Ollstein's They Promised Her the Moon
KPBS Midday Edition is a daily talk show hosted by Maureen Cavanaugh and Jade Hindmon, keeping San Diegans in the know on everything from politics to the arts.
Monday, April 8, 2019
The first all-woman spacewalk was canceled late last month because there weren’t enough correctly sized space suits prepared for the spacewalk at the International Space Station. Despite the blunder, NASA’s inclusion of women has improved dramatically since the space program began. Today, about one-third of NASA’s active astronauts are women—but it wasn’t always that way.
In the sixties, when NASA was training the first male American astronauts, a separate program was training 13 women. But the women never got the chance to go to space.
A play, “They Promised Her The Moon,” being staged through May 12 at The Old Globe, tells the true story of Jerrie Cobb, one of the women astronaut hopefuls known as the Mercury 13. Their name referenced the men’s group, the Mercury Seven. Despite outperforming her male counterparts during testing, Cobb never went to space.
Playwright Laurel Ollstein and Morgan Hallett, the actress who plays Cobb, join Midday Edition on Monday to discuss the inspiration for the play.