Within the Nineteen Sixties, NASA rejected Hillary Clinton’s childhood dream of turning into an astronaut as a result of the house company didn’t settle for ladies astronauts on the time.
An previous 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 baby asking to grow to be an astronaut. She claimed that NASA informed her in response that it didn’t have ladies astronauts. The story has gone viral typically over the past 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 it’s possible you’ll know that once I was just a little lady rising up in Illinois, I used to be desirous about every kind of tales about ladies. And my mom … was an actual fan of Amelia Earhart’s, and truly informed me about Amelia Earhart. After which after we determined, underneath President Kennedy’s management, that our nation was going to go to the moon and we have 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 stated there wouldn’t be any ladies astronauts. And I used to be simply crestfallen. However then I spotted I could not see very properly, and I wasn’t all that athletic, so in all probability – (laughter) — I would not be the primary girl astronaut anyway.
The Washington Post investigated this story in 2015, reaching out to NASA and the Clinton marketing campaign. Neither might reproduce the correspondence that Clinton described, provided that the interplay came about 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 stated such a response was in step with 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 stated. “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 girl who went to house was Sally Trip in 1983, whereas Susan Helms was the primary girl crew member aboard the house station in 2001. The Washington Post did share an excerpt from NASA’s research a few failed personal screening for ladies astronauts within the Nineteen Sixties:
Dr. Randy Lovelace had been operating (in 1960/61) a personal 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 exams on his ladies astronaut aspirants at Pensacola Naval Air Station. (It ought to be famous that many of the ladies weren’t fully conscious the Dr. Lovelace had no official backing for this effort.) Earlier than committing sources to those exams the U.S. Navy requested NASA if this was an official program. Stunned NASA officers stated no, and the Navy refused to let Dr. Lovelace run the exams 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 right now have a requirement for such a program” however that it would 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 Nineteen Sixties mirror this attitude.
The Washington Post reviewed archived paperwork from that point and located a lot of related responses from NASA that lightly inspired the ladies 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 she or he acquired a response from the company that stated: “whereas many ladies are employed in different capacities within the house program — a few of them in extraordinarily necessary scientific posts — we’ve no current plans to make use of ladies on house 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 have been acquired, we should not have a document of a letter to or from Mrs. Clinton within the Nineteen Sixties, however we’ve no cause to doubt her account.”
NASA additionally shared with us, correspondence between former astronaut Marsha Ivins and the house 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 strategy to confirm the precise correspondence many years later. We thus price this declare as unproven.
