Atmosphere: What a Ride!

 

 

 

 

Atmosphere (2025)

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Penguin Random Books, 352 pages.

★★★★★

 

In sections of recent U.S. history I used to hold up my cellphone and remind students that said phones have more far computing power than NASA had when it first sent astronauts into space. That remained so throughout the space shuttle program, which ended in 2011. Erstwhile astronauts were aware that theirs was an inherently dangerous profession. In essence, one had to be willing to die to advance science.

 

Novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid wanted her ninth novel to be different from the other eight. I’m a huge fan and never felt she was repeating herself, but Reid certainly took a big detour in Atmosphere, a novel about the early days on NASA. She did all the expected background work and even lived in Houston to get a firsthand feel of how astronauts train. Novels like Orbital and Atmosphere  remind me that I have the “wrong stuff” to go into space.

 

In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to leave earth’s atmosphere. Reid mentions Ride in passing in Atmosphere, but her character Joan Goodwin is loosely based on Ride. If you can recall the 1980s, you might remember that it was a period in which NASA was caught up in social change and sought a number of “firsts,” as in first African American, first Asian, first teacher …. There over 8,000 applications for NASA’s 1977 class of recruits, just 208 were chosen, and a mere six were women. Reid’s novel follows the discrimination women faced through Goodwin’s eyes as she narrates her inner fears, her struggles with shyness, frustration, and a work/life balance.

 

Joan is a brilliant Stanford grad training to be a mission specialist. Those who might go up in the space shuttle lived semi-cloistered existences in assigned (and spartan) apartments on the NASA Mission Control campus. They could leave the campus when they had days off, a good thing in Joan’s case as her sister Barbara is an irresponsible single mom who sees Joan as someone who should be at her beck and call to babysit her 9-year-old. Joan tries her best as there is no one in the world she loves as much as her niece Frances (and vice versa).

 

Joan, a former astronomy professor, and her female colleagues compete in a macho world of “Top Guns” (as one reviewer pegged them), who think women have no place in space. The women on Joan’s team include Donna Fitzgerald, who harbors a secret, mission specialist Vanesa Ford, and Lydia Danes who can’t figure out why no one can see that she the smartest person in every room she enters. The men on the team are commander Steve Hagen, space cowboy Hank Redmond, and John “Griff” Griffin, who is an open ally for the women.

 

The narrative opens and (mostly) closes with a crisis. Joan, to the shock of some colleagues, became the first woman in space. She didn’t like it as much as she hoped, as she was sick to her stomach a lot. For the next flight she’s at Mission Control serving as CAPCOM, the voice on the ground communicating with the shuttle in flight. Call her stint, “Houston we have problems.” She must handle a crisis that’s analogous to a mash of the 1986 Challenger and the 2003 Columbia disasters, (though not entirely like either of them).  An explosion aboard leaves several astronauts dead and the shuttle so seriously damaged that NASA doubts it can survive reentry.

 

The novel has been a huge hit, understandable as it touches numerous target audiences. It’s a thriller, a work that looks at the price of ambition, a marvel, a paean to teamwork, and a lesbian love story. The latter are in the closet (though not as deeply as they wished) because in the 1980s anyone engaged in “immoral” behavior would have been dismissed NASA. Some readers have found the relationship unrealistic and/or syrupy. It does tiptoe to the edge of the latter but, in my view, backed off before it crossed the line of unbelievability. Unbeknownst to many Americans until recently, Sally Ride married a fellow astronaut, divorced him after five years, and then lived with her female lover for the last 27 years of her life.* Atmosphere doesn’t leave too many meanings of the word unexamined.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Before she did so, she asked her partner, a former pro tennis player, to reveal their relationship.