March 28, 2009 1:22 am

Almost Astronauts: Inspiration for Aspiring Girls This Weekend on Book TV

Children’s nonfiction author Tanya Lee Stone will be on C-SPAN2’s Book TV this weekend to tell the story of the “Mercury 13,” a group of accomplished woman pilots who trained to become astronauts in the early 1960s but never made it into space, and the subject of her recent book Almost Astronauts: Thirteen Women Who Dared to Dream.

When I first saw the movie and read the book The Right Stuff, back when I was around 12 or 13, I totally geeked out on memorizing the names of the astronauts and the extreme physical tests they had to endure–the isolation tank, the altitude chamber, the Dilbert Dunker (description from Almost Astronauts):

“Above a pool, at the top of a steep ramp, is a metal cockpit. You are loaded down–suited up in full flight gear, helmet, parachute. You climb into the contraption and are buckled in. The door clangs shut. The metal cage then hurtles down the ramp, slams into the pool, flips upside down, sinks to the bottom, and fills with water.”

It’s amazing to me, then, that I didn’t know that a woman, Jerrie Cobb, went through all the same tests, or that 12 other women pilots passed the first round of tests, but never even got the chance to try the Dilbert Dunker. Stone’s book tells the whole story, with brief profiles of each of the women and a detailed account of the obstacles that kept them from their dream of space. It’s disheartening but inspiring, too. They basically paved the way for Sally Ride and all the astronauts who came after her who just happened to be women.

The program, in which Stone presents the book (which is targeted for readers ages 10 and up) to a group of students at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., airs Saturday at 8:45am and repeats at 9pm, Sunday at 4pm, and Monday at 4am.–Heidi