The Lizard Peninsula is a Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This part of the county really gets James going. On the way over here, he explained to me that the rocks on the peninsula are made of oceanic crust.
“Speaking of crusts,” I replied, “let’s get pizza tonight.”
James slowed to take a bend in the road. “The word pizza is over a thousand years old,” he pontificated.
I’ve downloaded a podcast to listen to on today’s run. It’s part of a science series run by two guys in Colorado. This episode is called “Women in Space.” I haven’t listened to any of the other episodes in this series before, but there are some intriguing titles such as: “How to Grow Skin” and “The Truth about Crows.”
“Hey, Elijah,” says a guy in my earphones. I take a quick look behind me. James gives me a wave. I increase my pace.
“Good to see you again, Powell.”
Irritatingly, Elijah and Powell start talking about their weekends, and this goes on for some time. To summarise: Elijah went to a flea market with his wife, but they didn’t buy anything. Powell went to a gig and drank too many Keystone Ices. Today Elijah and Powell are drinking Cougar Pale Ale, as supplied by Elijah, whose house they are recording in.
“Let’s talk about women in space,” says Elijah, cutting short Powell’s story about where he woke up after the gig.
“Oh right, that’s what we’re talking about,” laughs Powell, taking an audible gulp of beer. “Well, Colorado is an aerospace mecca, so we had to talk about this stuff at some point, right? And we thought we’d give it a twist by talking about women in space.”
“The first woman in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova,” says Elijah. “She orbited the earth forty-eight times in 1963.”
“It was a man who came up with the idea of sending a woman to space, right?” Powell chimes in. He then affects a bad Russian accent: “Sergey Korolyov.”
“That’s right. And there were these super-strict criteria. The women had to be skydivers, under thirty, less than five foot seven, under 154 pounds . . .”
“That’s standard practise for astronauts anyway, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure you have to be, like, under two hundred pounds to get into NASA.”
Elijah laughs. “There go my hopes and dreams!”
“You and me both, buddy.”
“Anyway, Tereshkova logged more flight time than all the American astronauts who’d flown before her put together.”
“Yeah, and everyone was like, ‘That was cool.’ But then no women went to space for nineteen years after that.”
“The second one to go was Russian again, I think?”
This is an even more difficult run than I’d anticipated. The coastal path is narrow and uneven. I really hope James is all right.
On the podcast, Elijah and Powell have started talking about American women in space. Apparently, the US has sent up forty females since 1983. My mum died in December 1983, so she’d have been alive to witness Sally Ride, the first American woman, go up in June of that year.
Elijah talks about female astronauts from all sorts of other places: Japan, China, Italy, South Korea. And one from Britain too. Helen Sharman got the job after responding to a radio advertisement. At the time, she was working for Mars, the confectioners. Her job involved studying the physical and chemical properties of chocolate. She beat thirteen thousand other applicants, and off she went to a Soviet space station. “From Mars to Mir,” jokes Elijah.
Powell has been quiet for some time. “Elijah,” he says now, “let’s talk about sexism.”
“Sure,” Elijah replies. Am I imagining irritation in his voice? “Female astronauts, who the media once dubbed ‘astronettes,’ have had to deal with a lot of prejudice, particularly in the early days of space travel. Jerrie Cobb, who was part of Mercury 13—”
“Mercury 13 was a group of thirteen American women who underwent many of the same tests as the men in Project Mercury, right?”
“Correct.”
“But NASA cancelled the women’s programme and didn’t select any of them to go to space.”
“Jerrie Cobb,” continues Elijah, “passed all three phases of her tests, ranking her in the top 2 percent of all astronaut candidates of both sexes. During this gruelling process, whenever the press interviewed her, they asked her about cooking. And before Shannon Lucid spent 188 days in space, she was quizzed about how her children would handle her being away for so long.”
“It is a weird one, though,” interjects Powell. “I don’t know how I would’ve felt having my mom blast off to space when I was a kid.”
“What about your dad?” asks Elijah.
“Well, my dad was never around.”
There’s a pause before Elijah goes on to list several well-known male astronauts with families. Alan Shepard’s three kids frequently attended NASA events. John Young had two wives and two children. Buzz Aldrin had three wives and three children.
I’ve got to go to a conference in Nottinghamshire for the next round of the competition. I’ve told James I’ve got a dive coming up in Liverpool, that I’ll be cleaning out a reservoir.
My gaze wanders up towards the sky. It’s not selfish to want to see what’s out there, is it? Kids may never happen, after all. It’s only sensible to have a plan B. Even if I do get pregnant, the first crew isn’t due to set off until 2030. If I give birth next year, she’ll reach double figures by the time I’m due to leave. Surely I’ll have done all the important groundwork by then? And we could still communicate regularly. It takes about twenty minutes for a message to
