generated by computers that feed readings into the exact replica of the shuttle's complex instrument panels the idea is to prepare for any eventuality so that no matter what happens the astronauts will react instantly and correctly after simulation comes the real thing Jack that was a super summary and for Dr ride it begins with her selection as a Capcom capsule Communicator the only person on the ground to communicate directly with the shuttle astronauts in orbit it's an awesome responsibility but ride is not above of a little fun is that the vampire that goes with the red blood cells like but nothing on Earth can quite match the experience of weightlessness that is the quintessential physical condition of space flight the closest NASA can come is in the cargo bay of a c135 the Air Force's giant jet cargo plane if even a few seconds of weightlessness can lead to Euphoria parachute training can bring one down to earth very quickly now space flight has become even more complicated and the space shuttle has become NASA's Workhorse Dr Resnik the shuttle is a very versatile tool we can do experiments on orbit we can repair satellites that might have malfunctioned or changed their film packs we can study the stars and look outward we can study the Earth and look uh back down there are advantages in almost every field of science astrophysics it's obvious x-rays don't make it through the atmosphere so you have to be in space to do any experimentation at all there are any number of things that you might be able to learn in physiology about the human body that uh just the way that it reacts to weightlessness I'm sure will will be very important um materials processing materials processing uh in space involves uh understanding and studying how materials combine uh for example if uh you can put uh Metals together and make different types of Alloys uh and their properties are different if they're manufactured without gravity than they are in gravity if we date the Space Program from 1957 the year the Russians launched sputnic to the moment when STS 7 the space shuttle Challenger lifts off with astronaut Dr Sally K ride aboard it will have taken women 26 years to finally get into space was it worth it why the desperate desire to leave the Earth to challenge the vast unknown of space Dr Ry well for one thing it's there I mean you just you have to do it and as the space shuttle Challenger lifts off with Dr Sally kride among its astronauts America truly enters the Space Age [Applause] [Music] this edition of the screen News Digest was brought to you by the Crum and Forester Insurance [Music] organization for