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THE SIX: The Untold Story of America’s First Ladies Astronauts, by Loren Grush
It’s troublesome to think about a spot extra coded as masculine than the cockpit of a rocket ship. The tales of the area race enshrined in American historical past too usually middle on white males and elevate machismo. From the primary pages of “The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Ladies Astronauts,” the science journalist Loren Grush reclaims this place as feminine.
“The Six” opens with a quiet scene. Anna Fisher, eight months pregnant along with her daughter, takes an in a single day shift within the area shuttle Challenger on June 17, 1983, guarding its switches and buttons upfront of the morning launch. A pregnant astronaut, writes Grush, had by no means earlier than been doable; astronauts had all been males. It’s a midnight vigil, however not a solitary one: The following era dwells there, too.
Fisher wouldn’t fly that morning. The respect of being first would go to Sally Experience. However Grush insists on equal recognition for the 5 girls who adopted her: Judy Resnik, Kathy Sullivan, Fisher, Rhea Seddon and Shannon Lucid. “The Six” joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1978, the primary class to permit girls. Although every flew to area individually, they had been a cohort, who knew their successes or failures would form the destinies of generations of ladies to come back.
Grush skillfully weaves a narrative that, at its coronary heart, is about need: not a nation’s need to overcome area, however the longing of six girls to achieve heights that had been forbidden to them — actually, to fly.
When the Soviet Union put the first man in area in 1961, the USA rallied to repeat the feat simply 23 days later. The primary Soviet lady in area, Valentina Tereshkova, spurred no related surge in innovation; as an alternative, American journalists derided her “plump determine” and lack of lipstick. NASA’s insistence on utilizing navy take a look at pilots for astronauts was a de facto ban of ladies, as had been deeply held beliefs about what the astronaut John Glenn termed “a reality of our social order.”
Then NASA developed the area shuttle, meant to be “a paradigm-changing transition from one thing harmful and costly to an endeavor that was low cost, routine and secure.” With the shuttle got here a brand new kind of astronaut, “mission specialists” who could possibly be scientists, engineers or medical doctors. In 1976, pushed by champions for range each inside and out of doors the company, NASA invited girls to use.
A six-pronged biography is essentially sweeping fairly than intimate, and it’s onerous to not need to know extra about every lady’s motivations and hesitations. Grush’s richly researched account shines when she will be able to provide these insights. She dwells on the exact second when every of the Six realized she may apply to be an astronaut, the success of a childhood dream. The 1978 class, although dominated by 25 white males, “was the closest NASA had ever come,” Grush writes, “to choosing astronauts who mirrored the true make-up of America.”
She resists the urge to place the Six on a pedestal, and avoids Hollywoodizing their relationships with each other. They had been neither shut pals nor fierce opponents, Grush writes, however fairly “trusted co-workers” who “may type a united entrance after they wanted.”
They confronted sexist information media consideration — usually with cool logic, although Resnik stands out for her pleasant snark — and handled chauvinist hypothesis about romance and intercourse in area. Experience’s story shines, not as a result of she was first, however for her battle to guard her privateness and psychological well being amid the media frenzy. Fisher, too, offers a glimpse of the generally painful rigidity between the non-public {and professional}; getting ready for a dramatic shuttle mission to retrieve two failed satellites, she sneaks away from Mission Management to pump breast milk.
“The Six” additionally gives temporary however poignant roles to champions reminiscent of Ruth Bates Harris, a NASA worker who bravely blasted her superiors for his or her “near-total failure” in welcoming range; the Mercury 13, a bunch of ladies who underwent rigorous bodily and psychological testing in 1960-61 to show they might meet the necessities to be astronauts; and Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura from “Star Trek”), who declared in a NASA recruitment video: “I’m talking to the entire household of humankind — minorities and ladies alike.”
The day-to-day work of the astronauts — surprisingly mundane — makes for fascinating studying. The ladies take a look at spacesuits, maneuver a robotic arm and work out the quirks of interacting with male colleagues who maintain pinup calendars on their workplace doorways. The spaceflights themselves comprise loads of drama and hazard.
Anybody acquainted with the 1986 Challenger catastrophe will really feel a chill when Grush first mentions the rubber O-rings meant to stop catastrophic explosions throughout launch. Delicate foreshadowing reminds readers that — regardless of NASA’s purpose to create space journey “low cost, routine and secure” — advanced engineering all the time includes threat. Resnik finally gave her life for the dream of spaceflight.
It’s daring to finish a ebook on tragedy fairly than triumph. But it surely provides heartbreaking emphasis to Grush’s level: “Braveness and perseverance in essentially the most pressure-filled conditions,” she writes, “aren’t traits which are unique to a single gender or race.”
Like area journey itself, “The Six” widens our imaginative and prescient of what it means to belong to “the entire household of humankind.”
Melissa L. Sevigny is a science journalist and writer of three books, most not too long ago “Courageous the Wild River.”
THE SIX: The Untold Story of America’s First Ladies Astronauts | By Loren Grush | 432 pp. | Scribner | $32.50
