Talk:Mercury 13

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2019 and 2 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Timberbcanady, Starr3932, Mick8484, Azartari. Peer reviewers: Starr3932.

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Plagiarism - Who copied whom?

A paragraph from this article:

A few women took additional tests. Jerrie Cobb, Rhea Hurrle, and Wally Funk went to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma for Phase II testing, consisting of an isolation tank test and psychological evaluations. Because of other family and job commitments, not all of the women were able to take these tests, however. Instead, once Cobb had passed the Phase III tests (advanced aeromedical examinations using military equipment and jet aircraft), the group prepared to gather in Pensacola, Florida at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine to follow suit. Two of the women quit their jobs in order to be able to attend. A few days before they were to report, however, the women received telegrams abruptly canceling the Pensacola testing. Without an official NASA request to run the tests, the Navy would not allow the use of its facilities for an unofficial project.

Pretty much identical paragraph from a NASA website:

A few women took additional tests. Jerrie Cobb, Rhea Hurrle, and Wally Funk went to Oklahoma City for an isolation tank test and psychological evaluations. Because of other family and job commitments, not all of the women were asked to take these tests, however. Instead, the group prepared to gather in Pensacola, Florida at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine to undergo advanced aeromedical examinations using military equipment and jet aircraft. Two of the women quit their jobs in order to be able to attend. A few days before they were to report, however, the women received telegrams abruptly canceling the Pensacola testing. Without an official NASA request to run the tests, the Navy would not allow the use of their facilities for an unofficial project.

http://history.nasa.gov/flats.html

Did NASA copy Wikipedia without proper attribution or was it the other way around? Ileanadu (talk) 15:32, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia copied from NASA. Here's the addition to Wikipedia, March 23, 2006: . Here is the NASA page as it appeared on January 14, 2006 (i.e., two months before the addition): . It probably should be sourced to the NASA site.

As far as "...without proper attribution" is concerned, works of the U.S. government are public domain. You can legally do what you wish with them. Assuming this is a work by NASA (as opposed to a work by a non-NASA person that NASA is publishing), there is no legal requirement for attribution. However, it's certainly sporting to do so, and Wikipedia policies are often more stringent than the law requires, so WP policies may very well call for attribution, although it is not required. TJRC (talk) 16:24, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Mercury 13/CommentsTalk:Mercury 13/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article swiped the text verbatim from the NASA page on the FLATs (http://history.nasa.gov/flats.html). I don't think merely citing the page as a reference covers plagiarism.

Last edited at 12:39, 2 January 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 23:43, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

External links modified

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DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAM: THEN AND NOW (pdf)

• DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAM: THEN AND NOW
• Christy L. Cechman
• for
• SPST503 B001 Fall 2013: Chronology of Space
• Dr. Jerome Gideon
• January 30, 2014
• American Public University System
• http://digitalcommons.apus.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=studentsstem
• http://docplayer.net/36615358-Discrimination-against-women-in-the-american-space-program-then-and-now.html

Xb2u7Zjzc32 (talk) 08:16, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

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External links modified (January 2018)

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Cleanup required

Whoever added all this new material recently, please clean it up. Address your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and typing errors. Remove redundancies and unreliable sources. Follow Wikipedia standards for reference names and usage.

This is an important article. Making it longer while reducing its quality does it a disservice. 73.92.193.211 (talk) 04:55, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Social considerations of the hearing section

The Social considerations of the hearing section contains only 2 sources, and it is unclear how much of the text is actually suppported by the sources. Also a lot of the text is written in extreme poor English and reads like a personal essay. It needs to be cleaned up and the unverifiable claims and analysis removed. 92.111.0.82 (talk) 14:22, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

"The pilot paradox" < major errors in this section

This section is in need of a complete re-write.

NASA hiring astronauts who were not fighter pilots goes back to the very first class. Scott Carpenter being the most significant example. And in the 3rd class, more than one-third were not test pilots. Here, moonwalker Buzz Aldrin is the most prominent example. With the very next class, hired in 1965, NASA picked several astronauts who had no military flying experience whatsoever. Some with no military experience in any non-flying capacity either. And none of them were test pilots. The biggest example here is Jack Schmitt, who walked on the Moon. There were multiple women who applied in 1965, and were considered along with Schmitt. The primary qualification that NASA was seeking was in being a scientist. Or a medical doctor, or an engineer. Countless thousands of American women met the eligibility criteria. So there was a path for women to be chosen by NASA, and eventually become an Apollo moonwalker as Schmitt did.

The wording of this section, as it stands now, makes it appear as though the door was not opened for women until 1978, and this is factually inaccurate by more than a decade. Per requirements that were put on paper, that door had been opened by NASA at least as early as 1965. --Tdadamemd20 (talk) 10:57, 24 July 2025 (UTC)

I think the section makes clear that the obstacles were more the unwritten selection criteria than those "on paper". Schazjmd (talk) 13:56, 24 July 2025 (UTC)