Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

After nearly five years in Houston as an astronaut wife—the AWC meetings for coffee and cake at the Lakewood Yacht Club ended before Apollo 11 launched—but Louise Shepard is someone Ginny barely knows at all. She’s an Original Seven wife, and a Boston Brahmin, and she moves in completely different circles. The Shepards don’t even live in Nassau Bay, El Lago or Timber Cove, but in River Oaks. Al Shepard, a man Walden respects but does not like, is going to walk on the Moon, and everyone knows he trod on plenty of people to get there. Ginny watches the Apollo 14 EVA on television, just like the rest of America, marvelling at the colour footage broadcast direct from the lunar surface.

Yet for all the realness of the television pictures, in stark contrast to the blurred black-and-white of the Apollo 11 landing—and the picture quality for Apollo 14 is not that good, a bit blurry, the picture occasionally breaking up—but there’s a seriousness to the way Al and Ed go about their activities on the lunar surface, and to Ginny it’s like something is missing… the excitement, the wonder, the fun .

So she rises from the sofa, turns her back on the television, and goes into the yard. The sky is clear but it’s only mid-morning and she can’t see the Moon, not even a ghostly presentiment of it, the temperature is in the mid-fifties and the air is still. She hugs her torso and she shivers as she realises only a few months and Walden will be up there, a quarter of a million miles away. She thinks about the cost of the Apollo program, the deaths and broken marriages, and her own loneliness for much of that time. With Ramstein and Edwards, it has been a mostly lonely life since she left SDSU, just Walden and herself, her science fiction pen pals, the handful of wives she’s become friends with, in USAF and NASA…

And via some chain of thought she cannot explain, she wonders if it was wrong to deny Walden, to deny herself, children. She was sensible about it, she prided herself on her good sense, and she was grateful their childlessness allowed her to live her own life… of sorts. But Walden has been away so much since he joined NASA, and even more so these last two years after being assigned to Apollo 15, and she wonders now if she made a mistake.

No, damn it. If she has dreams, they’re of visiting other planets, not of diapers and pacifiers. She turns on her heel and re-enters the house. Apollo 14 is still on the television, but she ignores it. She stalks to the bedroom, takes the typewriter and paper from the closet, her folder of stories from her dressing table, and sets herself up at the dining table. She flicks through the stories she has written, and finds the one about the spacecraft in the decaying lunar orbit.

And to the sounds of Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell setting up experiments in the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon, she tries to inject some excitement, some wonder, some fun into her story, although truth be told there’s not much fun in having to escape a spacecraft before it impacts the lunar surface and then floating around in lunar orbit for hours until rescue is possible…

Whatever Ginny did, it worked. Evelyn buys ‘Pericynthion’ for Galaxy within days of receiving it, and in her letter writes she really likes the idea of women astronauts, presented as if it were a perfectly normal and natural thing, and she especially admires Ginny’s decision to mention no men at all in the story. Ginny knows her three year drought is finally over, so she rewrites the story about the astronaut who finds ancient alien ruins on Mars, but this time she gives her protagonist a family and that provides the motive to overcome disaster. Ginny retitles the story ‘The Secret of Cydonia’, a reference to one of Leigh’s novels, and because Ginny likes the sound of the name “Cydonia”.

And that one sells too—Kay takes it for Astounding , and she wants more like it. But Ginny now has bigger plans, a novella set on the Moon; but it’s Apollo 15, Walden’s flight, first, so on the second year anniversary of the first landing on the Moon, Ginny catches a commercial flight to Orlando, reading her July issue of Galaxy , which arrived only a couple of days before, and there’s her name on the contents page, alongside Raccoona Sheldon and Joanna Russ and Joan Patricia Basch; but when the air hostess comes round, Ginny swaps the magazine for a copy of Cosmopolitan , although she’s not looking at the fashion spreads she’s thinking about Galaxy and she’s thinking about Apollo 15.

The Saturn V slowly rises from Launch Pad 39A on its 8.5 million pounds of thrust, the roar of its engines crashing and breaking across the Florida swamps, a tidal wave of sound inundating the watchers on the stand, who have all risen to their feet. Fire pours from the F1 rocket engines, a small and dazzlingly bright sun on which the rocket is precariously balanced, and Ginny raises a hand to shade her eyes even though she is wearing sunglasses. She is over a mile away but the sheer physicality of the liftoff overwhelms her. The noise! The brightness! That slim pencil of black and white rising slowly up the sky on an infernal pillar. This is no science fiction spaceship launch, this is the real thing. There are very few examples she can recall from movies, Hollywood has yet to embrace science fiction, despite such 1920s classics as Metropolis and Frau im Mond . It is a subject, they have discovered, best avoided. “Women’s pictures” are one thing, but there is not a large enough audience with sufficient money to spend to justify making “sci fi” movies. Horror movies, yes, young men like them; and beach movies, too. But not science fiction.

This, however, the Saturn V, oh the flame and thunder!, spearing up into the sky, and now it’s pitching over and seems to be travelling almost horizontal to the ground, heading for orbit, and thence to the Moon. Ginny’s heart is in her mouth, she puts up a hand as if to prevent it escaping. She knows how perilous a mission this is, though the previous four Apollo flights have all gone pretty much as planned, at least up until the actual trip to the Moon…

She imagines Walden in his spacesuit sitting in the command module, that wide grey expanse of instrument panel above him shaking, she imagines him on the surface of the Moon, skipping across a sea of grey regolith. Godspeed, she tells him under her breath, though the religious sentiment means nothing to her. And she thinks about the novella she plans to start when she returns to Houston. She can almost see the first few lines:

Some days, when it feels like the end of the world yet again, Vanessa Peterson, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.

In the grey gunpowder dust, she stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. She leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on her back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes her arms out from her sides. And she stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. She listens to the whirr of the pumps, her own breath an amniotic susurrus within the confines of her helmet. The noises reassure her--sound itself she finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.

Ginny turns to Lurton, and she wishes Pam were here to see this but it’s been two years since the divorce; and Ginny is surprised Lurton’s face does not echo her own expression of wonder, but then Ginny remembers she has a different view of the space program to the other wives, and it’s a view she has never shared with them. So she turns back to watch the Saturn V as it slowly fades from view, though the roar of its launch seems to echo still across the inlets and scrub, and Ginny is briefly amused by the Saturn V’s phallic symbolism, although that’s been a staple of science fiction since its beginnings—and what does that say about the women who call themselves fans!—but this rocket, Wernher von Braun’s Saturn V, is to Ginny emphatically not one of those symbolic images, because she’s aware of the engineering that has gone into it. When people see a LM, they think of it as ugly but strangely functional in appearance; but Ginny, she thinks about its incredibly thin walls, all those switches and buttons, the guidance computer and its programs, all the engineering it embodies. And she thinks about standing inside the LM, a hand gripping each hand controller, peering through the triangular window before her at the surface of the Moon—but the real lunar surface, not a simulated one.