About the Author

Martha Ackmann teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a frequent columnist, and has written for publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Ackmann is co-recipient of the Amelia Earhart Research Scholars Grant. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Lynn Sherr, correspondent for the ABC News program 20/20, covered NASA and the space program in the 1980s, anchoring and reporting on all the early shuttle missions, through the Challenger explosion and the subsequent Rogers Commission hearings. Sherr was a semifinalist in the (now abandoned) Journalist-in-Space competition. She lives in New York.

Reviews

“The Mercury 13 ought to be on the shelf next to The Right Stuff as a glaring and embarrassing counterpoint to the triumph of the boys’ club and its fighter jocks. Ackmann has done outstanding investigative reporting.” —William E. Burrows, author of This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
“[A] sharply pointed narrative [about how thirteen] highly skilled fliers were grounded, leaving it to the Russians to put a woman in space fully twenty years before the American government saw fit to do so. A shameful episode exposed with thoroughness and a graceful pen." —Kirkus Reviews
“The Mercury 13 women were not only dedicated and determined, they were enormously talented. To read about their accomplishments and to discover their passion to fly is to recognize an incredible lost opportunity.” —from the Foreword by Lynn Sherr