At the Lovelace Foundation, the Woman in Space Program intersected with another important development in space medicine: the introduction of computers for astronaut screening and selection. Starting in 1958, Lovelace and Flickinger along with Schwichtenberg, the retired USAF Brigadier General and former CONAD flight surgeon now serving as head of the Clinic’s
Department of Aerospace Medicine and Bioastronautics, collaborated to develop a system of machine-readable cards to standardize hand-written medical records generated during astronaut evaluations (Figure 28).76 Early space medicine experts often viewed bodies in machinic terms, as assemblages of mechanical components. Now Lovelace sought to convert these into information for efficient storage, transfer, duplication, and sorting. This disembodiment and abstraction of the body to data, translated into a constellation of holes in a piece of paper, was a new development in medicine, a new rendering of the body, and part of the wider biomedical turn that took place after World War Two. The body reduced to data offered many new possibilities, among them the chance to refigure old articulations of sex and gender within medicine. But as is often the case, the cards became a site for the reproduction of binary biological sex, one that reproduced the modern body stereotype of women as complicated, abnormal versions of men. This section connects Lovelace’s lesser-known work with computers to his contemporaneous Woman in Space Program to show how even in this highly-abstracted version of the body, sex and gender were reproduced. This adds to recent scholarship about women and computers in the Cold War—and notably space history—that have recovered the crucial and foundational work of women in the history of computer science, and as “human computers”.77 This is another example of how the design of computers, programs, and the information economy reproduced sex and gender inequalities.78 Lovelace’s drafting of cards in what we might call “the computer turn” in space medicine, offers an important glimpse of what aspects of the body experts were interested in, worried about, and sought to control.
In March 1960, just one week after Cobb finished her astronaut tests at The Lovelace Clinic, CBS broadcast an episode of the realistic science-fiction television drama Men into Space (1959-1960), which depicted the selection of a woman astronaut.79 The episode opens with USAF
76 Albert H Schwichtenberg; Donald Flickinger; Randolph Lovelace II. “Development and Use of Medical Machine
Record Cards in Astronaut Selection” in U.S. Armed Forces Medical Journal (Vol. 10, No. 11, 1959) pp. 1324-1351; W. Randolph Lovelace II, Ulrich C. Luft, Albert A. Schwichtenberg, and Robert R. Secrest “Selection and Maintenance Program for Astronauts for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration” in Aerospace Medicine, June 1962. pp. 667-684. See also the sections under “Use of Machine Data Cards” in: Siegfried Gerathewohl. “Manned Space-Flight Missions” in Principles of Bioastronautics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963) pp. 546-549.
77 Jennifer S. Light. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture, 40. (No. 3, 1999) pp. 455–483;
Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow and Company, 2016)
78 Marie Hicks. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in
Computing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017)
79 The show’s end credits also included production designer Chesley Bonestell, famous for his illustrations depicting
astronaut Edward McCauley (William Lundigan), the hero protagonist, struggling to choose between thirty strong applications for two astronaut positions. Out of ideas, McCauley mutters something about “the wisdom of Solomon”, referring to the wise King of ancient Israel. The off- hand remark gives another Air Force officer in the room an idea: “That’s it, we turn the whole problem over to Ol Solomon!” The punchline, delivered visually in the next scene, is that “Ol Solomon” is the name of their new computer.80 “We let the computer pick the top three candidates, there’s no chance of human error, and the results are purely scientific, right?” one officer marvels, loading in machine-readable cards. “Ol Solomon here is just a machine,” cautions McCauley. “It’ll give us the right answer, if we ask the right question.” In the next scene, the group is reviewing the computer’s selections when the “physical description” of the top-ranked pick, an astronomer named M.C. Gallagher, catches McCauley’s eye. “Height, five feet, three-and-a-half inches, weight a hundred and seventeen pounds—he’s a little fella isn’t he?” His deadpan delay in realizing the applicant is in fact a woman, Dr. Muriel Catherine Gallagher, is played for laughs. Then another officer explains, “Ol Solomon doesn’t have any concept of sex.” Angered by the prospect of a woman USAF astronaut, the Program Director quickly intervenes, “She’s out. I won’t allow it. Space is man’s last refuge from the female sex, and I don’t intend to see it invaded.”81
The scene hinges on an amusing (and telling) failure of imagination on the part of these fictional space medicine experts, one that highlights a problem with converting bodies into data. Using a computer for the first time, the USAF officers had not thought to record the sex of each applicant. Like McCauley warns in the set-up, they end up with a surprising result because they failed to ask, “the right question”. It was not that the computer “doesn’t have any concept of sex”, it was that assuming an all-male applicant pool, the experts had not asked applicants to indicate their sex. Depending on their design, computers certainly can embody and reproduce “a concept of sex”, but this sci-fi parable suggests that sex and gender needed to be shored-up and reproduced in new ways when bodies are abstracted into new regimes like data. This scene both needles and warns space medicine about their historic lack of interest in women: continue ignoring women and you might accidentally select one.
Space and The Man and the Challenge” in Spacefarers: Images of Astronauts and Cosmonauts in the Heroic Era of Spaceflight (ed. Michael J. Neufeld) (Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013). pp. 9-35.
80 I speculate that the “O” and lowercase “l” are also meant to symbolize a binary “0” and “1”. 01 Solomon implies
the machine embodiment of the virtue of fairness as delivered by King Solomon in the Bible.