Chapter 1: But Only Men Can Be Astronauts CHAPTER 1 But Only Men Can Be Astronauts The sun was still hours away from coming up that morning, and Margaret "Rhea" Seddon was already staring into the open abdomen of a patient on her operating table. As per usual, she was trying to control the patient''s blood flow and repair the damage to his organs, caused by a bullet that had violently ripped through his gut. By now, she''d become used to such grisly sights. As a surgical resident in John Gaston Hospital''s emergency room, she saw all manner of gruesome gunshot and knife injuries, often the result of two angry men and too much beer. EMS crews would wheel into the John--as the doctors called their hospital--the victims of these bar brawls, typically in the middle of the night, and they''d become Rhea or some other doctor''s priority for the rest of the evening. Each night, the John''s emergency room would see so many trauma patients that it would earn an even more menacing nickname: the pit. Sometimes Rhea stanched the blood and sewed people up just fine; other times she just couldn''t repair the sheer amount of damage. Those moments were the most devastating.
This early morning, however, things seemed to be progressing well, and she eventually stitched up her patient, sending him off to the ICU. Her work wasn''t done, though. As the patient''s doctor, she still had to keep her eye on him in case some unforeseen complication popped up. So she headed to the doctors'' lounge, which sat adjacent to the ICU. It was hard for her to believe, but there''d been a time when her presence in the doctors'' lounge would have been a serious transgression. When she''d been a surgical intern at Baptist Memorial Hospital, across the street from the John in Memphis, Tennessee, she''d been barred from entering the doctors'' lounge. It was for "men only," and she was the only woman surgical intern at the time. The head doctor told her the reason was that sometimes men walked around in their underwear in the lounge.
She told him it didn''t bother her, but he said the men would be embarrassed. Her superiors told her she could wait between surgeries in the nurses'' bathroom. Rhea tried to change the policy, but she lost out and found herself taking naps on a foldout chair in the bathroom, with her head resting against the wall. The rule had prompted her to switch to the John for her residency--a place that didn''t cling to such sexist policies. Ever since she''d decided to go into medicine, Rhea always seemed to be out of her comfort zone in some way. She''d grown up in a completely different world: a small girl with straight blond hair in the upper-middle-class suburban town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There, she followed the standard recipe for How to Make a Proper Southern Lady. She took the requisite ballet lessons from Miss Mitwidie''s Dance Studio.
She learned formal dining etiquette, played the piano, sewed buttons on dresses, and planted herbs. Those skills were the ones her mother, Clayton, had learned in her youth, and she was simply passing the torch on to her daughter, molding Rhea into the only type of girl she knew how to make. "People always followed in their parents'' footsteps, and I always thought I would be like my mother--be a southern belle and stay home and cook and raise babies," Rhea said. But her father, Edward, had other ideas. An attorney, Edward wanted Rhea to have more than what her mother and grandmother had growing up. That meant exposing Rhea to a more diverse range of experiences. One night in October 1957, Edward pulled Rhea outside and pointed her gaze toward the darkened sky. There she watched a tiny blip of light zoom through the darkness.
The tiny dot was Sputnik, an aluminum-based satellite the size of a beach ball that was beeping as it circled the Earth. The Soviet Union had just launched the spacecraft a day or two prior on October 4, putting the first human-made object into orbit. Fear had coursed through the American public over the Soviet Union''s newfound space dominance. But others also realized that it was a watershed moment for everyone , not just the Soviets. "You are watching the beginning of a new era," Edward said. "It''s called the Space Age." Although she was a month shy of turning ten years old at the time, Rhea''s still-forming mind could grasp that a new world was on its way. However, she didn''t quite realize at the time just how big a role space would play in her life.
The launch of Sputnik would ultimately put Rhea on a different path than the prim and proper one her mother had envisioned for her. One of America''s knee-jerk responses to Sputnik was to increase the level of science education in grade schools, an attempt to train the next generation of youngsters to become a new breed of brainiac who could keep the US competitive in the unfolding Space Race. Soon, Rhea fell in love with her science courses--particularly life sciences. But she still stuck to the recipe. She would eagerly dig through the innards of a dissected rat during the day while performing stunts with the cheerleading squad after school. For undergrad, she journeyed to the University of California at Berkeley, a place she''d chosen for its life sciences program. But the school felt as if it existed on another planet, let alone another state. She started as a freshman in 1965, and arrived at a campus bursting with political activism.
The year prior to her arrival the Free Speech Movement had erupted when students flooded the university, protesting the arrest of a fellow student for handing out leaflets on campus. An era of political protests followed--with some students decrying the atrocities of the Vietnam War and others championing the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers. The heated rhetoric and liberal tilt were a shock for a seventeen-year-old from a conservative Tennessee town that had a third of UC Berkeley''s population. Rhea''s GPA struggled that first year. Then the summer after her freshman year, she got a taste of a surgeon''s life. Her father, Edward, had been on the board of directors of a small hospital in her hometown, and he arranged for Rhea to get a summer job there. Originally, she''d planned to work in the ICU of the hospital''s new Coronary Care Unit, but its opening had been delayed. Instead, the doctors sent her to work in surgery.
Rhea was hooked from the start. She''d leveled up from peering into the open cavities of dissected frogs and rodents; now, she was staring inside the stomachs of actual patients. That job guided her when she entered medical school at the University of Tennessee in 1970, since, by then, she knew she wanted to follow the path of a surgeon. It was a path that almost didn''t happen. In college she''d almost gotten married, and even had a wedding date set. "Came close to the time of the wedding, and I said, ''Not going to work,''?" Rhea would later say. "He wants me to iron his shirts and stay at home and not go to work. So I backed out of the wedding.
" In hindsight, it turned out to be the right decision. In her first year, she''d been one of just six women in a class of more than one hundred. As she worked her way through school, her internship, and her residency, she got used to being surrounded by men. And while the idea of becoming a doctor was top of mind, she also had a hidden motive for going to medical school. Secretly, she wondered if it might lead to a future in space. In watching Sputnik careen across the sky, a seed had been planted. She figured that one day there''d be a future with space stations orbiting Earth, staffed with doctors. Perhaps she could be one of those doctors to live in space.
It had been the most minuscule thought, but it had stayed with her for years. And it was on her mind that early morning in the doctors'' lounge after the gunshot wound surgery. Smelling of body odor and other human fluids, Rhea contemplated if this was the life she really wanted. At that moment a neurosurgery resident named Russ waltzed into the lounge and sat next to her. He seemed to be having the same existential crisis as Rhea, and the two friends commiserated over their exhaustion. He then posed a question that many ask when their current situation seems dim. "What would you do if you weren''t doing this?" Rhea paused for a moment and then answered honestly. "I''d be an astronaut.
" It was perhaps the first time she''d ever said anything like that. To anyone else it may have been a strange response, but Russ had a surprising reply. "I used to work for NASA," he said. He explained his old job, though Rhea didn''t quite fully understand what he did. But Russ noted that he still kept in touch with his former coworkers in the space program. The conversation petered out from there, and the two residents eventually got up from their seats to finish their rounds. A couple weeks later, Rhea was back at the John, going through her typical day of opening human bodies and stitching them shut. At one point she saw Russ, who was rushing to his next surgery.
As the two passed each other, he suddenly remembered what Rhea had told him in the doctors'' lounge and stopped her. "Hey, some friends of mine say they''re taking applicants for the Space Shuttle program," he said. "I hear they have an affirmative action program!" He then hurried off without giving any more information. Rhea stood there stunned, a million questions running through her head. IT WAS AUGUST 1963 and Shannon Wells could almost taste freedom. In just two weeks, she was about to graduate from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor''s degree in chemistry. No more tests, no more papers. It was time to start thinking about actual employment.
But a.