Atmosphere(7)

Antonio stepped back and allowed everyone to take that in. Then he resumed his introduction:

“By now I hope you have surmised that you are looking at a spacecraft unlike anything we’ve seen before. The shuttle is not one piece of machinery. It is three. On launch, it is a rocket. In orbit, it is a spaceship. On landing, it is an airplane. This is what will allow us to usher in the future of space exploration.”

Joan felt a flutter in her belly. It was the same feeling she’d gotten the first time she saw the glowing band of the Milky Way when her parents took her to Joshua Tree as a child.

“Our missions here at NASA are not without risk,” Antonio said. “You will put your life into the hands of your directors and your fellow astronauts, as well as the researchers and engineers who make space exploration possible. But, if chosen, you may become one of a very small number of people who can say they have left the Earth and who can report back to the rest of us on what our planet looks like from afar. You will usher us into the future. I can assure you that this will be the greatest technological achievement in the history of NASA. It may well be the greatest endeavor in the history of mankind.”

Joan tried to process just how close this opportunity was to her grasp, but as she did, her eyes met those of the woman with the curly hair, a few seats away. The two of them held each other’s gaze for a moment.

Was this really happening?

That week, she sat for heart-rate monitoring, hearing and vision tests, blood draws, and full assessments from the flight surgeons. Her body was poked and prodded in ways that shocked her.

But she was determined to show all of her NASA evaluators that what she had to offer was exactly what they needed: determined, stoic composure.

She stepped onto a treadmill connected to electrodes and ran for over five miles before even beginning to slow down.

She sat for interviews in which the intense tone made even a question like “Would you like me to turn down the thermostat?” seem complicated to answer. She spoke calmly and clearly as she answered each one.

Joan’s favorite part of the week was when she was put in a suit and instructed to climb into a three-foot-wide white fabric ball. Her only source of air was an oxygen tank. She was ordered to stay in there for fifteen minutes. The moment Joan got in and could feel the quiet solitude of the ball, she understood.

It wasn’t a test of dexterity or mechanical aptitude. They wanted to see if she’d freak out, unable to stand the sensory deprivation and claustrophobia. She smiled to herself. Piece of cake.

She fell asleep.


One evening two months later, the phone in her apartment rang. Joan was eating Chinese food and sketching a portrait of Frances to give Barbara as a birthday present. She put the pencil down and walked to the phone.

It was Antonio. “Are you still interested in joining the astronaut corps at NASA?” he said.

Joan looked up at the ceiling and steadied her voice. It was the closest thing she’d ever felt to the way women look in the movies when they are proposed to. “Yes,” she said. “Absolutely yes.”

“Good, we are lucky to have you on board, Joan. There are sixteen of you who will be joining us here in Group 9. Eight candidate pilots and eight candidate mission specialists, such as yourself. I am not sure if you got to know Vanessa Ford during your time here at JSC, but she was in the same interview group with you. She also made the cut and has accepted. You two are the only finalists to make it through from that session.”

“No men from our group, huh?” Joan asked, and then could not quite believe she’d let that slip.

But Antonio laughed. “No,” he said. “I am afraid they were not up to snuff.”



Summer 1980


In the months after learning she would be joining the astronaut corps, Joan did three things.

First, she gave notice at Rice.

On her last day, the Physics and Astronomy Department threw her a going-away party. By the punch bowl, Dr. Siskin asked—in a way that struck Joan as remarkably transparent—how she’d managed to pull this off. Joan said, “Luck, I guess,” and then regretted it.

Joan knew that Dr. Siskin, and most men like him, had never taken a good look at her. She was used to it. After all, she was not Barbara. She had never commanded the attention of the entire room with how great she looked in a dress or how well she delivered a comeback. Once, when Joan was a teenager, her mother told her that she and her sister each had their own strengths. She said that Barbara’s were loud and Joan’s were quiet, but both were powerful in their own way. When her mother said this, Joan hugged her.

Joan knew she was easy to overlook. She was average height and a bit stocky. She dressed simply. Her light brown hair was just past her shoulders, but she didn’t wear it feathered like some other women did. Instead, she pulled it back loosely. Sometimes, when Joan saw herself in photographs, she was struck by how beautiful her smile was, her dimples making her face seem friendly and bright. In high school, Adam Hawkins had said so. But she didn’t expect other people to notice.

She also didn’t expect other people to ask what she did in her spare time (she was a classically trained pianist, had run two marathons, was an avid reader and an amateur portraitist, among other things). When people came into her office and saw some of the sketches on her wall, she knew they’d assume she’d bought them somewhere. When someone admired them, she never bothered to tell them she’d drawn them. The praise was never the point. In any case, no one in a long time had asked her about herself enough to know any of this. And Joan found a familiar peace in going unnoticed.