Leaving Orbit

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  Stories about astronauts are stories about risks. It is precisely the risks they take that make us admire them, that makes the wonders they encounter so wondrous. Tom Wolfe started writing about the Mercury astronauts after he met some of them at the last Apollo launch; in a foreword to The Right Stuff, Wolfe describes his motivation for writing the book: to understand what gave the astronauts the courage to undertake such daring missions. “What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle … and wait for someone to light the fuse?” The answer, as Wolfe constructs it, is the so-called Right Stuff. He uses an extended analogy with the ancient concept of single-combat warfare—the strongest combatant from each army would fight each other one-on-one. By doing so, the single-combat warrior took the burdens of an entire war upon himself, risked death so none of his countrymen would have to. At the same time, the single-combat warriors were “revered and extolled, songs and poems were written about them, every reasonable comfort and honor was given them, and women and children and even grown men were moved to tears in their presence.” More than the best and the brightest, more than role models, the Mercury astronauts embodied the best we were capable of. Astronauts still do. They are our avatars for our dreams of spaceflight, for our dreams of escaping Earth.

  Tom Wolfe defines the Right Stuff:

  The world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way.

  As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life…. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite.

  Yet Wolfe describes a growing concern among the astronauts: they were accustomed to testing themselves and besting one another through their flying, but the Mercury capsule itself would require no piloting. We tend to forget from our vantage point in history that even as the astronauts were chosen there was still controversy over whether space travel should involve humans at all. Robotic spacecraft could send back scientific data at half the cost, pragmatists pointed out; public opinion on the issue was divided. In 1960, President Eisenhower refused NASA’s request to fund the first steps in the proposed Apollo program—a three-man spacecraft and a rocket powerful enough to get to the moon—because his Science Advisory Committee had informed him that the motives for a moon shot involving astronauts were “emotional compulsions.” If this seems like a laugh line now that we know Apollo was in fact funded and did in fact carry out its missions successfully, it’s useful to keep in mind that this analysis was also pretty accurate.

  The debate over whether it’s important for humans to go to space is a debate about the dream lives of taxpayers. The scientists and engineers didn’t see the point of sending astronauts, but the people who romanticize spaceflight—the ones who want to see their science fiction fantasies come true—felt in their geeky hearts that sending astronauts to space, seeing human protagonists for our stories of leaving Earth, was in fact the whole point. And those geeks won. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon was devoured, and loved, by Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Goddard, the three geniuses who developed rocketry more or less simultaneously and in isolation from one another; it was also read and loved in childhood by Wernher von Braun, who developed the rocket that actually achieved the goal. Viewed from more than a century on, the most outlandish bit of invention in Verne’s novel is the idea that a flight to the moon could be funded entirely by a subscription service—regular citizens all over the world voluntarily paying into the project with no hope of being paid back.

  The Mercury Seven were so deluged with media requests for their time that they signed contracts with Life magazine for the exclusive right to their personal stories. Life paid them half a million dollars, a great deal of money for astronauts who were still living on military salaries, and gave them the added benefit of letting the astronauts and their managers at NASA control the story that reached the public. The Life contract did as much to cultivate and burnish the image of what it means to be an astronaut as anything else NASA did. One of the reporters for Life later admitted:

  I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking and never reported it. The guys wouldn’t have let me, and neither would NASA. It was common knowledge that several marriages hung together only because the men were afraid NASA would disapprove of divorce and take them off flights.

  As Wolfe describes it, the risks of single-combat warfare earned the astronauts certain privileges (“every reasonable comfort and honor”), and drinking and womanizing were among them. Historian Margaret Weitekamp writes, “Such macho excesses did not worry NASA decision makers. The space agency viewed this particular kind of manhood as part and parcel of the talents NASA needed.”

  I read The Right Stuff for the first time while I was researching my first novel. When I went back to the book before interviewing Serena Auñón, I found a note in the margin, in my own handwriting, that I didn’t remember writing: “A man is the opposite of a woman, and he is also the opposite of a monkey.” It was in a chapter about the astronauts’ medical testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Arizona. A monkey was going to make the first flight, attacking the definition of astronauts from one side; simultaneously, the definition was being attacked from the other side by women pilots who were demanding to know why they couldn’t be included in the space program.

  A strange precedent had been set in the early days of the airplane—promoters had encouraged women to learn to fly and to do so publicly, with the idea that seeing a woman in lipstick and heels climb into a cockpit and fly away would encourage the public to think of aviation as easy and safe. As a result, there was an unexpectedly high number of very qualified women pilots around the time the Mercury astronauts were chosen, and some of the women wanted to go to space. A small group organized themselves to approach NASA.

  The women were experienced pilots. Many of them had broken records; some had broken the sound barrier. Their efforts to get NASA to recognize them as potential astronaut candidates were met with evasion. When the women managed to gain access to the same rigorous physical and psychological testing the Mercury Seven had gone through at the Lovelace Clinic, thirteen of them passed. Some of the women beat records set by the men. By doing so, these thirteen women managed to create enough pressure that a congressional hearing was held to address the question of women joining the astronaut corps. In July 1962, only a few months after his triumphant orbital flight, John Glenn testified at the hearing and argued against the inclusion of women in space with a remarkable piece of circular logic:

  I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. It may be undesirable.

  Margaret Weitekamp notes that Glenn’s assertion of essentialism (“it is just a fact”) is at odds with his attempt to justify and explain these roles—not to mention his willful ignorance of the women testifying at the same hearing who did, in fact, “fly the airplanes.”

  Six of the seven Mercury astronauts got to fly in space, each of them setting a record or achieving a “first” of some kind. (The seventh, Deke Slayton, would get his chance on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.) Once the moon program was under way, five more classes of astronauts were chosen and trained. As their numbers grew, it became harder to keep track of their names and faces, as it had been possible to do when there were only seven. But the word astronaut still meant the same thing, and in July 1
969 everyone knew the names of the three men who were on their way to the moon to fulfill Kennedy’s challenge.

  The seventies were a dead period in the history of the American astronaut. Two projects were cooked up to use leftover Saturn V rockets that had been assembled before Apollo was canceled: Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. But no new astronauts were recruited between the class introduced in August 1969 and the new batch presented to the public in January 1978, over eight years later. By that time, the Mercury Seven were past fifty years old. This was during a period you may recall being associated with a “malaise” (though President Carter never actually used that term), a post-Vietnam distrust of anything having to do with the military or government. What it would mean to be an astronaut in this era would have to be different from what it meant for the Mercury astronauts.

  The new class of astronauts introduced in 1978, soon dubbed the Thirty-Five New Guys, was the largest astronaut class ever chosen and was profoundly different from the classes that had come before. The TFNGs were introduced at a press conference at Johnson, and their uniqueness as a class was apparent from the moment we set eyes on them. With larger crews of up to seven on each flight, the shuttle did not require that all astronauts be able to fly the spacecraft, removing the official barrier that had kept women out of the astronaut corps. Some of the new astronauts were doctors or scientists, some were women, and some were African American. One was Asian American. Two were Jewish. NASA had never had a policy against minority astronauts (just as it had not had a policy specifically prohibiting female astronauts), but the group of military test pilots from which potential astronauts had been drawn had included almost no minorities.

  For a bit of perspective: at the same time the Mercury astronauts were being chosen, a nine-year-old African American boy was being asked to leave his town’s whites-only public library in Lake City, South Carolina. Fourth-grader Ronald McNair refused to leave until he could check out the books he had chosen, prompting the librarian to call the police. McNair eventually earned a PhD in physics from MIT, was selected in the astronaut class of 1978, and flew in space for the first time in 1984. He was killed in the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. The library where he was once denied service is now named for him.

  The women astronauts were a late-seventies dream of second-wave feminism with their graduate degrees in science and engineering, their feathered hair and lip gloss. I thought they looked fantastic. Rhea Seddon even looked a little like my mother, with her blond flip and her petite frame. My mother had been one of the first women to graduate from her law school; Rhea Seddon was a surgeon and would be one of the first women to go to space. The role of astronaut, the role that defined masculinity like none other, was now open to young women, young mothers, even. To some people this meant an important barrier had fallen, as when as a few years later Sandra Day O’Connor would be appointed to the Supreme Court, and a few years after that Geraldine Ferraro would run for vice president. To many, the fact that space travel was now a challenge women were capable of facing meant that it was no longer exciting. Weitekamp: “the very presence of women in orbit would indicate that space no longer remained a battlefield for international prestige.” Wernher von Braun, asked about female astronauts in the sixties, had joked that the men in charge were “reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.”

  This is the odd thing about the shuttle era: it wasn’t only that the ranks of astronauts were infiltrated by women, nonwhites, nonmilitary, and nonpilots. It wasn’t only that the astronauts were now numerous and anonymous. More than that, the vehicle itself changed the nature of what it meant to fly in it. A vehicle that can only go to low Earth orbit, can come back safely to land on a runway, exactly as you and I do at our local unexciting airports, diminishes, for some, the entire meaning of spaceflight. Stories about astronauts are stories about risk. So if we imagine the risks to have changed, the astronauts had to have changed as well.

  As the program has gone on, thirteen more classes of astronauts have been chosen since that groundbreaking class of 1978, for a total of 335 American astronaut candidates altogether. Viewed another way: of all the American astronauts in the history of NASA, 55 were accepted into the corps during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo “heroic” era, and 266 were accepted during the shuttle era. Yet if you can name any of them off the top of your head, they are probably heroic-era astronauts, with the possible exception of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

  Part of what it means to be an astronaut today is that the “firsts” are all used up. Not only the first human in space, the first to orbit Earth, the first spacewalk, and the first to walk on the moon—these were all in the history books before Serena or I was born—but the demographic firsts as well. Serena Auñón is a Hispanic woman, but when she goes to space she will not be the first woman in space, the first astronaut of Hispanic descent in space, or the first Hispanic woman in space. Nor will she be a first for any of these categories to live on an orbiting space station. If she were to one day set foot on the moon, of course, she would be achieving any number of firsts (including first astronaut to walk on the moon who was born after the most recent moonwalk), but there are no plans for this under way. Maybe it’s a good thing for this crop of astronauts that they don’t have to go to space as representatives of demographic groups anymore—what sort of pressure did it put on Sally Ride not only to prepare for her own responsibilities on her mission but also to bear the burden of representing all female humans in history? When Serena goes to space she will bear no such burden; her every move will not be scrutinized as a data point in an argument about whether certain types of people can or can’t be astronauts. It’s been established that they can. She can go as herself.

  More than 3,500 people responded to the 2007 call for applicants for new astronauts. That pool was first culled for those who didn’t meet the basic requirements, then winnowed again. Semifinalists were brought to Houston in groups for interviews and medical tests. The finalists were brought back again for even more interviews. The screening process has put increased emphasis on psychological fitness since the scandal caused by Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who drove from Houston to the Cape with intent to harm the girlfriend of a fellow astronaut. NASA hopes to avoid future embarrassments like this one by identifying applicants with psychological problems, but everyone seems to agree that it’s impossible to predict who will and who will not crack under the pressure.

  The day of my appointment to talk to Serena Auñón on the phone, I type up a tidy list of questions to ask her. At the appointed time, I hang a sign on my office door warning people not to knock on it, then dial the number I was e-mailed by the Johnson Space Center media liaison. A few rings, then someone picks up.

  “Good morning, Astronaut Office?” a friendly female voice answers. This is a delightful way to answer a phone, I think, but I don’t say anything about it out loud. I’m suddenly taken back to Oriana Fallaci’s description of the Astronaut Office in 1967:

  [A] very long corridor with a lot of doors, each opening into the office of a new astronaut. Each door is generally wide open so that you can see the astronaut sitting at his desk surrounded by papers and pencils—say about twenty pencils to each astronaut. Why the astronauts should have so many pencils no one has ever been able to explain to me.

  I mention my appointment with Serena, and the woman puts me through. Serena answers on the first ring. She seems comfortable on the phone, more at ease than when I saw her at the rollout.

  “I’m going to be eating my lunch while I talk to you,” she announces with a smile in her voice. “So excuse me in advance if I make chewing sounds in your ear.” Even as an astronaut candidate who hasn’t been assigned to a flight yet, she is already on a busy schedule learning the systems on the ISS and the Soyuz, training for spacewalks in the underwater mockup, and studying the Russian language intensively. Serena is warm and friendly when I explain my nebulous-sounding project. “My mom is a novelist to
o,” she tells me, “and her name is also Margaret. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  I start out by asking her what made her want to become an astronaut. Serena answers that she was inspired by watching shuttle launches as a child and that when she told her parents she wanted to be an astronaut, they didn’t laugh at her. Her father encouraged her to study engineering, as he had. So she did, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, then went on to medical school and then to work as a flight surgeon for NASA. Serena tells me she didn’t make any choices specifically in order to make herself a more appealing candidate to be an astronaut; she says that at every stage she chose to follow her passion.

  I ask Serena whether there are personality traits that she and her fellow recruits have in common. I mention the Right Stuff stereotype and the way it seems to cling to the job.

  “Honestly,” Serena says, “the biggest thing I’ve found is that they’re all so down to earth it will shock you. You wouldn’t know walking in the door that this person has flown on the ISS. They are sisters and brothers and moms and dads and have all the same interests that other people do, like going to movies and going to sporting events.” She allows that while in the sixties NASA was looking for military pilots, the astronaut corps is now made up of “scientists, researchers, physicians … now when we look at flying to ISS, they really look at how people perform in extreme environments, how well they’re able to handle their own weaknesses, how people get along. That’s what they’re looking for.” In other words, NASA is no longer looking for the badass loner maverick cowboy; it is looking for team players, people who can keep from getting on each other’s nerves.