Space Inspiration (AFW Jan/Feb 2024)
by Liz Booker
This article was published in the January/February 2024 issue of Aviation for Women Magazine.
Many pilots of my generation were inspired by the space program to take to the skies. While I only remember men in astronaut suits on our television screens as a young child, that did not deter my interest in the least. I was oblivious to the gender imbalance, to national debates around equal rights, and even to the first women who were selected to NASA’s astronaut program. I just knew I wanted to be an astronaut, so I needed to be a pilot first, and that became my singular focus.
As I approached adolescence, I was vaguely aware that Sally Ride was making history as the first American woman in space, but the first female astronaut who stands out in my memory is Christa McAuliffe. My Houston middle school aerospace teacher, Ms. Dolezal, had applied for the ‘Teacher in Space’ program, and she hosted all of us students in her classroom for the launch of Space Shuttle Challenger on Tuesday, January 28th, 1986 at around 10:30 in the morning. I’d never seen a teacher cry before.
Despite many visits to nearby Johnson Space Center around that time, I was not conscious of the many other women who flew missions in the 1980s and early ‘90s. The next pioneering woman who caught my imagination was Eileen Collins when she became the first female shuttle pilot in 1995. Her memoir, Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, which we discussed in the Aviatrix Book Club in November 2023, filled out some of the history of her predecessors who led the way. Thanks to space journalist, Loren Grush, we now have a detailed account of our pioneering women astronauts.
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, released September 2023, opens with snapshots of where each of the first six women were when NASA announced astronaut training slots for women. Grush’s descriptions of their various professions and cumulative education impress upon the reader that, despite the cultural constraints of the time, Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judy Resnik, Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon, and Kathy Sullivan had amassed an impressive array of skills and accomplishments going into the applicant pool. She takes us back in time to understand who these women were as children and adolescents, and the historical context of the space program leading up to their selections.
Grush captures the intensity of the media pressure for these women and how they unified to deal with it whether they were friends or not. As we progress through their training and the various missions on which they served, we really get a sense of each woman’s unique personality and how she was received by her peers. We ride the wave of anticipation, frustration, disappointment, and elation as each astronaut awaits her first assigned mission. And Grush offers plenty of detail to satisfy any serious space geek, from technical descriptions of mission plans, experiments, and spacecraft systems, to the challenges of space gear designed for men and the physiological effects of zero gravity.
We have so many fabulous books in our canon that trace the history of women in aviation and space, but Loren Grush has given us a new lens to the space program and women’s roles in it with The Six. She not only illuminated the political and technical aspects of being a pioneering NASA woman, but also did such a wonderful job tracing each woman’s individual character arc that I left the book feeling like I’d made six new inspiring friends. You can find The Six along with hundreds of other books featuring women in aviation on the Literary Aviatrix website, along with the 2024 Aviatrix Book Club discussion list and author interviews.www.literaryaviatrix.com
Blue skies, and happy reading!
