The Six was an extraordinary cohort of women recruited by NASA in the seventies. Ride was just one member of the Six. Greeted in Houston by make-up bags designed for use in space, no designated locker rooms and flight suits that didn't fit, they went on to break barriers on earth and in space. In 1983 Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space. Anna Fisher was assigned to her first space flight while pregnant. Judy Resnik was killed in the Challenger explosion in 1986. But her legacy - and that of all the Six - lives on. This sparkling history reveals their journey through NASA's outreach programme, rigorous tests and training, sexism, press attention, and the solidarity with which they overcame obstacles and launched into space.

The remarkable true story of America's first women astronauts 'Suspenseful, meticulously observed... encompasses the talent, ambition and perseverance of America's first female astronauts' Margot Lee Shetterly, bestselling author of Hidden Figures 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 too fragile for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA relented and opened the application process to everyone, regardless of race or gender. From a 1977 candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected - 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.