Uhhh... The letter to NASA story has been debunked as another Hillary lie and it is being perpetuated by the MSM.
Fact: NASA was created when Hillary Rodham was 12 and Alan Shepherd did go into space when she was 14. The NASA program for training female astronauts was not canceled until 2 years after Hillary allegedly wrote this letter.
“The other day, when Hillary’s claim that she wrote to NASA and was told in a responding letter that the space agency “didn’t take girls” struck us as implausible and poorly calculated because obviously checkable, our interest waned at the prospect of FOILing the correspondence.
First Lady in Space Sally Ride is only a few years younger, as James Taranto has pointed out, than Hillary Clinton.
But the really interesting thing is that someone just a few years younger is more likely to have gotten that letter than Hillary was.
In fact NASA was training women until 1962. Hillary was about 15 when they cancelled the Mercury 13 program, which trained a group of women to go into space only to be cancelled when the real prospect of sending them up was before NASA.
Here’s the report from All Things Considered:
Out of a pool of women selected to undergo trials, 13 women endured and passed the battery of grueling physical and psychological tests — the same tests the original Mercury 7 male astronauts underwent at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque, N.M.
In some cases, the women scored better on the tests than their male counterparts.
The names of the women pilots and would-be astronauts — among them, Jerrie Cobb, Wally Funk, Myrtle Cagle, Bernice “B” Steadman — are largely lost to history.
The testing program was halted and eventually scrapped, in large part, Ackmann writes, because of a pervasive “boy’s club” attitude at NASA.”
For future Freep readers looking for more information on Hillary’s NASA lie, here is a good expose. Sadly, most women don’t care and go along with the Hillary’s feminist myth.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/2005/10/hillary-clintons-feminist-tale.html