But then Ginny looks up and she sees white and black, a vast tapering cylinder painted in those colours, stretching up to the roof and seemingly held upright by a tower of red girders. The Saturn V stack is so much bigger than she imagined. She knows it is 363 feet tall, but that’s just a number, and like many readers and writers of science fiction she has seen so many numbers so much larger—millions of miles! thousands of years! hundreds of light-years! She has become almost immune to scale, blasé about immensity. But this, it takes her breath away, and she finds it hard to credit three men will be perched atop this rocket and it will carry them to the Moon. She feels humbled, as if the immense physical presence of the crawler-transporter and Saturn V has levered open her imagination and created a gaping void to be filled.
Apollo 12, says the engineer, they finished putting it together only two days ago.
When will it launch? asks Ginny.
There’s still weeks of tests yet, the engineer adds. It’s all automated, but we won’t be ready to roll out to the pad for more than a month.
There is an unintended irony here. I have never visited the John F Kennedy Space Center, nor the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center (as the Manned Spacecraft Center is now known), I have never stood beside a Saturn V. I can only imagine its size, its sheer physicality. And yet, here I am, attempting to describe it in such a way that its overwhelming proportions impact my fictional character’s imagination. There are those who consider science fiction an essentially ironic genre, and the universe is indeed indifferent to the plight of humans—but in many science fiction stories, the very fate of the universe is dependent upon a person’s actions. In order to tell stories which will appeal to readers, writers must put people at the centre, and give them the power to change their world. It is almost axiomatic.
Yet here is Virginia Grace Eckhardt, who has no such power. She has power only over the fictional worlds she creates on her typewriter. There is irony. And there is more irony still—
Imagining an entirely female astronaut corps, given that, at the time Ginny is being shown around the VAB in early July 1969, only one woman, Valentina Tereshkova, has been into space.
Positing a history of science fiction in which the genre is dominated by women, in which it is considered women’s fiction.
One of the strengths of science fiction is its capacity to literalise metaphors. The 526 foot tall Vehicle Assembly Building, the Apollo 12 stack on the crawler-transporter in one of its high bays, both could be considered literal representations of the irony which underlies the narrative of All That Outer Space Allows.
The view from the roof of the VAB is astonishing, even though there’s little to see: low scrub, inlets and basins, to the east the blurred grey carpet of the Atlantic Ocean. And, of course, the two launch pads—a wide causeway stretches from the VAB to each of them, along which the crawler-transporter will carry its Saturn V stack.
A cool sea breeze blows across the top of the VAB, and Ginny feels it press the thin material of her dress against her back. There’s a photographer from the NASA press office standing several feet away, so Ginny smiles and grips Walden’s hand tighter and hopes she doesn’t look too foolish in the hard hat. The photographer tells them he’s finished, Walden releases her hand and marches across to have a word with the man. Ginny turns about, puts a hand up to the NASA pass clipped to her dress and plays idly with it as she gazes out at launch pads 39A and 39B. At some point in the next year or two, her husband may well find himself lying on his back in a command module atop 6 million pounds of fuel—kerosene and liquid oxygen; and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen—which will burn producing 8.5 million pounds of thrust and all to throw around 45 tons into orbit about the Earth in eleven and a half minutes.
She wonders what it might feel like to sit atop a Saturn V mated to one of those giant red gantries at the launch pad, clad in a space suit, the battleship grey instrument panel above her… She hugs her torso and shivers. This is what she has been writing about, but now having witnessed the colossal size of the Saturn V, she wonders if she can truly capture the sensation of flying in it. Science fiction seems such an imperfect tool, too dependent upon well-worn tropes and conventions so long established they’re usually left unexplained.
If only Ginny could apply to be an astronaut herself! But women are not allowed. Women are perfectly capable of being astronauts, of that much she is convinced—and an all-female astronaut corps would do the job just as well as an all-male one, if not better. Perhaps there’s a story in there somewhere, a history of the US space program, but with female astronauts—
Walden is at her side. He’ll send us copies, he says. Have you seen enough, hon?
She glances at her watch. It’s after four, they’ve been here since lunch-time, no doubt the tour would not have taken so long if Ginny hadn’t insisted on asking their guide how everything worked. He seemed as fascinated by her interest as she was by his explanations.
What about the launch pads? she asks. Can we see one of those?
Not with the Apollo 11 stack on the pad, hon, maybe another time.
Walden insinuates an arm around her waist. I got to get back to work, he says. Tomorrow maybe I’ll take you round the MSOB. I can show you the altitude chambers.
He gives her a squeeze and steers her about, toward the stairwell in the centre of the roof. I’ll come to the hotel this evening, he adds, we can have dinner in the restaurant. Another squeeze. Maybe I’ll even stay over.
I’d like that, she replies.
In the VAB parking lot, no longer wearing hard hats, Ginny glances back at the building and is struck anew by its enormous size. Science fiction is all about scale, vast distances and deep time, made manageable, made human. All those parsecs and light years, those millions and billions of years, rendered conceivable. And yet real space exploration is huge too, perhaps just a little bit too large to be believed, even when standing right next to it. The Saturn V seen up close is… monstrous.
And the distances! How obliviously science fiction skates over the vastness of space—a quarter of a million miles to the Moon, three days travel, they say the guys in Apollo 10 travelled the fastest of any human beings, hitting 24,791 mph during their return from the Moon. And a trip to Mars… It almost doesn’t bear thinking about: millions of miles, months and months of travel, to stand on the surface of a world where a man cannot survive without science, without engineering… This is what Ginny wants to put into her science fiction.
She has stood on the flight line at Edwards, she has seen Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers and marvelled at their size, been astonished that such a large and substantial aircraft—length 159 feet 4 inches, wingspan 185 feet, max takeoff weight 488,000 lbs!—could ever take to the air. But she has seen them fly, thundering past, no more than a few hundred feet above the dry lake, trailing smoke, the roar of their eight turbofan engines deafening.
Ginny knows about sense of wonder and suspension of disbelief, they are the tools of her trade. She tries to deploy both in her stories, whether she succeeds is open to debate. Sometimes she speculates if applying those concepts to real life, the quotidian and the prosaic, in some way devalues them. After all, she has witnessed much which would seem to apply—not just the sight of a B-52 taking off, but the ways of men, of her husband, the selective blindness and pigheadedness. The efforts she must go to in order to be noticed, the work she must put into the house so it fits Walden’s idea of a home…