SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
JOAN’S YOUNGER SISTER, BARBARA, HAD CALLED HER ONE MORNING TO tell her about a commercial she’d seen on TV late the previous night.
”It said, “This is your NASA.”
”What?” Joan said. She was in her kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She was about to head to the car. Her first class of the day at Rice University was a survey course on the cosmos, offered to freshmen of all majors. Although she had a PhD focusing on an analysis of magnetic struc-tures in the solar corona, she was spending her expertise teaching eighteen-year-olds the definition of a parsec. But, as her department chair had pointed out when she’d gently asked for a different assign-ment, “someone has to do it.” Apparently that someone just so hap-pened to be the only woman in the department.
”What do you mean, “This is your NASA?”
”That’s what she said, the woman from Star Trek. Hold on, I wrote it down somewhere. I saw the commercial just before putting Frances to bed, but I was able to grab a pen before it was over. Here it is: “This is your NASA, a space agency embarked on a mission to improve the quality of life on planet Earth right now.’ It was Nichelle
Nichols-that’s her name! That was driving me crazy. They are re-cruiting astronauts. Scientists. To go up into space. They specifically said they wanted women.”
Joan put the lid on her coffee. “They said female scientists?”
When Joan was twelve, she had read a newspaper article men-tioning the FLATs-First Lady Astronaut Trainees, involved in what was known as the Women in Space Program. That group of thirteen women had been privately tested and trained by William Randolph Lovelace II, the same physician who had helped select the Mercury program astronauts. He’d done it on his own, outside of NASA, in hopes that the organization might recognize the potential of female candidates.
But the article where Joan first read about the program was the same article in which she learned of its demise. The FLATs needed NASA’s approval in order to be granted permission to complete their testing at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine. Days before they were scheduled to arrive, they were notified that NASA would not pprove the request.
A congressional hearing in which many of the women testified about gender discrimination did nothing to change the NASA ad-ministrator’s mind. John Glenn had even been quoted as saying that women not being accepted as astronauts was “a fact of our social order.”
Joan had spent a lifetime of looking up at the stars, but had not imagined herself in a space suit in a very long time.
”They definitely said ‘scientist’ and they definitely said ‘women,” Barbara told her.
Joan put down her coffee and took the phone from her shoulder into her hand. “You really think I could be an astronaut?” Joan said.
”You study the stars. Who else could they possibly be asking for?”
”I don’t know. I… You really think I should apply?” Joan asked.
Barbara sighed. “Oh, forget it. You’ve zapped all the fun out of it,” she said and hung up.
As the dial tone kicked in, Joan took the phone from her ear,
slowly put it in its cradle, and kept her hand on it for a moment, star-ing at the receiver.
Two weeks later, without telling Barbara, she requested an ap-plication.
As she filled it out, she could barely look at it directly. Me, an astronaut. And yet. She went to the library to xerox her documenta-tion, then stuffed it all into a nine-by-twelve envelope-a summary, thus far, of everything she’d accomplished on Earth.
She walked to the post office and, without allowing herself to agonize any further, dropped it into the mail slot.
That January, Joan walked out her front door on the way to teach another introductory-level course and saw a newspaper in the apart-ment complex’s driveway. She picked it up and noticed the headline below the fold.
”NASA CHOOSES 35 NEW ASTRONAUT CANDIDATES, INCLUDING SIX WOMEN.”
Joan swallowed hard as her eyes began to sting. She got into her car, threw the newspaper onto the passenger seat, and stared at the steering wheel for seventeen minutes.
It was the only time in her career she had been late to a class.
A YEAR LATER, IN 1979, Joan was walking into the lounge when she overheard Dr. Siskin, her department chair, mention to a fellow profes-sor that NASA had opened up its astronaut applications again and that they were specifically looking for astronomers and astrophysi-cists.
She pretended to be searching in the refrigerator for her lunch but, instead, considered her options. Ten minutes later, she was at her desk, writing to request another application.
That year, one hundred and twenty-one applicants were invited-in groups of twenty-for a week of interviews at the Johnson Space Center.
This time, one of them was Joan.
The first night, Joan checked into the Sheraton Kings Inn and got settled in her room. She was ten minutes early for the evening orien-tation.
She was the third person to sit down. The two already seated were men, and both looked to be military. Then, just behind Joan, another woman walked into the room.
The woman had curly brown hair and light brown eyes, which looked especially striking with the olive-green button-up shirt she was wearing. There was a thin gold chain around her neck.
She sat down just a few seats away from Joan. This woman did not smile or say hello. Joan had no particular reason to feel a connec-tion to her except that, now, Joan was no longer the only woman in the room.
Joan watched as more people filed in. Soon a set of classifications emerged in her mind: scientist and military. Later, Steve Hagen would make it even simpler: “The astronaut corps has two types: dorks and soldiers.” Still, that evening, Joan could not classify the woman in the olive-green shirt.
A man at the front cleared his throat. He had salt-and-pepper hair, closely cropped and combed to the side, with a mustache that was beginning to gray as well.
”I am Antonio Lima, the director of flight at the Astronaut Of-fice,” he said. “Welcome, everyone.”
Joan looked around, seeing them all from what she imagined of his perspective. They all must seem so green.
”If you made it here today, you are one of the select few appli-cants who we believe may be an asset to NASA and to this nation. Over the course of the next week, you will be assessed in terms of your unique abilities and how they may be a benefit to the larger as-tronaut corps. Our astronaut candidates those of you who are for-tunate enough to be chosen to join the training here at NASA-must be physically fit and mentally sound, as well as superlatively prepared for the task that lies ahead.”
Just then, a man snuck into the room, taking the chair closest to the door. Joan looked at her watch. He was two minutes late. Cer-tainly this man knew that he was done for.
”You are here,” Antonio continued, “because NASA is about to embark on its greatest and most groundbreaking enterprise yet: the space shuttle program. Until now, space exploration has been exceр-tional. It has been rare. Soon it will become routine.”
Antonio lifted the cover off the easel and showed a blueprint of a spacecraft. Everyone in the room leaned forward. Joan was familiar with the concept of the shuttle, but learning this level of detail about how it would work made her pulse quicken.
”The shuttles are the first spacecraft in NASA history designed to be reusable,” he said. “With a fleet of shuttles, we can fly into low space orbit over and over again. Launches will happen monthly, even weekly. We will carry cargo to deploy to space. We will perform ex-periments. Eventually, we believe, we will establish a permanent pres-ence in space, including a space station and manned flights to Mars, built by the shuttle missions we are developing today.”
Antonio grabbed the pointer from the easel.
”This is the orbiter,” he said, pointing to the bulk of the shuttle. “It will launch with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters, one on each side.” He removed the top diagram to show another, more complex one.
”Once the shuttle is launched, the external gas tank and the solid rocket boosters will fall away. And the orbiter will enter low-Earth orbit. As for the crew .” He pointed to the nose of the orbiter. “They will occupy the flight deck here and the mid-deck here.”
The flight and mid-decks were tiny compared to the rest of the orbiter. Joan was starting to get a sense of scale, and she could not keep a smile from escaping.
”Once in orbit, the shuttle will be traveling at approximately five miles a second at a typical altitude of around two hundred miles, circling Earth every ninety minutes. After the astronauts have com-
pleted their mission, they will return to Earth. Unlike previous pro-grams here at NASA, we will not be using a splashdown landing in the water. Instead, upon successful reentry into the atmosphere, the shuttle will fly-much like an airplane-and land, wheels down, at one of our bases.”
Antonio stepped back and allowed everyone to take that in. Then he resumed his introduction:
”By now I hope you have surmised that you are looking at a space-craft unlike anything we’ve seen before. The shuttle is not one piece of machinery. It is three. On launch, it is a rocket. In orbit, it is a spaceship. On landing, it is an airplane. This is what will allow us to usher in the future of space exploration.”
Joan felt a flutter in her belly. It was the same feeling she’d gotten the first time she saw the glowing band of the Milky Way when her parents took her to Joshua Tree as a child.
”Our missions here at NASA are not without risk,” Antonio said. “You will put your life into the hands of your directors and your fellow astronauts, as well as the researchers and engineers who make space exploration possible. But, if chosen, you may become one of a very small number of people who can say they have left the Earth and who can report back to the rest of us on what our planet looks like from afar. You will usher us into the future. I can assure you that this will be the greatest technological achievement in the history of NASA. It may well be the greatest endeavor in the history of man-kind.”
Joan tried to process just how close this opportunity was to her grasp, but as she did, her eyes met those of the woman with the curly hair, a few seats away. The two of them held each other’s gaze for a moment.
Was this really happening?
That week, she sat for heart-rate monitoring, hearing and vision tests, blood draws, and full assessments from the flight surgeons. Her body was poked and prodded in ways that shocked her.
But she was determined to show all of her NASA evaluators that what she had to offer was exactly what they needed: determined, stoic composure.
She stepped onto a treadmill connected to electrodes and ran for over five miles before even beginning to slow down.
She sat for interviews in which the intense tone made even a question like “Would you like me to turn down the thermostat?” seem complicated to answer. She spoke calmly and clearly as she answered each one.
Joan’s favorite part of the week was when she was put in a suit and instructed to climb into a three-foot-wide white fabric ball. Her only source of air was an oxygen tank. She was ordered to stay in there for fifteen minutes. The moment Joan got in and could feel the quiet solitude of the ball, she understood.
It wasn’t a test of dexterity or mechanical aptitude. They wanted to see if she’d freak out, unable to stand the sensory deprivation and claustrophobia. She smiled to herself. Piece of cake.
She fell asleep.
ONE EVENING TWO MONTHS LATER, the phone in her apartment rang. Joan was eating Chinese food and sketching a portrait of Frances to give Barbara as a birthday present. She put the pencil down and walked to the phone.
It was Antonio. “Are you still interested in joining the astronaut corps at NASA?” he said.
Joan looked up at the ceiling and steadied her voice. It was the closest thing she’d ever felt to the way women look in the movies when they are proposed to. “Yes,” she said. “Absolutely yes.”
”Good, we are lucky to have you on board, Joan. There are sixteen of you who will be joining us here in Group 9. Eight candidate pilots and eight candidate mission specialists, such as yourself. I am not sure if you got to know Vanessa Ford during your time here at JSC,
but she was in the same interview group with you. She also made the cut and has accepted. You two are the only finalists to make it through from that session.”
”No men from our group, huh?” Joan asked, and then could not quite believe she’d let that slip.
But Antonio laughed. “No,” he said. “I am afraid they were not up to snuff.”