Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

But before that happens, NASA has more to do, and in late March 1970, it announces the crew for Apollo 15, so now it’s official: Walden is going to the Moon. Ginny’s stock in the AWC has been slowly rising since late 1969 when the Apollo 15 crew started training, but now it’s out in the open and the pressure is on. When she considers what some of the other wives have been going through, Ginny realises she is lucky. She and Walden go well together, she reached an accommodation with the danger inherent in his job years ago, and though what he’s now doing is so much more dangerous, she has faith, perhaps even more than Walden does, in the hardware and the engineering. Of course, they have it better than most—no kids; and if Ginny has never quite plugged into Togethersville, she still has her friends in science fiction scattered across the country, she still has her writing. She made a conscious decision to support Walden when he joined NASA, and she has stuck to that, and she has been very fortunate nothing has happened to distract her from it.

Which is more than be said for real astronaut Jim Irwin, whose wife Mary was beset by tragedy, and consequently their marriage was slowly disintegrating, while he was training for Apollo 15. He writes in his autobiography, To Rule the Night : “I thought the woman should be there to assist the man, help him in his task”.

Irwin’s attitude was hardly unique among astronauts, or indeed men in general—either in the real world, or the fictional world of All That Outer Space Allows . If Ginny is happy to give the impression she is thoroughly committed to supporting her man, and if she feels her reward for doing so—being a part of the space program, even if only peripherally—is perhaps not enough, that she doesn’t have the best of the bargain, and even their new-found affluence, and the fame too, is no real prize either, she keeps silent for Walden’s sake. Ginny would like to be known as a science fiction writer, not an astronaut wife; and the two forms of celebrity simply do not compare. When she finishes her toilet each morning and inspects her made up features, and she thinks of all she once held dear and has now compromised, the real Ginny Eckhardt hidden beneath all those Revlon products crowding the top of her dressing-table; and she sometimes wishes she could throw it all away and go back to who she wants to be, not who NASA and the AWC and Walden want her to be, to who she was … Except, of course, she never was that woman, the Ginny of Edwards is no less fictional than the Ginny she presents to people in Houston, a consequence of misrembering, confabulation, nostalgia and wish-fulfilment.

Ginny tries hard not to let her new status change her, and she finds the increased press attention a little embarrassing—perhaps she’s afraid some enterprising reporter might dig up her science fiction stories, and it would be horrible if that prevented Walden from going to the Moon… Although she has had nothing published since ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and that was just over two years ago. In her more reflective moments, Ginny is worried she is now incapable of writing sellable stories, that the new Ginny of Houston, Texas, is too much the astronaut wife, too much the wife , and not enough Virginia G Parker. But these new stories she’s working on, the ones editors don’t seem to want, she thinks they’re worth the effort she’s putting into them, she’s convinced soon something will break and Cele or Bea or Fanny or Evelyn will send her a contract by return post. So, while Walden is off at the Cape, or Long Island, or wherever the hell he is this week, and the house is empty, the house is clean and tidy, Ginny is dressed and made up, should anyone drop by, during those moments of free time she works on her stories, revises and restructures the rejected ones, types out first drafts of new ones. She keeps on writing, even if she has nothing to say, it’s old advice but it works damn it, and better 3,000 words, and “THE END”, to be worked on and rewritten, than half a page that goes nowhere.

April 1970 and Apollo 13 puts the space program back on the front page, but not for the right reasons. Halfway to the Moon, an oxygen tank in the service module explodes and suddenly the crew of three, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, could die in space. Once again, the streets are mobbed with reporters, and they’re at their thickest around the houses of Marilyn and Mary (Jack is one of the program’s few bachelors). Togethersville swings into action, and even Ginny finds herself running groceries into the besieged Lovell home in Timber Cove; and she does her best to sympathise with Marilyn, but like all the astronaut wives she’s privately glad it’s not Walden up there.

But NASA shows what it’s made of, and they get the guys home safely, the command module splashes down in the South Pacific, southwest of Samoa and only four miles from the recovery ship.

In September of that year, the dream dies a little when Apollo 18 through 20 are cancelled, and even the promise of a space station, Skylab, can’t lessen the hurt. Some of the rookies who were down for those cancelled missions, they’re angry and disappointed, and Ginny hears it from their wives. It’s worse for the scientists, who are especially bitter that Apollo will forever remain the preserve of test pilots and fighter pilots. Man should go to the Moon for science, NASA should send scientists, but that’s not going to happen now.

So Walden and Dave have to learn the science if the scientists are going to get any useful data out of the mission, and that means trip after trip to Hawaii, the San Gabriel Mountains, the Coso Hills, even back to the Mojave Desert, to learn geology. When Walden is home on his infrequent stay overs, he complains he’s a pilot not a rock hunter, but as the weeks and months pass his attitude changes and he surprises Ginny by getting excited as he talks geology. He’s learnt something new, something completely outside the world in which he has lived his entire life, and the wonder of it animates him whenever he discusses it. Now he wants to go to the Moon not because it’s there, not because it will put him at the top of the pyramid, not because putting a man on the lunar surface is such a bold enterprise… No, he wants to go because he might find some really exciting rocks on the Moon.

By the end of January 1971, when Apollo 14 launches, Togethersville is undergoing changes. There have been two intakes of astronauts since Walden and Ginny arrived, but plenty of people have also left, and that sense of community, the one Ginny never quite plugged into, it’s slowly fading away. Only Al, who is commanding Apollo 14, and Deke, who has never flown, remain from the Original Seven. Neil is retiring and Frank has left from the Next Nine; of the Fourteen, Buzz and Wally Cunningham are going, and Mike has already gone. No one from the Original Nineteen, Walden’s group, has spoken of leaving NASA, but with so many astronauts, so few flights and so much uncertainty about what comes next, Ginny thinks more will go in the next couple of years. In fact, what will she and Walden do after he’s flown on Apollo 15? It’s scheduled for that summer—will he want to stay in the astronaut corps, or return to USAF? It’s no good asking him, she drops a few hints on the infrequent weekends he’s home, but he doesn’t know how to answer. His head is full of Apollo and geology, and he’s so tightly focused on his mission he can’t even conceive of a world after it.

Ginny is having her own problems imagining a world for her stories. Perhaps that’s why she’s having so little success selling them, the world in which they’re set is the real world, more or less. It’s not the Mars of Northwest Smith, nor Ursula’s Ekumen. Take this one she’s currently working on, about a flight to the Moon which turns into disaster when the spacecraft runs out of fuel and in a decaying orbit. It’s an Apollo spacecraft—the astronauts aboard it are on their way to a Moon base, although she suspects there will never be a Moon base, the cancellation of all the flights after Apollo 17 has seen to that. But who knows what the future will bring? Despite this, she has set her story in 1985. Fifteen years into the future. Perhaps space flight will be routine by then—or rather, more routine than the press seems to be treating Apollo 14.