The Six by Loren Grush

More than 45 years ago, NASA announced a new class of astronauts, the first chosen for the shuttle era. Those 35 people included, famously, NASA’s first six women selected to the astronaut corps, who became instant celebrities as they made history, subject to countless articles, news stories, and other accounts over the decades since their selection. This book offers a well balanced portraits of the six women selected in that class—Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Rhea Seddon, and Kathy Sullivan—and their individual approaches to becoming astronauts and eventually flying in space while also working with, and sometimes competing against, one another at NASA. All six follow separate paths to becoming part of that historic astronaut class, then being thrown together to face both internal and external challenges towards flying to space. They did work together, particularly when dealing with some of the rampant sexism that, with the hindsight of history, looks extraordinarily awful. That cooperation included impromptu debriefs with each other when doing media interviews after their selection, exchanging intelligence in the privacy of the women’s restroom on who was asking what kinds of questions. There is nothing sensationalist about this, and much like other accounts of women's firsts it chronicles extraordinary women who overcame inordinate odds that were tipped not in their favor to achieve their dreams.