Lovelace Health System is a healthcare company which operates six hospitals in New Mexico, five in Albuquerque and one in Roswell. It is one of New Mexico's largest employers with 3,659 employees as of 2020. The company grew out of the Lovelace Clinic founded in 1922, one of the pioneers of group medical practice in the United States. The clinic was best known for conducting physical evaluations of 32 astronaut candidates in 1959 which helped to select the Mercury Seven, the first Americans to travel into space. The clinic also administered testing for an unofficial "women in space" program, during which 13 women—later nicknamed the Mercury 13—were named as prospective astronauts, though they never traveled to space.

The Mercury 13 were thirteen American women who took part in a privately funded research program run by NASA physician William Randolph Lovelace II in 1959-1960, which aimed to test and screen women for spaceflight. The first participant, pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb helped Lovelace identify and recruit the others. The participants successfully underwent the same physiological screening tests as had the astronauts selected by NASA for Project Mercury. While Lovelace called the project Woman in Space Program, the thirteen women decades later became known as the "Mercury 13"— a term coined in 1995 as a comparison to the Mercury Seven astronauts. The Mercury 13 women were not allowed in NASA's official astronaut program, and at the time, never trained as a group, nor flew in space.