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
too fragile for space flight. Eventually though NASA relented and opened the application
process to everyone regardless of race or gender. From a 1977 candidate pool of 8 000 six
elite women were selected - 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.
