Tales of heroism and sexism from space
SPACE The human story TIM PEAKE 336pp. Century. £22.
THE SIX The untold story of America’s first women astronauts
LOREN GRUSH 432pp. Virago. £25.
WRITING IN 2 0 0 4, as George W. Bush announced his intention for Nasa to return to the Moon and go on to Mars, the physicist Robert Park called the plan “hopelessly oldfashioned”. “The future is not in spacesuits”, he declared. “The future is in robots.” Twenty years later the latest upgrade of Bush’s plan is preparing for launch in September 2025. But when Artemis 2 takes off on its loop around the Moon, it’ll be carrying approximately 320kg of human cargo – not to mention the food, water and air required to keep four astronauts alive.
Only 628 humans have crossed the Kármán line – a boundary 100km up that marks the notional edge of the atmosphere – since Yuri Gagarin climbed into Vostok 1 in 1961. In Space: The human story the astronaut Tim Peake doesn’t spend much time trying to justify all that extra baggage. We could send a robot to the Moon, he admits, and it “might even take better pictures … But somehow only when a human has … seen it through human eyes, and come back and told us about it … do we feel a visceral connection with that journey – a connection strong enough to inspire us”.
Peake’s survey begins in 1959, with the Mercury space programme’s first press conference, at which Nasa’s administrator introduces a group of seven “exceptional individuals” sitting in a row and looking out “calmly but slightly warily” at “200 jostling news reporters and photographers”. Two years after the taunting beeps of Sputnik 1, the US is heading for space. But, as the astronaut Eugene Cernan wrote in his autobiography, The Last Man on the Moon (1999), “How did one get to be an astronaut? For that matter, just what the hell was an astronaut?”
Back in 1959 the answer was straightforward. All seven were military test pilots. They were all in their thirties, all married, all white, all men. Peake explains how relevant experience, medical records and comprehensive flying logs made military test pilots the convenient choice, despite the awkward fact that the agency was supposed to be a civilian outfit and their decision ruled out half the population of the US at a stroke. He describes the physiological and psychological tests the candidates performed, including the blank sheet of paper they were handed for comment. (The third man on the Moon, Pete Conrad, pushed it back across the table to the examiner and said: “it’s upside down”.) He recounts how the design of the Soviet Union’s Vostok capsule imposed a rigorous height limit of 5ft 7in and recalls his own encounter with the blood tests, eye tests and lung tests, and with that blank sheet of paper. But space agencies weren’t, and aren’t, j
