NASA Had Zero Plans To Send Women Into Space In The '60s
NASA has been getting a lot of flak lately for something it wrote over 40 years ago. Reddit user come_on_now_guys posted a letter that was allegedly sent from NASA to a woman identified as "Miss Kelly" at the University of Connecticut in 1962.
The letter stated that NASA had no existing space program for aspiring women astronauts and the agency wasn't planning on sending women into space in the future as women's proper place was in the kitchen cooking for their astronaut husbands.
All right, that last bit isn't in the letter. But we can certainly imagine it.
It seems a number of women have faced rejection from the aeronautical organization. At an event celebrating Amelia Earhart last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the audience that she also received a rejection letter from NASA because of her gender.
"When I was about 13, I wrote to NASA and asked what I needed to do to try to be an astronaut," Clinton said. "And of course, there weren’t any women astronauts and NASA wrote me back and said there would not be any women astronauts. And I was just crestfallen."
At some point NASA changed its mind and Sally Ride became the first American woman sent to space in 1983. In this year's new class of NASA astronauts, 50% are women, which the agency said was the " highest percentage of female astronaut candidates ever selected for a class."
Who would have thought it! Women in space! Doing a man's (snort) job. My how times have changed.
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