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krpalmerNever having got around to unsubscribing from promotional emails from the Kennedy Space Center visitor’s centre, I happened to see a notice about a new book about the astronauts hired in 1978 to begin restaffing NASA in preparation for space shuttle launches. I looked up the ebook version of Meredith Babgy’s The New Guys without quite being ready to commit to buying it. Then, I happened to see a hardcover copy in the bookstore. That just managed to turn my thoughts to having just read a different book on space through my library’s ebook lending service (Stephen Walker’s Beyond, which is about Yuri Gagarin). When I looked up The New Guys, it was there too.
Thirty-five astronauts were hired in 1978. Reading the book, I did get the sense it was concentrating on the four visible minorities and six women (none of them visible minorities) among the “Thirty-Five New Guys” (the non-obscene expansion of their group’s acronym nickname). With early notes included about the women who’d done well at astronaut medical exams in the early 1960s and the two black pilots who’d come closer to becoming astronauts later in that decade, I can understand the focus, and I’m very conscious of how fast ostensible “questions” can turn into “performative offensiveness.” Maybe “there could be other interesting stories from the group too” might not turn into that; maybe there’s problems with that too. I did notice the book noted Mike Mullane’s earlier autobiography Riding Rockets; I did once buy that book, but wound up getting rid of my copy after Mullane might have left me with too much of an impression of presenting things as “one big frat boy party, until some of us were dead and it wasn’t.” This new book might have got my attention when it casually mentioned every one of the 1978 astronauts launched into space between 1983 and 1985, anyway.
I did think a bit that it’s been longer since those missions than it had been since the Apollo landings when books about them ramped up again in the mid-1990s. That does lead to uncertain thoughts about “does something you were alive for never feel quite as distant as something you weren’t?” As The New Guys worked through to some missions in the 1990s I did wonder a little about just what things were like for the astronauts in those frowned-at days, but I also got to imagining being told “we remained busy; we didn’t have time to care about the complaints of armchair critics, whether on Usenet, in science fiction magazines, or the press itself.” Now that I’ve read this book I did get to wondering about buying a copy, and whether things will get to the point of a paperback version.
Thirty-five astronauts were hired in 1978. Reading the book, I did get the sense it was concentrating on the four visible minorities and six women (none of them visible minorities) among the “Thirty-Five New Guys” (the non-obscene expansion of their group’s acronym nickname). With early notes included about the women who’d done well at astronaut medical exams in the early 1960s and the two black pilots who’d come closer to becoming astronauts later in that decade, I can understand the focus, and I’m very conscious of how fast ostensible “questions” can turn into “performative offensiveness.” Maybe “there could be other interesting stories from the group too” might not turn into that; maybe there’s problems with that too. I did notice the book noted Mike Mullane’s earlier autobiography Riding Rockets; I did once buy that book, but wound up getting rid of my copy after Mullane might have left me with too much of an impression of presenting things as “one big frat boy party, until some of us were dead and it wasn’t.” This new book might have got my attention when it casually mentioned every one of the 1978 astronauts launched into space between 1983 and 1985, anyway.
I did think a bit that it’s been longer since those missions than it had been since the Apollo landings when books about them ramped up again in the mid-1990s. That does lead to uncertain thoughts about “does something you were alive for never feel quite as distant as something you weren’t?” As The New Guys worked through to some missions in the 1990s I did wonder a little about just what things were like for the astronauts in those frowned-at days, but I also got to imagining being told “we remained busy; we didn’t have time to care about the complaints of armchair critics, whether on Usenet, in science fiction magazines, or the press itself.” Now that I’ve read this book I did get to wondering about buying a copy, and whether things will get to the point of a paperback version.