Participated in Lovelace Clinic astronaut testing

Also in 1961, Betty Miller participated in tests at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, helping establish physical standards for women astronaut candidates. The available sources identify the year but do not preserve a precise date, so this event is recorded as a year-only milestone.

This participation is historically significant because it connected a working woman pilot to one of the earliest efforts to evaluate whether women could meet astronaut requirements. In the context of the space race, medical testing and physical qualification were crucial gatekeeping tools. Women were often excluded not because of demonstrated inability, but because institutions built their standards around male military test pilots and then treated those standards as neutral.

Miller’s involvement therefore belongs to the larger history of women’s attempts to enter aerospace medicine and spaceflight. Although the testing did not open the astronaut corps to women at the time, it contributed to the evidentiary record that later generations would use in arguments for equal access. The episode also illustrates how women aviators were sometimes asked to prove not only that they could fly, but that their bodies could meet institutional expectations designed without them in mind.