Girl on the Moon (11 page)

All went well until there was a problem with Grant’s underwear. Actually, it was a case of user error with his pressure suit—the underwear under the suits had a sophisticated network of circulating cool water, kept cool via the suit’s power, and the suit was designed to safely vent body heat. Without these measures, an astronaut in the sealed environment of the suit could suffer heat stroke. Grant failed to properly connect the suit to the water-cooled underwear, so the water heated up the way one would expect it to when it was next to a 98.6-degree body inside a sealed environment.

Callie Leporis, who was responsible for double checking everything on Grant’s suit, established a new protocol whereby another astronaut would have to see you connect the suit to the underwear, since it was impossible to check after the rest of the suit was on. The error was a little ridiculous, and the crew believed it wouldn’t repeat itself, but the incident made them all more cautious.

Good,
Conn thought.

December, 2033–March, 2034

Unfortunately, the feeds were interested in the mission by the time the crew were up in the Arctic Circle, and the underwear problem was widely covered. Conn felt bad for Grant, with the (mostly good-natured) ribbing he got on the space and science feeds. Still, on balance, it was better for the mission and for business to have more coverage rather than less.

America and Canada—Grant was originally from Fort Erie, Ontario, and attended college in Montreal—were hungry for details about the astronauts’ lives. The feeds delivered: Grant was a shy, unassuming kid, perpetually happy, invariably kind, a
wunderkind
who had landed a spot on the Saturn mission at a younger age than most astronauts were for their first trip into space. Conn was glad to see Grant made out to be more than a nice, young guy: as far as the feeds were concerned, he also had an explorer’s mentality, thrilling to new discoveries, risking his comfort and safety for the sake of the acquisition of knowledge. Professionally, Conn celebrated each mention or profile of Grant that made him out to be a (North) American hero. Privately, it helped rekindle her regret over their breakup, after she had decided in her manic state in Cleveland that everything was better.

The world knew Al Claussen, because Conn’s moon mission had received so much coverage in the preceding months. He had been married but was divorced, though his former spouse, a pro baseball player, gleefully talked about their relationship at every opportunity as though they were still together. Al was a Texan who obsessed over the Houston Astros—still, even after his divorce. He renovated antique furniture. He had run for the state Senate and lost.

The star of the Saturn expedition was Callie Leporis. She had always gotten attention because she was a woman in charge of the most ambitious expedition in human history. But with the ascendancy of Conn’s celebrity, the world had more experience fawning over a female astronaut. They used what they had learned with vigor to express their love for Callie. She was smart—BS, MS and PhDs in molecular biology and biophysics—well-spoken, accomplished, attractive, a pioneering female astronaut out of central casting. As the March departure neared, Callie became something like royalty.

Callie had a boyfriend, a lawyer named Marcus Weiss. They had been together for three years, and the idea that these star-crossed lovers would be rent asunder by Callie’s mission to Saturn captured the public imagination. Petitions were e-signed by thousands demanding the two get married before Callie left. Truthfully, as Conn knew from having befriended Callie, she and Marcus only got along as well as they did because they so rarely saw each other in person. That might mean their marriage would actually survive her round trip to Saturn, but it wouldn’t be anything either of them would want when she returned.

Callie was comfortable in the spotlight, but was grateful that Conn had come along to take some of the glare. Callie told Conn she would be delighted to never hear the words “first woman” in regard to herself again. She would be the first
person
, or among the first people, to do a great many things; qualifying her accomplishments by calling her the first woman discounted them, as far as Callie was concerned.

Among all the celebrity gossip and human interest reporting, the media was asking questions Callie was glad to hear raised. If they indeed found extraterrestrial life on Tethys, what did its presence mean philosophically? Religiously? What did it tell us about the origin of life on Earth? Conn followed the debates, wishing she could tell everybody arguing over the existence of microbes on Tethys about the aliens she was going to meet on the moon.

The media asked: how would three people survive without killing one another in a small space together for two-plus years out and two-plus years back? The answer was that the crew, now that Al Claussen was back, had been selected for their adaptability and compatibility with one another. The three had trained to work together in close quarters, as well as to leave one another alone, as alone as could be. Each astronaut took seriously the possibility they would get sick of one another, but all were confident they would make it work.

The media asked: should anybody be allowed to spend this much money on space exploration, with so much going on at home? For most, the question answered itself. It wasn’t their money, and they didn’t have anything to say about how it was spent. Others advocated a space tax: one-third of the cost of the endeavor. Close to 100 percent of advocates of the space tax believed it would raise money, rather than effectively ending space exploration by increasing its cost by 33 percent.

A few days before liftoff, before the astronauts had to enter quarantine, Peo entertained the crew with a lavish going-away dinner. The party was attended by nearly everybody who was putting up money for the expedition, which meant a lot of prominent and powerful people.

Grant was unattached at the party, and he and Conn spent most of the time together, talking, really communicating for the first time since Grant left Chicago. Conn no longer felt that their issues had been wrapped up neatly, nor the pangs of regret. Instead she felt genuine affection and admiration for Grant. For his part, it was evident to Conn that he still carried a torch, but they had both grown up over the last two years—that, and Grant’s imminent departure, likely kept either of them from making any declaration they might regret in the morning. Conn was relieved to learn that they could be real, adult friends.

The launch from Brownsville was well-covered. The media had settled on calling it a mission to Saturn, after some fits and starts referring to Titan and/or Tethys, and it fit well with one of the most glamorous aspects of the mission: the spacecraft would match orbits with one of Saturn’s rings, and Callie Leporis would spacewalk out and take samples. A human being would reach out and touch Saturn’s rings. It fired the public’s imagination, and was terrific for the mission and for Dyna-Tech business.

Peo was glad Conn had thought of it.

January, 2034

With Al Claussen going to Saturn, Conn would be in the lander all by herself. The way Peo had been in 2022.

On a crisp, clear day in January, Conn got her first chance to inspect
Hippeia
at Gasoline Alley. There was a great deal of fanfare and coverage: everyone wanted to see the soon-to-be first woman on the moon make her first trip into space.

She sat strapped in to the Space Station Ingress Vehicle (SSIV) atop an Strummer I-IV rocket, a titanium/beryllium flyer (Space Station Egress Vehicle; SSEV) attached to the spacecraft’s back. She had tightened her straps as tight as they would go, and she could move her head, and flail at the instruments in front of her, but that was it. On every surface, tactile switches and dials sprouted like fungus around windshields, touchscreens, and inputs manipulated by gesture. Looking at the layout as though for the first time, Conn had a hard time believing everything had a unique purpose. Out one window, she could see inland; out the other, she could see the Gulf of Mexico and, just barely, bits of the Texas coast.

Liftoff was like getting weighed down by a bag of rocks, and as the rocket thrust the craft into the Earth’s sky, she felt as though somebody extremely heavy was pressing down on her chest, to the point where she thought she might burst. She was learning to fly.

Today, she instinctively wanted to be up front, in control, pitching, rolling, feeling the press of engine thrust again in response to her swipe. But she had to settle for being a passenger on her first flight.

Zero-G was every bit as strange and wonderful as it felt beneath the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab pool. She undid her buckles and floated above her seat, except there was no above anymore. Her world was truly three dimensional now—three hundred sixty degrees. It felt familiar, almost comfortable, and she remembered her NASA training gratefully.

The rocket was pointing at the space station, and they were hurtling toward it. So maybe it was OK to think of herself as going
forward
to look out the cockpit window. Gasoline Alley looked like a child’s toy suspended from an invisible ceiling. Conn tried to get the station to look real to her. At last, as they got closer, she could see places where the exterior was scarred or charred, and it began finally to look like the enormous construct it was: a feat of imagination, effort, and, to go by how no one module seemed to go with the ones adjacent, humor. The chain of bulbous or boxy modules stretched out a dozen wide and two deep, connected by fragile-looking transit tubes. The modules were mismatched in color, shape and size. Not even a child would play with something so strange, or so wonderful.

The moon mission command module was visible docked beside where they were parking. She figured the lunar lander couldn’t be far away.

She disembarked in her full pressure suit: she would remain suited for the entirety of this quick trip. She saw a figure behind one of the modules’ windows pointing something at her, and thought it must be a range finder, or an instrument to read her suit data: she learned later that a pool of news feeds hired two astronauts bunking down in Gasoline Alley to follow Conn around with handheld cameras. It was surreal.

She heard Meridith Williams’s voice over her radio: “Conn, to your left.” There she was, waving Conn over to stay outside an airlock as her transport pilots went in. She drew once again on her NASA training to cross the twenty feet to Meridith. Meridith pointed above her head, several thrusts with her finger: Conn looked and saw the lander tethered on a long line above.

“We needed a bay for the command module,” Meridith explained as she located the winch that would reel the lander to them. She braced herself and pulled a lever. The tether went taut and the lander began to descend. No, it was simply moving, Conn reminded herself: there was no up or down.

The lander came to a stop almost close enough to touch. Meridith motioned Conn to hoist her way up to its hatch. “We’ll pressurize it once you’re in there,” Meridith said; unnecessarily, Conn thought. They wouldn’t pressurize it
before
she opened the hatch: they’d have to do it all over again, and also they’d kill her.

Conn clambered to the hatch and opened it. She was bulky in her pressure suit, and it took a good five minutes to maneuver inside far enough to close the hatch behind her. She followed Meridith’s instructions to pressurize the lander.

Conn was glad to see that the lander retained much of its tactile instrumentation, even though much of what Peo did in 2022 was computer-controlled now. Peo insisted that nothing important on the lander be controlled via swipe, or other finger or hand motion on a smooth surface. She, and now Conn, had to be able to feel everything. Dials were actual dials, turned when necessary by hand. Switches were physical toggles. There were levers, pedals, and buttons. Many of the redundant ones might eventually have to go to save weight, but until then, they all were at Conn’s disposal. The lander looked like it was ready for her.

And it needed a new name. Conn loved the name
Hippeia
, after a chariot-borne goddess, and it would still be significant since it would again be called upon to bear the first woman to the moon. But it also carried the symbolic baggage of Peo’s abortive journey. Floating in the lander now, Conn had the idea of holding a contest: let middle schools across America suggest names. She’d commit to using one of the names for the lander, and do her best to persuade Jake to use one for the command module.

Conn floated in the vehicle she was going to make history in for twenty-five minutes. No matter how real the mission had felt before, it had never felt as real as it did now. She was going to the moon.

An astronaut with a camera peered in from outside. Conn braced herself and pulled down the sun screen. She felt prepared now to tell the design team what she needed and didn’t need from the lander. Time to go home.

She agreed to let a mounted camera record her return to Earth in the Indian-made space flyer. She had been reluctant to allow one on the way up, because she was afraid she would throw up or do something equally embarrassing.

It was after she returned from Gasoline Alley that the dark side of celebrity caught up to her.

January–March, 2034

The trouble started with
TMI
, a celebrity gossip feed, which did a biographical segment about Conn that reported that her mother had abandoned the family a few months before her death when Conn was five years old. If this was true, Conn wasn’t aware of it—she remembered her mom being around until she died. But it perturbed her that her dad was reluctant to talk about it: he gave no quotes to
TMI
, and refused to even discuss it with Conn or her sister, Cora. And Peo instructed Conn herself to refuse to comment, although Conn desperately wanted to make a public statement to the effect that the
TMI
report was bullshit.