Promised the Moon

I borrowed Stephanie Nolen's 2002 Promised the Moon from my space race-obsessed younger daughter, and the title is a little misleading. Promised the Moon is the story of a group of American female pilots; but the first woman in space, by a country mile, was a Russian. Were these women 'in the space race' at all? It's arguable, because they didn't really even get close to going into space.

What happened was that the medical officer associated with the space program decided to see if women would be comparable to men in handling the rigours of space travel. This became an issue because NASA at the time needed to save every ounce of weight in the payload, because their first rockets were not that powerful. If a woman astronaut could replace a man, she'd be lighter. It was as simple as that. They tracked down an experienced (but still young) female pilot, and put her through the same tests that the male prospective astronauts had gone through, and she shone. In fact, her endurance and ability to deal with isolation were superior to the men. Plans to test a wider female cohort were put in place, and a dozen other women pilots went through the physical testing.

But then NASA pulled the plug. They didn't need any female astronauts after all; they had plenty of qualified blokes already; their rockets were more powerful now, so the weight factor no longer mattered. The women, who'd had their hopes raised, were cast aside.

Even though they didn't make it into space (except for Wally Funk, who flew on the New Shepard spacecraft in 2021 at the age of 82), these women were remarkable, battling a super-sexist industry to work as pilots. (Even in the 1970s, I don't remember encountering a single female pilot in all my father's years flying in PNG, and I well remember Debbie Wardley's fight to fly for Ansett in 1980.) But if the aviation world was sexist, the space industry was ten times more so. There was just no way that NASA was going to allow any little lady to steal thunder from their big strong brave hyper-masculine jet pilot astronauts. In many ways this is a sad story, but it's also a fascinating.
 

Orbital

There is a long queue at the local library for Booker Prize winner, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital, but I was able to find it on the shelf at the Athenaeum. Orbital traces a single twenty-four hour period on a space station circling high above the Earth, staffed by six astronauts; the space station loops around the planet sixteen times in the 'day.'

Orbital is an elegant, beautiful little novel with not a word out of place. It flows effortlessly between the very small -- tiny details of the astronauts' life in the cramped tin can -- and the very big -- the beauty of the continents viewed from space, without borders or any hint of human habitation, except for the city lights at night, and the vastness of the galaxy beyond. There is not much in the way of plot, but this is not a novel about story. It's a meditative, gorgeous, thoughtful voyage, compressing big ideas into a few pages.

Orbital has popped up on a few people's Top 10 books lists (the ABC is running a countdown of 21st century books at the moment ), and I can understand why. This is a book to treasure, and a worthy Booker winner.

The Six

The Six by Loren Grush is a book I probably wouldn't have picked up if my space-race obsessed daughter hadn't urged it on me, but it was an entertaining and educational read. 'The Six' were the first cohort of female astronauts recruited to NASA. The first generation of fighter pilot astronauts were less than impressed with the idea of women competing for their spots in space flights, and the women faced not only push-back from within NASA's ranks but also a lot of patronising and sexist media attention, which must have been pretty tedious. 

The women were all very different personalities and at different life stages -- some single, some married with kids, some straight and at least one gay. They didn't necessarily have much in common but their shared ambition to go to space (even though the Soviets had beaten them to it). But strong friendships and fellowship did spring up and (spoiler) they were all devastated when one of the first recruits, Judy Reznik, was killed in the terrible Challenger explosion in 1986. Sally Ride, another member of the group and the first to actually go to space, was instrumental in the following investigation. It was a sad note to end an otherwise upbeat story about some amazing women.
 

Cosmos, Then and Now

I was flicking through the channels last night when the screen filled with wheeling stars. 'Evie!' I yelled. 'Space!'

Evie loves space. She ran in to join me on the couch and I soon realised that we were watching the 2014 series of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The first episode had just begun, and Evie and I watched, entranced, as Tyson led us on a tour of our local galaxies, then the observable universe. Having explored the limits of space, he then conducted us on a nifty tour of time, that compressed the history of the cosmos to a single calendar year -- on this scale, the whole of human history takes place in the last few seconds of the last day of December. It really does blow your mind... Evie was transfixed.

During an ad break (they are useful sometimes) I told Evie that I'd been hooked on the first iteration of Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, which was produced in 1980 when I was only a couple of years older than Evie is now. And I was just as thrilled and enchanted by that version of the show, even though the effects weren't nearly as spectacular. It's the big concepts that are the real source of the magic, not the special effects.

And when the show resumed after the break, Neil Tyson told a lovely story about meeting Carl Sagan in person, when he, Tyson, was a 17 year old kid from the Bronx who dreamed of becoming a scientist. Sagan made time to take him on a tour of his lab, signed a book for him, escorted him to the bus stop. It brought the show into a beautiful, human-scale circle.

Evie and I can't wait for part 2.