Mercury 13

Mercury 13 (2018) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Heather Walsh and David Sington. In 1961, thirteen American women pilots completed the same rigorous space-readiness battery as the Mercury 7 astronauts — and were still cut.

Their numbers held up. Several outperformed the men they were tested alongside. None of it mattered: NASA's selection criteria called for a military jet test pilot qualification, and the U.S. military did not accept women. Jerrie Cobb, Wally Funk and the others who passed spent the following decades watching the men they'd matched become national icons.

The film is built on archival footage and first-person accounts from the women themselves. A chapter of the Space Race that the official record preferred to leave out. Stream Mercury 13 (2018) online on iFILM.