Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

• Air Force Commendation Medal

• NASA Distinguished Service Medal

• Command Pilot Astronaut Wings

• Robert J Collier Trophy, 1971

• Haley Astronautics Award, 1972

He was also awarded Belgium’s Order of Leopold in 1971, and an Honorary Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering from San Diego State University in 1971.

He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983, and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on October 4, 1997.

• Flight of the Falcon (with Virginia G. Eckhardt, 1983)

Categories: American astronauts | 1971 in spaceflight | American aviators | American test pilots | Apollo 15 | People who have walked on the Moon | United States Air Force officers | U.S Air Force Test Pilot School alumni

The next day, Ginny is taken round the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, she sees the altitude chambers in which they test if the command modules and lunar modules can survive the rigours of space. She can’t decide if the chambers resemble giant ovens or giant diving bells but perhaps, she decides, it’s because their function is something of both. Then, on the third floor, Walden hasn’t said where he’s taking her, he abruptly halts, glances at his watch and swears.

I was supposed to be somewhere, he says, I got to make a phone call. Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute, hon.

He hurries off back toward the elevators, leaving Ginny on her own in the corridor, wondering if she’s meant to stand there like a lemon until he returns. And then the doors just a little further along the corridor swing open and a woman with short brown hair, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and white hose, comes striding toward Ginny, and frowns on seeing her and asks, Can I help you?

Ginny introduces herself but is only halfway through explaining her husband is giving her a tour of the MSOB but has just abandoned her to make a telephone call, when the nurse interrupts, and with a smile asks, He was taking you to the suiting room?

I guess, says Ginny.

Well, it’s this way, come on, I’ll take you. My name is Dee, by the way.

She leads Ginny along the corridor and through a pair of double doors into a white-walled room with several tan Naugahyde armchairs scattered about it. Each armchair faces a large white control-panel festooned with dials and valves and knobs; and between each control panel, a waist-high table stretches from the wall out into the room. Dee waves at a man in white coveralls, he’s standing at one of the tables and Ginny thinks he’s talking to someone lying on the table top before she realises it’s an empty spacesuit.

Hey, Joe, says Dee, this is Ginny, you want to give her a quick run-down of what you do in here?

Ginny Eckhardt, Ginny adds, Walden just had to go make a phone call.

She looks at the spacesuit on the table, and asks, Is that what they’ll be wearing on the Moon?

Joe starts to explain the A7L and its twenty-one layers of materials, from the rubber-coated nylon bladder to the Teflon fabric abrasion layer. When he mentions the spacesuits are made by a division of Playtex, Ginny can’t help smiling—and she thinks about bras and foundation garments, girdles and corsets, and the white constricting material from which they’re made, the outer layer of the A7L shares their colour and texture. And the A7L’s innermost layer of nylon too, she’s amused by these manliest of men wearing garments so closely related to women’s underwear. Joe is in the middle of an explanation of the connectors on the front of the torso, and Ginny is listening fascinated, when the doors to the suiting room swing open and Ginny turns and sees Walden poke his head inside, scan the room, scowl, and then withdraw. She makes a face at Dee, puzzled by her husband’s behaviour; but then she turns back to Joe and he has what looks like a fishbowl in his hands and he tells her it’s the helmet and it’s made of polycarbonate…

Joe drifts away after his lecture, and Ginny and Dee chat. They connect immediately, it’s not simply their shared gender in this predominantly male world, or the fact they’re the same age, perhaps it’s the interest Ginny showed in the A7L, in what it takes to put a man on the Moon. For Ginny, it’s partly gratitude at being rescued in the corridor, the chances of someone she knows passing were slim, and she thinks perhaps there are not many at the Cape who would have stopped to ask if she needed help. Emboldened by Dee’s friendliness, Ginny admits she writes science fiction, and Dee mentions a writer who interviewed her years before as research for a novel about a space nurse.

That novel is Countdown for Cindy by Eloise Engle, originally published in 1962 in the magazine American Girl . I own a copy of the 1964 Bantam paperback. It is the sort of science fiction novel which proves the point of Ginny. In the novel, Cindy, the protagonist, is celebrated by a shocked and astounded media as the first woman into space when she is chosen to accompany a doctor of space medicine to the US Moon base. The book was written, of course, before Tereshkova’s flight aboard Vostok 6. Countdown for Cindy is rife with late fifties gender politics—these are not the sensibilities Ginny, who is fictional herself, would write into her own stories, although she has lived with them and not much has changed for the better in the decade since.

There is a scene in Engle’s novel which, for me, is emblematic of the time’s attitudes to women—shortly after arriving at the Moon base, Cindy gets ready for her first shift on duty: “Then she opened her bag and took out fresh disposable undies and a pair of clean slacks. She thought a moment. What a horrid mistake that would be. She folded the slacks, put them away, and took out her crisp white nurse’s uniform and the perky cap. Yes, that was more like it. White hose and white shoes… she looked into the mirror and applied fresh lipstick on her lips. Ready? Not quite. A bit of perfume and a final smoothing of her fluffy hair”. Cindy is expected to look like a nurse, no matter how impractical her uniform in one-sixth gravity; and she must look pretty too.

Ten minutes later, Walden sticks his head back into the suiting room, he spots Dee and says, Have you seen my wife— Oh there you are, Ginny.

Before they go, Ginny needs to visit a rest-room, Walden of course has no idea where one for women can be found, but Dee gives precise directions. After washing her hands and fixing her lipstick, Ginny returns to her husband, and she says her goodbyes to Dee, with promises to keep in touch; and then Walden walks Ginny to the elevator, they descend to the first floor, leave the building and he drives her to the visitor center parking lot, where she left her rental. Walden tells her he’ll be round to see her that evening and they’ll go out for dinner, and she wonders if she has brought enough clothes to eat out every night of her stay in Florida. She gets in her car, winds down the window, they kiss through it, and Walden turns on his heel and strides back to his car, while she inserts her ignition key and gives it a thoughtful twist.

It has been like a holiday these days at the Cape. Each evening, he takes her somewhere different to eat—Ramon’s Restaurant, The Moon Hut, Fat Boys Bar-B-Q Restaurant, Bernard’s Surf, Wolfie’s Restaurant… And everywhere they go, they know Walden, they know he’s one of the Apollo astronauts and they tell him he’s going to the Moon for sure. She can see why he frequents these places, it’s not just for the food. Ginny loves the history, the space memorabilia on display—there are wooden plaques naming the Mercury Seven astronauts on the walls of Ramon’s, signed photographs and “flown items” in the other venues.