Page 18 of Atmosphere

As the ASCANs stood in front of the jets, Joan began to understand just how large the disparity was between the military astronauts and the mission specialists. She had not noticed the difference in the classroom, where it favored her. But here, in a flight suit on the airfield, with the wind drying out her eyes, the gap between them felt vast, its edges sharp.

“As you know, if you are not a military pilot,” the instructor said, “you will be a backseater for the entire time you fly here at NASA.”

Joan had already known she’d be relegated to the backseat and was grateful for it. But when she looked over at the rest of her colleagues, she could see that Vanessa’s jaw was clenched.

Soon the group was divided, and the military guys made their way to the other side of the tarmac.

Joan could not think of a single pilot she had gotten to know. Some of them, like Hank, seemed nice enough. But a lot of them kept making the kinds of cracks that irritated her.

At first it was things like “I’ve never been so up close and personal with so many women,” at the gym on campus. And then it was a comment one of them made about the women’s “sturdiness” during one of the facility tours. There were innuendos about skirts, cracks about penis envy.

Just yesterday, Lydia had been bemoaning the fact that they’d have to meet on the tarmac so early in the day, instead of easing inwith classroom instruction first. Joan had disagreed and said that she was “glad to get the hard part done first.”

At which point, one of the pilots, Jimmy Hayman, said, “I’ve got a hard part you can do first.”

Joan stared right at him, unsure how to respond. But then Lydialaughed.And in the moment, Joan wanted to slap her.

Didn’t Lydia understand that if one of them made it seem like it was okay, the rest of them would be sidelined as humorless? Didn’t Lydia get that this was how the men kept them separate and underestimated? With these small jokes that made them look petty if they got upset? Couldn’t Lydia see how it worked?

“Hayman,” Griff had said as he walked into the room, “cut that out.”

Jimmy shut up then. Joan knew she was supposed to be grateful, though she resented the need for it at all.

“Thank you,” she whispered to Griff when she sat down.

He shook his head. “Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum,” he said. “It does a disservice to us both.”

Obviously, the mission specialists weren’t immune to bad taste, but they weren’t as overt about it. And so Joan preferred it when she was grouped with Vanessa, Donna, and Griff. Even Lydia, Harrison, and the others were all right.

The instructor refocused on them as the pilots left.

“As mission specialists, you will be required to gain significant flying experience here at NASA, fifteen hours of flight time a month, for the length of your time in the corps. You will not take off and land the jet yourselves,” he said. “But you will learn a lot from that backseat—including how to navigate and, occasionally, how to handle the aircraft while in the air.

“As you know, flying is not without its myriad risks. Today we will start slow. You will watch the pilots from the ground as they take off, barrel-roll, and land,” he said. “Think of it as a flight show, knowing that in the future, you’ll ride shotgun.”

Joan looked to Vanessa, whose face showed nothing. But Joan already knew what she was thinking.

The flight instructor had to raise his voice over the sound of the engines starting.

“Before you are allowed in the planes,” he shouted, “you will have to learn how to survive being thrown out of one. First thing tomorrow you will be leaving for water survival training.”

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In the swampy August heat,Joan, Griff, Donna, Vanessa, Lydia, Harrison, and the other two mission specialists, Ted Geiger and Marty Dixon, had departed for Homestead Air Force Base, in Florida, for three days to learn how to bail out over the ocean.

In their first test, they’d been strapped to a parachute and then tied to the back of a speedboat. One by one, each of them had been dragged through the ocean while attempting to keep their head above water for as long as possible. They’d had mixed results. Vanessa and Lydia kept calm. Marty almost drowned and had to take a rest on the boat. Donna and Griff ended up somewhere in the middle. And Joan took so much water into her stomach and lungs that she was burping for hours afterward. Her head was thrashed so hard by the chop of the waves that she still had a headache the next morning.

But still, she had done it.

The next day, in the open water, she had successfully swum beneath her floating parachute, come up for air on the other side, and inflated her life vest. It had taken her a few tries—and one full moment in which she thought she might be drowning—but again, she succeeded.

But today was the biggest test. One she was not sure she could pass.

They would start on the deck of a large boat, connected to both a parachute and a harness that were attached to a speedboat. When the speedboat accelerated, they would run off the edge of the firstboat and let the wind catch their parasail, the speedboat pulling them high over the ocean.

When they were hundreds of feet in the air, they would disconnect their harness from the tether to the speedboat. This would send them crashing into the water, where they’d have to get themselves to the surface, inflate a life raft, and then crawl into it.

If, until this point, Joan had been able to convince herself that being an astronaut was a cerebral affair, she was cured of it now as she sat on a boat just off Biscayne Bay with a harness on, preparing to crash-land in the ocean.

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