Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The human body—intelligent as it is—was formed in response to the atmosphere of Earth. It would be easy to make the case that humans are ill-equipped to be in space. Whatever led to our design, it was not meant for this. But Joan sees it as the exact opposite. Human intelligence and curiosity, our persistence and resilience, our capacity for long-term planning, and our ability to collaborate have led the human race here. In Joan’s estimation, we are not ill-suited at all. We are exactly who should be out there. We are the only intelligent life-form that we know of in our galaxy who has become aware of the universe and worked to understand it. We are so determined to learn what lies beyond our grasp that we have figured out how to ride a rocket out of the atmosphere. A thrilling ability that seems ripe to attract cowboys, but is best done by people like her. Nerds. Everything about space exploration is about preparedness over impulsivity, calmness over boldness. For such an adventurous job, it can be achingly routine. All risks are carefully managed; no corners are cut. There are no cowboys here. This is how NASA keeps everyone safe. Predictable models, prepared for every scenario.

“By now I hope you have surmised that you are looking at a spacecraft unlike anything we’ve seen before. The shuttle is not one piece of machinery. It is three. On launch, it is a rocket. In orbit, it is a spaceship. On landing, it is an airplane. This is what will allow us to usher in the future of space exploration.”

“Our missions here at NASA are not without risk,” Antonio said. “You will put your life into the hands of your directors and your fellow astronauts, as well as the researchers and engineers who make space exploration possible. But, if chosen, you may become one of a very small number of people who can say they have left the Earth and who can report back to the rest of us on what our planet looks like from afar. You will usher us into the future. I can assure you that this will be the greatest technological achievement in the history of NASA. It may well be the greatest endeavor in the history of mankind.”

my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time. And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares, with its reddish hue, in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 B.C.E. To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

“Do you know the difference between bravery and courage?” Vanessa said. Joan considered the question. “I don’t think so.” “My dad taught me when I was little. Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.” “Oh,” Joan said. “Neither of us are particularly brave right now,” Vanessa said. “But both of us are going to be courageous.”

How can her heart sink in microgravity? But it does.

Jimmy had been told from a young age that fear and failing and trying and wanting and openness and kindness and sincerity made him weak. And because he had believed it, he’d learned to suppress all of those things. And when he saw those traits in others, he hated them because he hated himself. Jimmy was hiding. That’s what Jimmy was doing. Lydia was, too—because she was trying to prove she could be like Jimmy. And Joan was falling for it. She was trying to prove that she could be just like a man to all of them. To Jimmy. To Lydia. Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it. Joan had let men like Jimmy set the terms. But the terms were false, even to him. He was just as scared as anybody else. Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have. She didn’t want to lower herself to the game men played.

As Joan lay in bed, her legs sinking into the welcoming mattress, her pillow so soft, she kept trying to understand how she’d gotten here. Hadn’t she been an associate astrophysics professor, teaching freshmen about Copernicus, just yesterday? She would go home each night and heat up her dinner. Frances was six and slept over every weekend. But as Joan had taken each small step forward, the world had kept spinning on its axis. Days had formed into weeks and months and years, which people marked with watches and calendars, all based on the only thing they had to tell what time it was: the stars. As the Earth orbits the sun, it shifts toward the sun’s warm embrace. Then summer turns to fall, fall to winter. Soon it loops back around, and winter thaws to spring, spring to summer. Through it all, babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from. And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy. Day in and day out, the Earth keeps spinning and revolving and sailing through the Milky Way. That is why time never stands still. And that is why, small as they were, J...

Look what we humans had done. We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly. It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt. Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.