Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

She thinks perhaps it’s because science fiction fans don’t get together, they don’t meet up, their husbands likely wouldn’t allow it, fathers would certainly not let teenage daughters travel to other cities alone to visit other science fiction fans. Maybe there are small literary circles dedicated to science fiction at some universities, perhaps some of them even have male members… But fandom as such, it can’t even decide on an award, they’ve been discussing it since the late fifties, but who to name it for? Francis Stevens? She was prolific and popular during the first two decades of the century, she arguably invented science fiction; but perhaps they should use her real name, Gertrude Burrows Bennett? Or, how about a long-established and successful living author? Alice Norton? Catherine Moore? And there were those writers who were successful back in the 1930s, just as the science fiction magazines began to appear, like Leslie F Stone and Claire Winger Harris and Hazel Heald…

Lurton rushes up and holds out a hand for Ginny, and she’s pulled from her husband’s side and over to a group of wives, and someone pushes another cocktail into her hand, and as she hears the topic of conversation—it’s Togethersville gossip, of course, divorces and separations, but it’s also about the upcoming Apollo 11 and Neil, standing over there by the barbecue, he’s going to be the first man to set foot on the Moon … Janet doesn’t know whether to be proud or frightened, and so settles for both, and though Janet and Lurton are firm friends, no one really knows Neil, who is often almost inhumanly distant—so much so David Scott mistakenly ascribes to him Pete Conrad’s motto, “if you can’t be good, be colourful”, in the autobiography Scott shares with Alexei Leonov, Two Sides of the Moon .

And it all brings Ginny abruptly back to Earth and it’s a rapid enough descent to make her head spin. Which she blames on the drink, as she puts a hand up to her mouth and gives a sheepish grin.

Nineteen sixty-nine is a red letter year, the year a man first sets foot on the Moon, the year NASA, the people of the United States of America, make good on their president’s promise, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 launched the previous year, of course—and who can forget Bill, Jim and Frank reading verses from the Book of Genesis 234,474 miles from the Earth? Apollo 9, a month before the Scotts’ luau, was almost routine by comparison.

At the beginning of the decade, the Space Race was exciting, it captured the public’s imagination. Alan Shepard, the first American but the second man into space, spent only fifteen minutes in a suborbital hop, he met the president, who gave him a medal. John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, they all had ticker tape parades in New York. The Gemini flights weren’t so glamorous, nothing could ever be “routine” about spaceflight, but they were no longer front page news, the astronauts who flew them didn’t go on world tours. Sure, everyone had to spend some time “in the barrel”, and even Walden has given talks to high schools and plant workers.

But the Apollo flights are different. America is in front, they’re beating the Soviets. It puts the astronauts back in the headlines. Frank, Bill and Jim even get a ticker tape parade after their trip around the Moon.

Ginny, of course, is still pretty much a nobody—she’s sort of famous because she’s an astronaut wife, but Walden Jefferson Eckhardt is only one of fifty-four astronauts and he’s never flown so no one is really all that eager to interview Ginny or snap photographs of her. None of the reporters, of course, know about her career as Virginia G Parker—she can just imagine the magazine articles if they ever found out.

As backup to Apollo 12’s LMP, Al Bean—Ginny is aware of Pete Conrad’s crew, with their matching gold and black Corvettes, but she knows the wives only in passing—Walden is at the Cape pretty much all the time. She understands he might have to take Al’s place, and she’d want him as prepared as possible should such an eventuality arise… To be honest, she’s used to it now, she’s used to being left on her own for weeks, seeing her husband only infrequently. The house keeps her busy—my God, the endless housework—the AWC is there when she feels the need for company, and the new sense of purpose she has brought to her writing is proving the sort of intellectual challenge she now realises she has been missing. For those long busy months of 1969, as spring fades and summer threatens to throw a blanket of muggy heat over Houston, Ginny is happier than she has ever been. Though she has never thought of herself as a homemaker, she is proud of their home, proud of the hand she played in creating it; and she is beginning to enjoy her reflected minor celebrity, the wife of an astronaut who will probably go to the Moon, even if it has yet to be officially confirmed.

In May, Apollo 10 launches, and its crew of three make the quarter of a million mile journey to the Moon, and then descend to within ten miles of its surface. But they do not land. Ginny visits Faye during the flight, sitting on the sofa, trying to listen to the other women present and the squawk box at the same time. But really she wants Walden home so she can ask him to explain what is going on. She hears something over the squawk box and it sounds like: Okay, it’s attitude control three mode control … commander is four jet … when you hit hard over here it’s going to be hot fire.

But Walden is not in Houston, and though Ginny can find her way around a diagram of the lunar module, and make an educated guess at some of the workings depicted in sub-system diagrams, much of the astronauts’ speech is impenetrable, full of acronyms and terms she doesn’t understand. What she needs is a glossary and a legend for the acronyms.

As the mission progresses, a day in orbit, three days travelling to the Moon, Ginny feels Walden’s absence keenly, they should be experiencing this together, Apollo 10 validates everything that has happened since he applied to NASA, since they moved to Houston. Ginny wants to share the excitement—and not just with the other wives, whose responses are… complicated . Faye and the two Barbaras fear for their husbands’ safety but are also proud of their achievement—every other wife is just frightened at the prospect of their own husband up there, reliant upon something built by the lowest bidder… Though they may all profess to be “proud, thrilled and happy”, that’s only for the sake of the press. Certainly those three sentiments are present, but they are only part of a potent rocket fuel of emotions.

I am, incidentally, indulging in some artistic licence here. In his autobiography We Have Capture , commander Tom Stafford makes absolutely no mention of his wife and daughters during his discussion of the Apollo 10 flight. And Lily Koppel in The Astronaut Wives Club skips straight from Apollo 8 to Apollo 11. But it seems to me the mission should play an important role in Ginny’s journey of discovery, an almost metaphorical role—in a story in which the US space program has been put to more than its fair share of metaphorical uses…

Ginny fears for the Apollo 10 astronauts because they are using the same hardware her husband will be using when he goes to the Moon; but she is also frightened they might fail, and so the program will be cancelled and Walden will never set foot on the lunar surface. And then there’s what she knows about the spacecraft… So many things that could go wrong, that could fail at any point during the mission and spell death for the crew, even with all the triple redundancies.