The Fifth Risk(29)
It was her brother who had first told her about NASA’s new need for astronauts. He’d seen an ad in the newspaper announcing that the space agency was opening its rocket ships to all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty, under six feet tall, weighing less than 180 pounds, and in possession of just about any sort of college science degree. He’d already applied and thought she also should. Women were specifically encouraged for the first time. Minorities, too. All that was required were some character traits: “a willingness to accept hazards comparable to those encountered in modern research airplane flights, a capacity to tolerate rigorous and severe environmental conditions, and an ability to react adequately under conditions of stress or emergency.” Up to that moment NASA had been looking mainly for test pilots who could at least feign indifference to their mortality. Now they were looking for scientists—or at any rate scientifically minded people—but with a twist: they needed the temperament of fighter jocks. Kathy hadn’t taken her brother seriously. You really think they’re going to hire an oceanographer? A girl????
A few weeks later she ran across the call for astronauts again, this time in a science journal. They really did seem to want women scientists. And she sensed that she might be the sort of woman they were looking for. “I never brought normal girl books home from the library,” she recalled. “I was fascinated by maps and the stories they told.” She was handy, too, and quick to figure out how things worked. “I kind of always flunked the dolls test,” she told an interviewer for the Johnson Space Center’s oral history project. “I never found the dolls interesting. The dollhouse stuff I found interesting, but from an architectural point of view: building them. And I’d want to lay them out differently. I didn’t want to just move the furniture around, and I sure didn’t want to just sit there and imagine conversations [between dolls] that never happened. Let me go build another house; that was more interesting.”
The head of NASA’s astronaut program had asked her to tell the group about herself—but she sensed that they were after something else, too. They listened without saying a word, until she got to a point in her story where she was on a ship in the ocean, in a storm, conducting research. It was the aspect of research oceanography she loved best: “Figuring out how to adapt to everything that happens while you’re at sea and still come back with the data that you needed, and the accuracy that you needed. I loved that challenge,” she said. “Then you’ve got to work up the data and write the papers as sort of penance to be able to go out to sea again the next year.”
George Abbey interrupted her just as she was describing how, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night, a critical piece of research equipment had busted. She’d had to haul it into the boat in the darkness and inspect each segment. The oceanographer in charge of the expedition had watched her labor for the first few hours but finally turned grumpy. “Just fix the damn thing,” he had said, and gone to bed.
“So what did you do?” Abbey asked her.
“What do you mean what did I do?” she said. “We fixed it.”
“And then you went to bed?” he asked.
“I felt like saying, No, you idiot, I did not go to bed.” Instead she explained that she had stayed up for two more hours, to make sure her fix held in the storm. Later NASA had her take a Myers-Briggs–type personality test. Like virtually all the astronauts—but unlike roughly 85 percent of the American population—she profiled as a “mission-driven” person. “The mission-driven type was overrepresented in the astronaut population,” she said. “Whereas more dreamer-or salesman-type folks are very underrepresented.”
From the original eight thousand or so applicants, NASA selected thirty-five to become astronauts. Six were women, all scientists. A lot of the men were indeed former fighter pilots. They tended to see themselves as the main event and, at least at first, looked upon the women scientists assigned to accompany them as a sideshow. Kathy wasn’t shy about expressing her thoughts on this subject. You know you’re just my taxi driver, she told one of the pilots. My job is the interesting part of this mission. He didn’t like it, but the space program was changing. “By the time I got to it,” she said, “it had gone from just proving you could get there and come home alive to: what are we doing here?”
What they were doing in space was what she sensed she’d been put on earth to do: explore, gather data, and make sense of it. “The science was three big things,” she said. “Bullet point one: using space as a platform to look back at Earth and out into the cosmos. Getting a different point of view. There is a kind of understanding of this planet that space alone makes possible. Bullet point two: What do we need to know that we don’t know about living in space? Bullet point three: How does the human body respond to being sprung from the force of gravity? How do fluids flow? How does the body behave?”
What had grabbed her attention from the start was the earth science. The snapshot that might be taken of Earth from above, of the current conditions on Earth that were going to be crucial to mankind’s understanding of its environment. “I was all about bullet point one,” said Kathy.
She couldn’t just skip the other bullet points, however. She might see her job as gathering data about the planet; but a lot of other people saw their jobs as gathering data about her. They now had another kind of human body to study, though it was reluctant. (“I was moderately disinterested in being a lab rat.”) It didn’t help that the engineers at the heart of the space program had some strange notions about women—for instance, that they were more vulnerable to rapid decreases in pressure. “The air force worked with this aerospace medical unit,” she said. “They’d concluded that the women were more likely to experience the bends when the pressure went from high to low. They think they’ve detected a higher instance of damage to the central nervous system. They tell them I’m going to die.” She thought: You guys don’t have enough data, and the data you have you’ve handled badly. She pointed out that female deep-sea divers didn’t experience any special problems at lower depths.