Within the Sixties, NASA rejected Hillary Clinton’s childhood dream of turning into an astronaut as a result of the area company didn’t settle for ladies astronauts on the time.
An outdated story shared by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went viral in late 2024, describing the time she purportedly wrote a letter to NASA as a toddler asking to grow to be an astronaut. She claimed that NASA instructed her in response that it didn’t have ladies astronauts. The story has gone viral usually during the last a number of years, with many on-line posts casting doubt on her declare.
Clinton shared the story in a 2012 speech honoring Amelia Earhart:
Now a few of you could know that once I was a little bit lady rising up in Illinois, I used to be keen on all types of tales about ladies. And my mom … was an actual fan of Amelia Earhart’s, and really instructed me about Amelia Earhart. After which after we determined, beneath President Kennedy’s management, that our nation was going to go to the moon and we had been going to have an astronaut program, I wished to be an astronaut. So once I was about 13, I wrote to NASA and requested what I wanted to do to attempt to be an astronaut. And naturally, there weren’t any ladies astronauts, and NASA wrote me again and mentioned there wouldn’t be any ladies astronauts. And I used to be simply crestfallen. However then I noticed I could not see very effectively, and I wasn’t all that athletic, so most likely – (laughter) — I would not be the primary lady astronaut anyway.
The Washington Post investigated this story in 2015, reaching out to NASA and the Clinton marketing campaign. Neither may reproduce the correspondence that Clinton described, on condition that the interplay occurred round half a century in the past.
However NASA did argue that such an interplay doubtless did happen, and it had no cause to doubt Clinton’s story. Company officers mentioned such a response was according to the coverage on the time.
“In 1962, the necessities for being an astronaut included being a army take a look at pilot with a level in engineering,” spokesperson Lauren Worley mentioned. “Greater than 50 years later, NASA’s astronaut corps displays our nation’s range.”
NASA didn’t have a ladies’s astronaut program then. The primary American lady who went to area was Sally Trip in 1983, whereas Susan Helms was the primary lady crew member aboard the area station in 2001. The Washington Post did share an excerpt from NASA’s research a few failed personal screening for ladies astronauts within the Sixties:
Dr. Randy Lovelace had been working (in 1960/61) a non-public screening program for potential ladies astronauts that was abruptly terminated in September 1961. That fall, there have been many questions raised about why this system had been ended — with many fingers within the press and on Capitol Hill pointing at NASA. In the summertime of 1962 there have been congressional hearings on the subject.
What had truly occurred in September 1961 is that Dr. Lovelace had tried to run additional checks on his ladies astronaut aspirants at Pensacola Naval Air Station. (It must be famous that a lot of the ladies weren’t fully conscious the Dr. Lovelace had no official backing for this effort.) Earlier than committing sources to those checks the U.S. Navy requested NASA if this was an official program. Shocked NASA officers mentioned no, and the Navy refused to let Dr. Lovelace run the checks at Pensacola.
In discussions between NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden and U.S. Navy officers that fall, Dryden’s place was that “NASA doesn’t at the moment have a requirement for such a program” however that it’d examine the likelihood “at a while sooner or later.” This was the official coverage on ladies astronauts and NASA response letters to ladies all through the Sixties mirror this angle.
The Washington Post reviewed archived paperwork from that point and located numerous related responses from NASA that lightly inspired the women writing to them, whereas sustaining the coverage of not planning to coach feminine astronauts. One instance was a letter present in Trip’s assortment. It was despatched to Trip by a lady named Linda Halpern who had written to NASA in 1962, and he or she obtained a response from the company that mentioned: “whereas many ladies are employed in different capacities within the area program — a few of them in extraordinarily essential scientific posts — we now have no current plans to make use of ladies on area flights due to the diploma of scientific and flight coaching, and the bodily traits, that are required.”
A NASA spokesperson responded to our questions with the next assertion: “Sadly, as a result of so many letters of this type had been obtained, we shouldn’t have a document of a letter to or from Mrs. Clinton within the Sixties, however we now have no cause to doubt her account.”
NASA additionally shared with us, correspondence between former astronaut Marsha Ivins and the area company from 1970, written when Ivins was in faculty:
Though there may be loads of circumstantial proof displaying that it was doubtless that NASA despatched Clinton such a response, there isn’t any solution to confirm the precise correspondence many years later. We thus fee this declare as unproven.
