The Six is about 6 women who were NASA Astronauts. As a girl who would love to be an astronaut myself, I am always excited to read about some of the women who have paved the way, whether it ends up being a path I can actually follow them down or not. This was a long book and full of a LOT of details and information which made it difficult for me to really get into at times and it took me quite some time to make my way through it. But a lot of the things they had to go through being women hit home for me as I am also a woman in a male-dominated field – but we can do everything they can – if not moreso!
This book contains some great stories about some remarkable women so if you’re as interested in bad ass women and space as I am, definitely check out this book!
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
In the bestselling tradition of Hidden Figures and Code Girls, the remarkable true story of America’s first women astronauts—six extraordinary women, each making history going to orbit aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle.
When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.
In The Six, acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride’s history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.