Space Books By Or About Women
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There have been a number of space books recently about women, by women — or both. Here are my reviews of a handful of them.
The Sirens of Mars: Searching For Life on Another World, Sarah Stewart Johnson, 2020.
There are books that grab you with the way they are written from their opening pages. This one wrapped around me like a blanket and refused to leave. Achingly beautiful descriptions of Earth and Mars, and the resolve of humans yearning to explore them both, are delivered with passion bleeding through the pages.
Johnson weaves her own narrative of life into a story bounding between epochs of exploration, often abandoning chronology to follow threads of human ingenuity and intrigue. Only a very skilled writer can get away with this, and transform some (literal and figurative) dry geology into something so vivid. Every paragraph is descriptive, and yet it never feels overdone. Instead, it feels intensely readable for a general audience who may never have cared about what’s under their feet, nor what is under the wheels of a Mars rover. Crunchily active verbs abound. Reading the book felt like being fed forkfuls of rich, delicious cake, and yet always being hungry for more.
Johnson’s personal life story of astronomical eagerness matches her excitement of telling the history of Martian exploration. She relates to discoverers of old, making both herself and them more personable as a result. She’s incredibly adept at taking the reader from enormous macroviews of Martian vistas from orbit, down to microviews of her own comparative field geology here on Earth. Everything connects. She should not be as interesting as a Mars mission. But she is – because, wow, she can describe like few other writers. A Martian dust storm is captured in words reminding me of Shakespearean imagery from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I don’t recall ever being enraptured before by dust – dust! – yet this book does it numerous times. When a Mars rover trundles down an ancient water channel, we feel the language curve and flow like the sinuous subject matter. We’re there, growing excited about the possibilities of ancient Martian microbes locked in deep permafrost. Humans are always in the story anticipating, joyously finding, and celebrating every discovery, which combined with Johnson’s loving and alluring geology descriptions sets the imagination ablaze. We’ve been to Mars in other books before. But never like this.
Crucial figures in exploration history burst into view with brief yet clear understanding given of their societal context. The cult bubble of Carl Sagan is dented but never sullied, one of many places where the book is realistic about all-too-human characters without undermining nor understating their achievements. We are there in key moments across centuries for the tantalizing excitement of new discoveries, and the crushing moment when they ebb away, the evidence explained in other ways. I was fascinated to learn oddities such as the archaic theory of artificial canals on Mars only being conclusively disproved the same year humans landed on the moon. Johnson’s personal story, from child to student to planetary scientist, helps give us a sense of the long decades between Mars missions and findings. We learn of similar waits and career advances of mission scientists such as Maria Zuber. We learn of the lack of women in the field, and how one person such as Zuber can inspire a new generation to follow her. Johnson goes from being an observer to becoming a participant, drawing us inside NASA to share the daily discoveries with her. She doesn’t insert herself into humankind’s stories of exploration unwanted: this book is the humanity of feeling and living a story, of becoming a part of it because your love of a subject drove you to get involved. For people who want to be part of space exploration – and if you can harness a great deal of luck – here’s how.
Reading this book feels like the point of being human. To pull our way along the thread of art in science and engineering. To be inquisitive. To love knowledge. It’s a lyrical love letter to imagination. I felt like cuddling up and going to sleep with this wonderful book. Mars is no longer a bright dot in the sky. I have tasted its dust.
What Stars Are Made Of: The Life Of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Donovan Moore, 2020.
A woman born into privilege, with parents who supported her curiosity about the world and her wish to learn, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin had more opportunities to follow her ambition than most. Nevertheless, born in England in 1900, she was denied opportunities many times based solely on her gender. It’s an all-too-familiar story, both in past eras and today.
A relentlessly curious child, Payne-Gaposchkin took delight in recognizing and classifying detail, and in knowing what was knowable. Encouraged to absorb knowledge, she did so – voraciously. Her siblings also went on to succeed in a variety of fields. But even with such a supportive head start, Payne-Gaposchkin frequently encountered obstacles. Esteemed “experts” declared that higher education could harm women mentally and physically. Thankfully, there always seemed to be at least one sympathetic character who helped Cecilia advance another step every time she needed it. And like so many stories of fascinating people, it seems to be little moments of fate that created life-altering changes in direction. By the time she gets to Cambridge University, it seems her relentless push encountered less resistance. In fact, she is among much more helpful people – one of whom was memorably summoned by a colleague exclaiming “Sir, there’s a woman out there asking questions…”
Cambridge immediately after the First World War was an environment where the size and type of hat a woman wore for different occasions was apparently seen as more important than what she studied. A female student’s steel corsets might even upset delicate magnetic equipment. In a place where advanced theories of the universe were being discussed, we see a stark contrast with the backward thinking about women. One woman worked out how to break into the university’s observatory and study the stars solo, before rolling under iron gates to get back to her room uncaught. Yet there were also a small number of men who took notice of Payne-Gaposchkin’s insatiable curiosity and willingness to put in the time and study, and rewarded her with special opportunities. And it was an era where the old way of studying – experts lecturing at students who struggled to keep up – was changing to a model where hands-on experiments were performed in laboratories.
It’s sad – disgraceful, looking at it now – that Payne-Gaposchkin had to go to a totally different continent to pursue any chance of a career in the field she loved. Even so, this only came about because a number of leading men in the emerging field of astrophysics saw what incredible potential she had and opened the door to her a little.
By now in the United States, at Harvard, Payne-Gaposchkin was ideally placed for what so often happens in scientific discoveries. She had access to already-accumulated data, and an understanding of a theory of spectral classification that already existed. She had the background of physical chemistry to be able to analyze spectra, with a good idea of what might be learned. Her initial discovery, of spectral lines revealing the temperature of a star because of ionization, is lucidly explained, and we share the excitement as she makes the connections.
By the time we get to the point of her greatest discovery – how stars hold far more helium and hydrogen than ever anticipated – we’ve been very well led to this moment. Before her careful studies showed otherwise, it was believed that stars were made of approximately the same elemental composition as our own planet, in the same proportions. It makes a kind of sense, but I was surprised at how rigidly this idea had held, and how hard it was to overturn.
Like so many moments in science advancement, the discovery was resisted. Ignored. Then, as more confirming evidence came in and the idea became more widespread, it was grudgingly, then eagerly, accepted. The book relates equal parts frustration and hope, as some embraced and celebrated Payne-Gaposchkin’s genius, while others muted her work on account of her youth and gender. She was recognized as a star of her generation, asked to teach others, yet denied the title and pay that position affords – humiliatingly listed as “equipment” instead of instructor. Slowly – achingly slowly – she changed the conditions around her, simply by being among the best. She traveled to give talks after having children. She even brought her children to work, something still frowned on in many scientific research institutions. She broke barriers with precisely-aimed practicality. As the book so well relates, she absorbed the wisdom of those around her, and – if they stood in her way – simply slipped around them and carried on.
Not only do we fully get to know Cecilia as an individual, we also come to know the other characters around her as real people. We learn about many other women in lowlier, thankless tasks accumulating the data that allowed men to claim discoveries. We enjoy tales of people in this book despite their quirks – and often because of them.
There wasn’t ever going to be any thrilling moments of action in this biography, and that is as it should be. This is a story of people who have sacrificed other pleasures of life to doggedly pursue theories, pore over data, and adapt the theories of others in their field. It’s a reflection, a century later, of a moment where – steadily, quietly – one woman proved what most of the universe is made of.
The Mars Challenge: The Past, Present, and Future of Human Spaceflight, Alison Wilgus and Wyeth Yates, 2020.
I am totally intrigued by this book. It’s a graphic novel – which apparently is what this kind of comic-book-style is called whether fiction or nonfiction – of a teenager talking with an expert in space flight. The duo converse about what space is, what it takes to get there, and what happens once there. It could have been dry and boring: it is anything but. The graphics bring the whole story to life, as the duo can see examples of some otherwise-complex theories and engineering. Gravity is easier to explain when you can see what it does. It would be a hard job conveying what this book shows merely in words.
Combining words and images so well does not work without a lot of thought. There is clearly a huge amount of research done for this book, then pared down and expertly woven into an engrossing story. The two characters are both women of color, which I found an inspirational touch, and I know others will too. Telling the story as a curious teen eager to learn from an excited expert gives this book added zing.
As a teenager, I’d have been reading and rereading every page until I got the concepts down cold. Adults, I think, could also get a real sense of the universe they live in by reading this. It’s a creatively unique way of taking us to Mars, showing all the challenges we face to do so. It’s a firehose of information, and I needed to keep pausing when reading it, because there is so much to take in.
I don’t recall a book before this that so lucidly sets out the myriad challenges ahead for any human Mars journey – and toys with saying it is simply too difficult – before showing why it’s important to keep working at it.
Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, 2020.
My first impression of this book was – warmth. Italian astronaut and recent space station inhabitant Samantha Cristoforetti wants to concentrate on the positives. And while it’s hard to tell if it is due to the book being originally written in Italian, or a pungent, sense-heavy writing style, the book is vivid with descriptions of color, of movement, of feeling. Who else has ever evoked Caravaggio when describing the light and shade of a space shuttle launch? Quoted Virginia Woolf when talking about space experiences? Or described their last few days before leaving Earth as if scenes painted in a church fresco? We’re along with her for the ride. We live in space with her.
She expertly captures little moments such as the odd tinge of loss when a small-scale project becomes larger, more public, and has to be shared with the world. Her description of how happiness can spread through the body is one of the best I have ready in any literary genre. Instead of relief when her training is over and her flight approaches, she shares a whispery pang of regret that years of regimen are about to end. We’re caught up with her as, one by one, she describes the last time she will do everyday things before leaving Earth; even though we know she’ll survive the mission, she expertly manages the reader’s tension. Hers is an emotional journey, in that every feeling Cristoforetti experiences as she moves forward in her career is described. But it’s not uncontrolled emotion; these are the feelings that come from being a driven professional, elated to reach every goal. She has the tough writing job of being good at everything in life, but needing to describe it without sounding arrogant. She also has an incredible grasp of detail, capturing informative snippets of life events I would have forgotten a week later. She’s happy when learning something new, plus skilled at describing the happiness of a new sensation that brings her ever closer to a flight into space. And once in space, she relishes the clarity of a distraction-free, scheduled existence.
I gained a real sense of how, during training, even during times of relaxation, Cristoforetti had a constant sense that she was being measured, judged, evaluated. Nothing was ever a guarantee, even when she was assigned to a flight, and she could never fully let her guard down. Any “free” time was best spent studying harder, to gain an extra advantage. She actually slept better in space because finally, she relates, she wasn’t bouncing around different time zones while training. It’s quite a career to pick. The discipline reminds me of an athlete training for the Olympics. Push too much, you might break something. Push too little, you won’t peak at the right moment. It sounds relentless, and suitable only for a very specific type of person. Fortuitously, she’s the right kind of person, who pushed harder to gain experience in tasks she might never carry out in space, rather than shy away from them. We learn how Cristoforetti would rather take on a task that risked her own life than one where the lives of her crewmates would be in her hands. We see how moments that might irk other personality types – inadvertent elbow-jabs from colleagues in tight quarters, for example – are mentally dealt with in ways that actually enhance crew bonding.
Cristoforetti is still an active astronaut, and you can tell. When spacefarers retire, they tend to become more honest about whom they liked and disliked, and other little details that would not be wise to share when they are still work colleagues. As such, I never really gained a sense of what her fellow spacefarers and co-workers were like. They all seemed to combine into a professional, cheery bunch with little difference in personalities. But perhaps that’s how she sees them in reality. And it worked in this book, which focuses on Cristoforetti’s own experiences as she travels from nation to nation training, attending meetings, and working with hundreds of people whose job is to test and to assist her.
I love a good spacefarer memoir. I wish every space traveler would write one. Yes, I know, I know, there are over 560 spacefarers now. But they are from over 40 different countries, from different generations, with different experiences. Yes, some of their stories are going to sound the same. But the differences intrigue, surprise, and delight. It struck me how long this multigenerational genre has been in existence when Cristoforetti mentioned she was four years old when the first space shuttle was launched – a flight that came two decades after the first human spaceflight. And yet, once she is in space, this book reminded me more of the memoirs of cosmonauts on Soviet space stations in the 1970s and 1980s than anything contemporary. There are common threads of surprise and wonder mixed with the mundane chores of life across generations.
So is this book different from other spacefarer memoirs? Yes. I was surprised that I was two-thirds of the way through the book before we got into space – but this seemed to mirror the immense amount of training that has to happen first. And Cristoforetti describes the space experience differently than others, as she transitions from highly-trained expert of Earth to clumsy new arrival in space. She’s not trying to explain a wider view of a space station and the program. Instead, you move with her from little area to area, feeling and learning as she did, moment by moment. Eventually, Earth life recedes until, for her, lying down on a bed is a faint and distant memory. Every part of her aches to remain in space on the day she leaves it. It’s visceral. It’s special.
“She Persisted: Sally Ride,” Atia Abawi, 2021.
This book is part of a spinoff series from Chelsea Clinton’s “She Persisted” books, which also include a couple of pages on Ride. This more in-depth look at the life of the first American woman in space is designed to inspire young girls in their first grades in school (although kids of all genders will get a lot from reading it). But inspiration can be a tricky one. It can seem hokey if laid on too thick – and kids can be the largest cynics and see right through it. We’ve all read those books of seemingly superhuman people who triumph over adversity and figured, well, good for them, I could never do that. This book is subtly – almost subversively – different. Abawi tells you what Sally didn’t care about as a kid. We learn when she retreated from the world. When she tried something, was good at it, and yet changed paths unexpectedly, leaving other promising careers behind. Sally Ride here is contrary, and capricious. She’s human. And being human is shown as something good.
There are details here of Sally’s life that books for adults did not capture, and it’s clear that Abawi has done a fair deal of original research before winnowing it down to the key moments of a complex life. And to cap it off, at the end, there are suggestions for what the reader could do to follow in Sally’s footsteps. It reminds me of books I read as a kid, ones I remembered decades later for key sentences that held deep meaning for me. It’s a subtle, peaceful grenade of inspiration. Arm a child with it and stand back.