Right stuff. Wrong gender

Word comes today that Janet Christine Dietrich has died. She, and 12 other women, underwent — and passed — the same “physical and psychological assessments as the men who became immortalized as America’s first astronauts,” according to an article this afternoon in the San Francisco Chronicle.

While the women waited for the next phase of their program in July 1961, the testing was halted without warning or explanation.

It wasn’t until Sally Ride went into space 20 years later that America learned what it could have learned 20 years earlier.

(h/t: Michael Wells)