Americas
![Loren Grush - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B0CGGTKY9H.jpg)
The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts
In the bestselling tradition of Hidden Figures and Code Girls, the remarkable true story of America's first women astronauts-six extraordinary women, each making history going to orbit aboard NASA's Space Shuttle.
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. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 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 multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride's history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.
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. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 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 multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride's history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.
Editorial Reviews
"Remarkable...Grush has an important story to tell, and she tells it well. An inspiring story of the first American women to go into space, charting their own course for the horizon."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Engrossing…a well-rounded narrative…The Six highlights the contributions of women in science and the challenges they face."
-Booklist
"[Creates] an intimacy that makes [each astronaut] utterly memorable….Grush makes it thrillingly clear: These six women rose far above such misogyny, smashing our planet's highest ceilings as they soared."
-BookPage (starred review)
"Suspenseful, meticulously observed, enlightening…Lifts the curtain on the moment when Neil Armstrong's ‘one small step for man' expanded to encompass the talent, ambition, and perseverance of America's first female astronauts."
-Margot Lee Shetterly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Figures
"A dazzling look into the lives of the first U.S. women to venture into space….This is a story that had to be told, and Grush has told it brilliantly."
-Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
"One of the most important stories to come out of the space age….One can't help but cheer for these women of destiny as their journey unfolds…Superb."
-Homer Hickam, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys, basis of the film October Sky
"A powerful, gripping, and at times heartbreaking tale of human courage in the face of impossible odds. The Six reminds us of the price that women paid to join men in space-and why these women still matter today."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Engrossing…a well-rounded narrative…The Six highlights the contributions of women in science and the challenges they face."
-Booklist
"[Creates] an intimacy that makes [each astronaut] utterly memorable….Grush makes it thrillingly clear: These six women rose far above such misogyny, smashing our planet's highest ceilings as they soared."
-BookPage (starred review)
"Suspenseful, meticulously observed, enlightening…Lifts the curtain on the moment when Neil Armstrong's ‘one small step for man' expanded to encompass the talent, ambition, and perseverance of America's first female astronauts."
-Margot Lee Shetterly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Figures
"A dazzling look into the lives of the first U.S. women to venture into space….This is a story that had to be told, and Grush has told it brilliantly."
-Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
"One of the most important stories to come out of the space age….One can't help but cheer for these women of destiny as their journey unfolds…Superb."
-Homer Hickam, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys, basis of the film October Sky
"A powerful, gripping, and at times heartbreaking tale of human courage in the face of impossible odds. The Six reminds us of the price that women paid to join men in space-and why these women still matter today."
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1: But Only Men Can Be Astronauts CHAPTER 1 But Only Men Can Be Astronauts
The sun was still hours away from coming up that morning, and Margaret "Rhea" Seddon was already staring into the open abdomen of a patient on her operating table. As per usual, she was trying to control the patient's blood flow and repair the damage to his organs, caused by a bullet that had violently ripped through his gut. By now, she'd become used to such grisly sights. As a surgical resident in John Gaston Hospital's emergency room, she saw all manner of gruesome gunshot and knife injuries, often the result of two angry men and too much beer. EMS crews would wheel into the John-as the doctors called their hospital-the victims of these bar brawls, typically in the middle of the night, and they'd become Rhea or some other doctor's priority for the rest of the evening. Each night, the John's emergency room would see so many trauma patients that it would earn an even more menacing nickname: the pit.
Sometimes Rhea stanched the blood and sewed people up just fine; other times she just couldn't repair the sheer amount of damage. Those moments were the most devastating. This early morning, however, things seemed to be progressing well, and she eventually stitched up her patient, sending him off to the ICU. Her work wasn't done, though. As the patient's doctor, she still had to keep her eye on him in case some unforeseen complication popped up. So she headed to the doctors' lounge, which sat adjacent to the ICU.
It was hard for her to believe, but there'd been a time when her presence in the doctors' lounge would have been a serious transgression. When she'd been a surgical intern at Baptist Memorial Hospital, across the street from the John in Memphis, Tennessee, she'd been barred from entering the doctors' lounge. It was for "men only," and she was the only woman surgical intern at the time. The head doctor told her the reason was that sometimes men walked around in their underwear in the lounge. She told him it didn't bother her, but he said the men would be embarrassed. Her superiors told her she could wait between surgeries in the nurses' bathroom. Rhea tried to change the policy, but she lost out and found herself taking naps on a foldout chair in the bathroom, with her head resting against the wall. The rule had prompted her to switch to the John for her residency-a place that didn't cling to such sexist policies.
Ever since she'd decided to go into medicine, Rhea always seemed to be out of her comfort zone in some way. She'd grown up in a completely different world: a small girl with straight blond hair in the upper-middle-class suburban town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There, she followed the standard recipe for How to Make a Proper Southern Lady. She took the requisite ballet lessons from Miss Mitwidie's Dance Studio. She learned formal dining etiquette, played the piano, sewed buttons on dresses, and planted herbs. Those skills were the ones her mother, Clayton, had learned in her youth, and she was simply passing the torch on to her daughter, molding Rhea into the only type of girl she knew how to make.
"People always followed in their parents' footsteps, and I always thought I would be like my mother-be a southern belle and stay home and cook and raise babies," Rhea said. But her father, Edward, had other ideas. An attorney, Edward wanted Rhea to have more than what her mother and grandmother had growing up. That meant exposing Rhea to a more diverse range of experiences. One night in October 1957, Edward pulled Rhea outside and pointed her gaze toward the darkened sky. There she watched a tiny blip of light zoom through the darkness. The tiny dot was Sputnik, an aluminum-based satellite the size of a beach ball that was beeping as it circled the Earth. The Soviet Union had just launched the spacecraft a day or two prior on October 4, putting the first human-made object into orbit. Fear had coursed through the American public over the Soviet Union's newfound space dominance.
But others also realized that it was a watershed moment for everyone, not just the Soviets. "You are watching the beginning of a new era," Edward said. "It's called the Space Age." Although she was a month shy of turning ten years old at the time, Rhea's still-forming mind could grasp that a new world was on its way. However, she didn't quite realize at the time just how big a role space would play in her life.
The launch of Sputnik would ultimately put Rhea on a different path than the prim and proper one her mother had envisioned for her. One of America's knee-jerk responses to Sputnik was to increase the level of science education in grad...
The sun was still hours away from coming up that morning, and Margaret "Rhea" Seddon was already staring into the open abdomen of a patient on her operating table. As per usual, she was trying to control the patient's blood flow and repair the damage to his organs, caused by a bullet that had violently ripped through his gut. By now, she'd become used to such grisly sights. As a surgical resident in John Gaston Hospital's emergency room, she saw all manner of gruesome gunshot and knife injuries, often the result of two angry men and too much beer. EMS crews would wheel into the John-as the doctors called their hospital-the victims of these bar brawls, typically in the middle of the night, and they'd become Rhea or some other doctor's priority for the rest of the evening. Each night, the John's emergency room would see so many trauma patients that it would earn an even more menacing nickname: the pit.
Sometimes Rhea stanched the blood and sewed people up just fine; other times she just couldn't repair the sheer amount of damage. Those moments were the most devastating. This early morning, however, things seemed to be progressing well, and she eventually stitched up her patient, sending him off to the ICU. Her work wasn't done, though. As the patient's doctor, she still had to keep her eye on him in case some unforeseen complication popped up. So she headed to the doctors' lounge, which sat adjacent to the ICU.
It was hard for her to believe, but there'd been a time when her presence in the doctors' lounge would have been a serious transgression. When she'd been a surgical intern at Baptist Memorial Hospital, across the street from the John in Memphis, Tennessee, she'd been barred from entering the doctors' lounge. It was for "men only," and she was the only woman surgical intern at the time. The head doctor told her the reason was that sometimes men walked around in their underwear in the lounge. She told him it didn't bother her, but he said the men would be embarrassed. Her superiors told her she could wait between surgeries in the nurses' bathroom. Rhea tried to change the policy, but she lost out and found herself taking naps on a foldout chair in the bathroom, with her head resting against the wall. The rule had prompted her to switch to the John for her residency-a place that didn't cling to such sexist policies.
Ever since she'd decided to go into medicine, Rhea always seemed to be out of her comfort zone in some way. She'd grown up in a completely different world: a small girl with straight blond hair in the upper-middle-class suburban town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There, she followed the standard recipe for How to Make a Proper Southern Lady. She took the requisite ballet lessons from Miss Mitwidie's Dance Studio. She learned formal dining etiquette, played the piano, sewed buttons on dresses, and planted herbs. Those skills were the ones her mother, Clayton, had learned in her youth, and she was simply passing the torch on to her daughter, molding Rhea into the only type of girl she knew how to make.
"People always followed in their parents' footsteps, and I always thought I would be like my mother-be a southern belle and stay home and cook and raise babies," Rhea said. But her father, Edward, had other ideas. An attorney, Edward wanted Rhea to have more than what her mother and grandmother had growing up. That meant exposing Rhea to a more diverse range of experiences. One night in October 1957, Edward pulled Rhea outside and pointed her gaze toward the darkened sky. There she watched a tiny blip of light zoom through the darkness. The tiny dot was Sputnik, an aluminum-based satellite the size of a beach ball that was beeping as it circled the Earth. The Soviet Union had just launched the spacecraft a day or two prior on October 4, putting the first human-made object into orbit. Fear had coursed through the American public over the Soviet Union's newfound space dominance.
But others also realized that it was a watershed moment for everyone, not just the Soviets. "You are watching the beginning of a new era," Edward said. "It's called the Space Age." Although she was a month shy of turning ten years old at the time, Rhea's still-forming mind could grasp that a new world was on its way. However, she didn't quite realize at the time just how big a role space would play in her life.
The launch of Sputnik would ultimately put Rhea on a different path than the prim and proper one her mother had envisioned for her. One of America's knee-jerk responses to Sputnik was to increase the level of science education in grad...
