Stephanie Nolen
Promised the Moon
The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race

"Compelling reading … this is impossible to put down and deserves widespread attention." —Publishers Weekly

The world wasn't ready. Or at least the U.S. wasn't. In the early 1960s thirteen American women were invited to take the same battery of tests the male astronauts known as the Mercury 7 took. They were experienced pilots, ready to serve their country, and they all passed — sometimes outdoing their male counterparts. They assumed, with good reason, that they were being considered by NASA for the space program.

Thanks to political maneuvering on the highest level and a pre-feminist society that couldn't abide by the idea of women in space (unlike the Soviet Union, which launched Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova into space on Vostok 6 in June of 1963), astrophysicist Sally Ride would be the first American woman in space in 1983, and Eileen Collins would be the first to take the controls of an American spacecraft in 1994 — some twenty and thirty years after the "Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees" (FLAT) had all but abandoned their dreams of spaceflight.

Stephanie Nolen's Promised the Moon is a powerfully rendered account of the events surrounding this little-known chapter in history. Nolen, a foreign correspondent, has carefully researched her subject. She interviewed the eleven surviving women and vividly tells their stories. Most of the women didn't know why they had been called for the tests and what happened to the program until they read Promised the Moon when it was first published in Canada last year. Nolen puts the events in a cultural and political context, and she details the FLAT's lives, their struggles at home and on the job during a time when women weren't apt to work, let alone earn a living flying aircraft.

"Promised the Moon is sad and fascinating, and an invaluable addition to the history of space exploration." —Vancouver Magazine

Stephanie Nolen is a foreign correspondent for Canada's Globe and Mail and has recently covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is coauthor of Shakespeare's Face, published in 2002, and lives in Toronto.