Mercury 13 and new SBU Additions Tue, Apr 24, 2018

Hey everyone!! Filling in for Alex today.

I've added a few more fantastic books to the SBU audible account (Gabby will get the physical copies for the break room as well). A couple of these are books that I started to listen to after watching a new documentary up on Netflix called Mercury 13. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.

It chronicles a group of women in the 60s who trained for space flight. And wow is it impressive and inspiring. They underwent the exact same physical and psychological tests that NASA had the Mercury 7 undergo, and the women either matched or outperformed the first astronauts in almost every area. It is shocking to see the intense discrimination they were up against -- from male journalists at the time, as well as the original male astronauts, all the way to the top with Lyndon Johnson clearly pushing back against the Mercury 13 program.

Not to reveal too many spoilers, but the first woman in space ended up not being an American, but a Russian: Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited the Earth 48 times in 1960. We had to wait until 1983 to have the first American woman in space. 1983! Clearly we in the U.S. have been quite a bit slower in learning to treat all humans equally.  

Some of the SBU books I've added are by top female authors discussing strategies for empowering both women and men. Go check it out, highly recommended! Even today these are rough waters to navigate, for both women and men. The way I see it: our generation (that is, yours and my generation, all of us here) inherited a world from our parents & grandparents, a world that has quite a few battle scars, broken bones, and is far from perfect. It's our job to take it, and improve everything we can about it. Let's see if we can make it better than any generation before us. No more facepalm moments for the human race!

P.S. Here are the new SBU additions: