Leaving Orbit (31 page)

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 1969 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:

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 too,” 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.

Serena tells me that every new astronaut is assigned a mentor when he or she arrives at Johnson Space Center in Houston, an experienced astronaut who can help gain entry to the sometimes-bewildering NASA culture with its alphabet soup of acronyms.

“That’s interesting,” I answer. “If it’s not inappropriate, can I ask who your mentor is?”

“Oh, sure. It’s Doug Hurley,” she says. Doug Hurley is a Right Stuff type Marine pilot who is scheduled to fly on
Atlantis
’s last mission. It’s interesting that she was assigned a mentor who was not a woman, not a minority, and not a scientist, despite there being plenty of astronauts in the corps who would meet one or more of those criteria. Maybe it means that things have progressed to a point where these factors are not as prominent as they once were, that Serena and Doug are well matched in terms of personality, or that they knew each other from Star City when Serena was his flight surgeon. “He’s someone I trust,” Serena says with genuine warmth in her voice.

I wonder what John Glenn thinks of this turn of events in the history of the astronaut, that getting along with others is now prized over lightning-fast reflexes or superhuman daring, that Serena’s place in the astronaut corps is so unremarkable that Doug Hurley, a Marine pilot like himself, would be assigned to mentor a nonpilot Hispanic woman, and that the two would be great friends. Later, I would read that when Doug Hurley’s wife, Karen Nyberg, flew her own mission to space, a six-month stint on the International Space Station, Hurley took care of their son. He shut down reporters’ attempts to define his parenting as an unusual or excessive burden—he pointed out to the Houston
Chronicle
, “Every other man up on the space station has children, too. Why is it different for her?” Yet as published, the piece focuses on his burdens over her accomplishments and bears the subtitle “Mr. Mom.”