Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

And isn’t that what Ginny is doing? Letting her man lead the way. Of course she’s not qualified to be an astronaut—she watches her weight and tries to exercise, but she’s no athlete; and she cannot fly an airplane, there is only one licenced pilot in the AWC, and that’s Trudy.

But now that Ginny considers it, as she stands inside the lunar module simulator, it occurs to her that while she can never become an astronaut herself there’s no reason why she can’t write about them. Not something like Judith’s story about the tramp spaceship with the male doctor in an otherwise all-female crew, a story that has been a perennial favourite since its original appearance a decade before. No, Ginny is thinking of something much closer to home, a space program much like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, those first faltering steps into space… but by women.

The more she thinks about it, the more she likes the idea. She has access to much of the material Walden is using in his training, she can probably get hold of some press kits, and she can use it for research, for the background to her stories. And the more she finds out, the more she understands what an astronaut is and does, the more she will be a better partner to Walden, understand his frustrations, emotionally support him.

It doesn’t occur to her until later that perhaps Walden will object to Ginny “interfering” in his area of expertise. He is the astronaut in the family, she is the wife. As a military man, Walden has always been keen on well-defined areas of responsibility—his den is out of bounds, her dressing-room is of no interest to him; the mess he makes it is her job to tidy up, any mess she might make is, of course, her job to clean up…

They exit the LM simulator and as Ginny stands at the top of the steps, she asks, Are they the same? The other two simulators?

They’re command modules, Walden replies.

Oh, can I see inside one of those?

Walden glances across at the LM simulator console, there’s a lone pencil-neck with his head down, busy doing something, programming perhaps. I guess, Walden says.

But the CM simulator is accessed via a steep ladder leading up to a hatch in the side of the cone-shaped spacecraft. There’s no way Ginny can climb that in her high-heeled pumps, so she slips them off, hands them to Walden, and starts up the ladder. She looks back over her shoulder, and there are a couple of guys over at one of the computer banks and they’re gazing in her direction, so she puts a hand to her skirt to keep it pressed against the back of her legs. It’s an inelegant scramble to get through the hatch and inside the CM, and it’s such a cramped space in there, she can’t believe three grown men—in spacesuits!—will fly to the Moon in it, even she has to duck her head. She works her way round to where three seats in a row gaze up at a wide instrument panel covered in switches and dials and meters and barber poles; and there’s the diskey, recognising it makes her smile. But just then she feels something catch her calf, and she looks down and says, Oh shoot. She has snagged her nylons on something and now there’s a run up one leg from the heel to the back of her knee. She can’t be seen around the MSC like that, so she hikes up her skirt, slips her fingers under the waistband of her pantyhose—

Jeez, Ginny!

It’s Walden, filling the hatchway.

What the hell are you doing?

She peels off her hose, an awkward manoeuvre in the tight space, scrunches it up and passes it to her husband, asking, Can you put this in your pocket?

On the way back to the parking lot, Walden and Ginny bump into Al Shepard, the first American into space. She’s heard the stories about the “icy commander” but they must have caught him on a good day, he is charm itself, shaking Walden’s hand vigorously, flashing a boyish grin at Ginny, maybe even flirting with her a little.

Afterward, Ginny can’t help saying, Fancy meeting Alan Shepard, a real astronaut!

I’m a real astronaut too, protests Walden.

She hugs his arm with both hands and pecks him on the cheek. Sorry, darling, she tells him, I just meant he’s been into space; but you will too, Walden, I know you will.

But she’s thinking about someone else going into space, someone who is not real.

Dear Mr. Pohl,

V. G. Parker’s February story, “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” deserves some comments on its frankly bizarre approach to telling what could have been a sound and ingenious piece of science fiction. Much as we may love them, wives have no place in serious science fiction. Or, if they must appear, it should be in the background, nobly supporting their men. But Mr. Parker, for reasons best known only to himself, decides that rather than science and engineering we should be presented with womanly gossip and high heels. Perhaps he thought he was being clever.

If that’s his excuse, I have no idea what might be your excuse for publishing this story. Your male readers greatly outnumber your female readers, and that’s a stone-cold fact. We are not in the littlest bit interested in women’s affairs. If we wanted that, we would be reading a woman’s magazine and not Galaxy.

Soon after, Walden is invited to join the support crew for the Apollo 10 mission, which is the one that will be going to the Moon but not actually landing on it. There is some sort of rota which NASA uses to determine who flies when and on which mission. Because Walden has been picked for a support crew, he thinks the chances are good he will get an actual flight. Or so he tells Ginny. Tom picked him for this support crew, that’s evidence of Tom’s confidence in his abilities, Walden is sure of it. For Ginny, it makes more real the prospect of her husband going to the Moon, and while before she felt proud and honoured, now she begins to feel a little bit afraid.

It’s not like spaceflight has proven any more dangerous than she’d imagined—Apollo 1 happened on the ground, after all; although everyone still bears the scars of the tragedy. The Soviets have lost only a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who plummetted to the ground from orbit and scuttlebutt has it he was cursing all the way down. But Apollo 7 launches safely in October, and three guys spend ten days in orbit testing all the systems in the re-designed command module.

Ginny, accompanying Pam and Mary, drops by Loella’s house, and she sits in the Cunninghams’ lounge, sipping coffee, the other women also smoking cigarettes, and though Loella casts an occasional worried glance at the NASA squawk box on the dresser, the conversation mostly confines itself to gossip about the AWC. They don’t talk about the Vietnam War, though they know women from their air force, navy and marine corps days whose husbands are over there fighting. They don’t mention the protest in Atlantic City against the Miss America pageant—after all, what do they have in common with those women, the protestors or the contestants? The Olympics in Mexico City, the opening ceremony was the day after the Apollo 7 launch, doesn’t enter the conversation. This is the year in which both Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and now, months later, neither event is ever mentioned at the AWC. Oh, there was a peace march through Houston after King’s death, and the Houston Chronicle claimed an astronaut participated…

This is Togethersville and talk runs along well-worn rails: Apollo flights, home life, church, children… A practiced litany of domestic details with ample opportunity for sympathy, humour, boasting and envy. Ginny lets the words wash over her, there’s something about Wally and Donn, the flight’s not going well and the way they’ve been talking back to Houston, it could be the end of their careers.