American space program

Review: The Six

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The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush. New York: Scribner, 2023.

Summary: Traces the story of the first six American women astronauts from their selection, through their training and missions, along with the special media attention they received.

I grew up with the early space program. I followed the Mercury Seven. I made models of the rockets they flew. I didn’t dream of being an astronaut–maybe an engineer in the space program. I did not think at the time that there were women who thought about going into space–as an early chapter of this book states: “But Only Men Can Be Astronauts.” I didn’t know about the Mercury Thirteen–women who passed the same physical screening as the men–but were excluded from consideration. And so it would go through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. But women continued to dream of going into space. When the new space shuttle program was announced, the electrifying announcement came that applications would be open to women.

Loren Grush, a space reporter for Bloomberg News, brings us a well-researched account for the first six women who won places in the program in 1978–Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon. She begins by describing their astronaut dreams and the competencies they brought to the new group of astronauts–doctors, an oceanographer, engineers, a chemist among them. We follow each of the women as they learn of the opening, their decision to apply, and then as they participate in the finalist interviews and medical testing. Then came the call from George Abbey asking, “are you still interested in coming to work for NASA?”

Grush describes the media attention, the lame jokes by Johnny Carson and the questions no male astronaut would be asked. Ironically, the men felt kind of left out for once. The training began in earnest, and, with it, the challenge to convince everyone there that they could do the job. We see the deftness of several women in manipulating the robot arms that would be crucial in launching satellites and observatory platforms. They match the men, except none can fly in the front seat of the T-38s–women had not yet been allowed to qualify as military jet pilots–and so all were mission specialists and could not pilot a shuttle.

The question though was “who would be first.” While all counted it a privilege to be on any mission, only one could be first. While all the women are covered, particularly Judy Resnik, who later died on Challenger, Grush focuses special attention on Sally Ride as the first, the media pressure she faced, her growing ability to cope with it, and the success of the mission. We learn of her troubled marriage, and her awakening to her love for Tam O’Shaughnessy, making her the first LGBTQ+ person in space, as well as America’s first woman. Ride also played key roles in the Challenger investigation, including passing along crucial engineering information she’d been given focusing attention on the flawed O-rings that led to the fatal burn-through and explosion. She also played a crucial role in redefining NASA’s mission, including a focus on studying changes to our own planet, crucial in the decades of climate change ahead.

Grush offers accounts of the missions each woman was on, including Anna Fisher’s MacGyvered fix that was used to attempt to activate a satellite that did not activate as it should have and Kathy Sullivan and Dave Leetsma’s space walk practicing a delicate satellite fueling operation. The women demonstrated that they could handle whatever was assigned them. And there was evidence that Judy Resnik was the one who activated Captain Dick Scobee’s emergency oxygen, possibly giving him some extra moments of life as the Challenger cabin tumbled to the sea.

The Challenger accident comes toward the end of the book and the reactions of each of the surviving women is described. The shuttle program was paused as boosters were re-designed and safety protocols were reviewed. The women had done their work. Additional women joined the astronaut corp subsequent to the accident, including one who would pilot a shuttle. Grush traces the subsequent careers of the surviving five.

Grush has given us an account that is combination of history and six biographies. It is an account that shows six women spotlighted because they were women who simply wanted to do a job–which they did. Some were mothers and people questioned whether it was proper for them to be astronauts–something no one asked of the men who were fathers. They were a part of a generation who went from being excluded from jobs or paid less because of their gender to moving the needle toward a greater parity, something we have not totally achieved yet. But they showed there was no reason but our prejudices to keep women from reaching for the stars. Grush helps us realize just how much these women accomplished toward that dream.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: American Moonshot

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American Moonshot, Douglas Brinkley. New York: Harper, 2020.

Summary: A history of the American space program centering around John F. Kennedy’s embrace of the space race and goal that an American would walk on the moon by the end of the 1960’s.

Born in the 1950’s, I grew up loving rockets. I built models of rockets, launched rockets, and read about rockets. In first and second grade, I remembered televisions wheeled into our classrooms when Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space and John Glenn the first to orbit the earth three times. As fellow Ohioans, we were especially proud of Glenn, as we were that moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon–we stayed up to watch the landing and hear those words “That’s one small step for a man…”

In Douglas Brinkley’s book, I was able to relive all of that, as well as understand the history and personalities behind America’s race to the moon. Brinkley introduces us early to two central figures, John F. Kennedy and Werner von Braun, the former a war hero, the latter a German scientist who hitched his scientific aspirations in rocketry to Nazism, then escaped prosecution as a “paperclip” scientist brought to the U.S. for his expertise. Brinkley describes how the two would team up to drive America’s space program to new heights, even while making his own opinion clear that von Braun was a Nazi war criminal unworthy of enduring fame, despite his signal contributions to American rocketry culminating in the Saturn V and eventually the space shuttle boosters.

Brinkley casts this against the backdrop of the Cold War with the USSR and the space race kicked off with the launch of Sputnik, followed by the Soviet manned (and womaned) spaceflights with few answering U.S. accomplishments, although we rapidly surpassed the Soviets in satellite technology. These flights also underscored a feared threat of nuclear weapons in space and that the USSR would dominate space. This provided Kennedy an issue in the form of “the missile gap,” later shown to be spurious, that helped him win the 1960 presidential election. The Eisenhower administration had taken only slow, measured steps to develop space exploration.

Kennedy changed all that, facing the opposition of the former president, especially when he gave the speech at Rice University pledging the United States to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, galvanizing von Braun and those he worked with at Huntsville. The book narrates the efforts to create NASA, mobilize the funding, and under space administrator James Webb, build out the capacity to accomplish the complex task of figuring out how to actually do what Kennedy pledged. As Kennedy’s re-election approached, Brinkley describes the increasing resistance and efforts to cut NASA funding. Paradoxically, it was Kennedy’s death that saved the program as Lyndon Johnson carried it through. The book portrays the breadth of Kennedy’s vision–at once to meet the Soviet threat, to give the country a lofty goal, and to create a kind of technology infrastructure that would bolster the economy of a number of states and result in spinoff inventions that enhanced Americans lives from medical devices to microchips.

Another facet of the book were the first American astronauts, the Mercury Seven, who were our space pioneers and paved the way for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programs. It was fascinating to learn how deeply acquainted Kennedy became with the astronauts, hosting them collectively and individually at the White House. Some, like John Glenn, became family friends. It was Glenn who represented the astronauts at John Kennedy’s funeral, and who comforted the children of Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated. Those relationships, in turn, led to Glenn’s decision to pursue public service in a political career, serving as an Ohio Senator for three decades, attempting a run for president, and then returning to space in his seventies.

Because the book center’s around Kennedy’s role in the space program, the Gemini and Apollo launches are much more briefly covered, coming after Kennedy’s death, with the book ending with the Apollo 11 mission and the announcement that “the Eagle has landed” beating Kennedy’s goal by five months.

Douglas Brinkley pulls all these threads together around a study of presidential leadership in setting America a lofty goal wedding disciplined and courageous performance with technological innovation. While Brinkley doesn’t overlook it, one wonders if Lyndon Johnson deserves greater credit for bringing this program to fruition, if not being its inspiration. While telling a compelling story, Brinkley still left me wondering, was it worth it, particularly when what considers was not done with the tremendous outlay of money, further complicated by the Vietnam war? How important are national goals that capture the imagination and harness the resources of our best and brightest? How do we address the militarism and military industrial complex that grew around this program?

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which this was a “bright-shining moment,” a national effort that captured and held the country’s imagination. It was an exercise in presidential leadership, for which Brinkley has given us an in-depth case study. And for some of us, Brinkley’s book enables us to relive a decade of space exploration that is just as, if not more extraordinary, fifty to sixty years later as it was at the time.