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Promised the Moon: The untold story of the first women in the space race by Stephanie Nolen, Four Walls Eight Windows, $22.95, ISBN 1568582757
Reviewed by Stephen Baxter

鈥淗ERE is Seagull! Everything is fine鈥︹�� It is 40 years since the first woman cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, flew into orbit in a Soviet Vostok spacecraft on 16 June 1963. Meanwhile a group of female American pilots had started astronaut training. Might that 鈥渙ne small step鈥� onto the moon have been a woman鈥檚?

In 1959 Randy Lovelace, chair of NASA鈥檚 Life Sciences Committee, recruited world-record-setting female pilot Jerrie Cobb to take tests that paralleled the Mercury astronauts鈥�. Lovelace, no social reformer, was motivated by scientific curiosity, thinking that women might be more tolerant than men to pain and isolation. In all, 13 women were recruited, and many passed with flying colours.

But Lovelace raised their hopes too high. NASA never officially sanctioned the trials, and curtailed the programme. Cobb fought her corner, and in 1962 actually won a Senate Space Committee hearing, forcing a rattled NASA to wheel out Mercury astronaut heroes John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. Of course the women lost. But, ironically, Tereshkova stayed aloft longer than all the Mercury astronauts combined.

Canadian journalist Stephanie Nolen tells this forgotten space-race subplot well. Technical slips will annoy space buffs, such as when Glenn launches aboard a Saturn rocket. But Nolen鈥檚 strength is people and politics. The stories of the women pilots are compelling, if romanticised. Nolen makes a heroine of Cobb, which is understandable, but the apolitical Cobb made mistakes. With hindsight all the protagonists were mired in the prejudices and assumptions of their time.

NASA doesn鈥檛 come out of it well. It鈥檚 true that at this crucial time NASA was stretched; putting women in space was beyond the decision-makers鈥� imagination. But NASA remained dominated by white male pilots, and no American woman reached space until 1978. You can help but ache for all those thwarted dreams.