The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America's First Women Astronauts (Paperback)

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. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to everyone, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of eight thousand, 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 multimillion-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run, and each would make their mark.