Fighting for Space

When the space age began in the late 1950s, Jackie Cochran held more propeller and jet flying records than any other pilot of the twentieth century, man or woman. She had led the Women's Auxiliary Service Pilots during the Second World War and was the first woman to break the sound barrier. She also ran her own luxury cosmetics company and counted several presidents among her friends. No woman in the world was better qualified to move from the atmosphere into orbit.

The woman who actually took the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts, however, was Jerrie Cobb, who was twenty-five years younger than Jackie and a record-setting pilot in her own right. She maneuvered her way into the testing, and the idea of flying in space soon became her obsession.

As American and international media ran with the startling story of a woman astronaut program, Jackie and Jerrie each struggled to control the narrative and to shape the rumored program to fit her own vision. The dispute eventually reached Congress.

Spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel tells this story in Fighting for Space, a dual biography of Cochran and Cobb. Their lives serve as a guide to the changing social, political, and technical landscape of the era.