by Ian Sales
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…
Ginny slides into Walden’s car, and as soon as she’s shut the door, he pulls out of the parking space. I’ll take you back to your car, he says, I still got stuff to do.
But you’ll come to the hotel later?
Sure, I said so, didn’t I? He looks across at her. How long are you planning on staying, hon?
She ignores his gaze and stares out of the passenger window at the passing scenery, which appears no more interesting at ground level than it did 526 feet up in the air. I don’t know, she replies. A couple of days, I suppose.
When you’ve seen everything at the Cape, there’s the beach, Walden suggests.
Ginny is not a beach person, and spending hours lying on hot sand beneath the Florida sun, in a bikini or a one-piece, that’s not something she’s ever considered a worthwhile pastime. She came to Cocoa Beach to see more of the space program—and her husband of course—not to sunbathe.
Maybe, Ginny tells her husband.
Walden Eckhardt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walden Jefferson “Wal” Eckhardt (born March 8, 1932) is a retired United States Air Force brigadier general and a former NASA astronaut. As the lunar module pilot for Apollo 15 in 1971, he became the eighth person to walk on the Moon.
Biography
Early life and education
Eckhardt was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he graduated from Central High School in 1950. After a year spent working at Walker Field Airport, where he earned his pilot’s licence, he studied for and received a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering at San Diego State University in 1955.
Military career
Eckhardt joined the United States Air Force on graduation from San Diego State University. After a year at flying school, he was sent to George Air Force Base, California, for advanced training on the North American F-86 Sabre fighter jet, before being assigned in 1959 to the 415th Interceptor Squadron stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. In 1962, he was transferred to the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. On graduation, he remained at Edwards as an instructor before attending the Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1962. After graduating from ARPS, he spent a year as an instructor and was then assigned to the Fighter Test Group.
NASA career
In April 1966, Eckhardt was one of the nineteen selected for NASA’s fifth group of astronauts. In 1968, he served as a member of the support crew for Apollo 10, the first mission to carry the full Apollo stack to the Moon and the dry run for the first manned Moon landing. He then served as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 12, the second Moon landing mission, commanded by Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad.
Apollo 15
Between July 26 and August 7, 1971 – as the Apollo 15 Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) – Eckhardt logged 295 hours and 11 minutes in
space. His extra-vehicular activity (EVA) on the Moon’s surface
amounted to 18 hours and 35 minutes of the mission time (an additional 33 minutes was used to do a stand-up EVA by opening the LM’s docking hatch to survey the surroundings and take photographs). Eckhardt and David Scott’s mission was more science-based than previous missions, which meant that they received intensive geological training to meet the demanding nature of the J-Mission profile. This extra training is credited with allowing them to make one of the most important discoveries of the Apollo era, the Genesis Rock.
Apollo 15 landed in the Moon's Hadley-Apennine region, noted for its mountains and rilles. As a J-Mission, they would spend more time on the moon than previous missions, to allow for three EVAs. As well, Eckhardt was the first automobile passenger on the Moon as Scott drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) carried along for this mission in the Lunar Module (LM) Falcon's Descent Stage. Scott and Eckhardt’s stay on the Moon was just under three days at 66 hours and 54 minutes.
Post-NASA career
After Apollo 15, Eckhardt remained with NASA after being assigned to the Skylab program. However, once the planned fifth Skylab mission was cancelled Eckhardt left NASA, and retired from the United States Air Force, on September 1, 1975. He held a number of positions with aerospace companies before retiring in 1992.
Personal life
Eckhardt married his wife, Virginia, shortly after she graduated from San Diego State University in 1958. They have one daughter, Suzy, born 1973. The pair divorced in 1979.
Organizations
He was a member of the Air Force Association and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
Awards and Honors
Air Force Distinguished Service Medal
Air Force Commendation Medal
NASA Distinguished Service Medal
Command Pilot Astronaut Wings
Robert J Collier Trophy, 1971
Haley Astronautics Award, 1972
He was also awarded Belgium’s Order of Leopold in 1971, and an Honorary Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering from San Diego State University in 1971.
He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983, and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on October 4, 1997.
Bibliography
Flight of the Falcon (with Virginia G. Eckhardt, 1983)
Categories: American astronauts | 1971 in spaceflight | American aviators | American test pilots | Apollo 15 | People who have walked on the Moon | United States Air Force officers | U.S Air Force Test Pilot School alumni
Chapter 9
Lunar Module Descent
The next day, Ginny is taken round the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, she sees the altitude chambers in which they test if the command modules and lunar modules can survive the rigours of space. She can’t decide if the chambers resemble giant ovens or giant diving bells but perhaps, she decides, it’s because their function is something of both. Then, on the third floor, Walden hasn’t said where he’s taking her, he abruptly halts, glances at his watch and swears.
I was supposed to be somewhere, he says, I got to make a phone call. Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute, hon.
He hurries off back toward the elevators, leaving Ginny on her own in the corridor, wondering if she’s meant to stand there like a lemon until he returns. And then the doors just a little further along the corridor swing open and a woman with short brown hair, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and white hose, comes striding toward Ginny, and frowns on seeing her and asks, Can I help you?
Ginny introduces herself but is only halfway through explaining her husband is giving her a tour of the MSOB but ha
s just abandoned her to make a telephone call, when the nurse interrupts, and with a smile asks, He was taking you to the suiting room?
I guess, says Ginny.
Well, it’s this way, come on, I’ll take you. My name is Dee, by the way.
She leads Ginny along the corridor and through a pair of double doors into a white-walled room with several tan Naugahyde armchairs scattered about it. Each armchair faces a large white control-panel festooned with dials and valves and knobs; and between each control panel, a waist-high table stretches from the wall out into the room. Dee waves at a man in white coveralls, he’s standing at one of the tables and Ginny thinks he’s talking to someone lying on the table top before she realises it’s an empty spacesuit.
Hey, Joe, says Dee, this is Ginny, you want to give her a quick run-down of what you do in here?
Ginny Eckhardt, Ginny adds, Walden just had to go make a phone call.
She looks at the spacesuit on the table, and asks, Is that what they’ll be wearing on the Moon?
Joe starts to explain the A7L and its twenty-one layers of materials, from the rubber-coated nylon bladder to the Teflon fabric abrasion layer. When he mentions the spacesuits are made by a division of Playtex, Ginny can’t help smiling—and she thinks about bras and foundation garments, girdles and corsets, and the white constricting material from which they’re made, the outer layer of the A7L shares their colour and texture. And the A7L’s innermost layer of nylon too, she’s amused by these manliest of men wearing garments so closely related to women’s underwear. Joe is in the middle of an explanation of the connectors on the front of the torso, and Ginny is listening fascinated, when the doors to the suiting room swing open and Ginny turns and sees Walden poke his head inside, scan the room, scowl, and then withdraw. She makes a face at Dee, puzzled by her husband’s behaviour; but then she turns back to Joe and he has what looks like a fishbowl in his hands and he tells her it’s the helmet and it’s made of polycarbonate…
Joe drifts away after his lecture, and Ginny and Dee chat. They connect immediately, it’s not simply their shared gender in this predominantly male world, or the fact they’re the same age, perhaps it’s the interest Ginny showed in the A7L, in what it takes to put a man on the Moon. For Ginny, it’s partly gratitude at being rescued in the corridor, the chances of someone she knows passing were slim, and she thinks perhaps there are not many at the Cape who would have stopped to ask if she needed help. Emboldened by Dee’s friendliness, Ginny admits she writes science fiction, and Dee mentions a writer who interviewed her years before as research for a novel about a space nurse.
That novel is Countdown for Cindy by Eloise Engle, originally published in 1962 in the magazine American Girl. I own a copy of the 1964 Bantam paperback. It is the sort of science fiction novel which proves the point of Ginny. In the novel, Cindy, the protagonist, is celebrated by a shocked and astounded media as the first woman into space when she is chosen to accompany a doctor of space medicine to the US Moon base. The book was written, of course, before Tereshkova’s flight aboard Vostok 6. Countdown for Cindy is rife with late fifties gender politics—these are not the sensibilities Ginny, who is fictional herself, would write into her own stories, although she has lived with them and not much has changed for the better in the decade since.
There is a scene in Engle’s novel which, for me, is emblematic of the time’s attitudes to women—shortly after arriving at the Moon base, Cindy gets ready for her first shift on duty: “Then she opened her bag and took out fresh disposable undies and a pair of clean slacks. She thought a moment. What a horrid mistake that would be. She folded the slacks, put them away, and took out her crisp white nurse’s uniform and the perky cap. Yes, that was more like it. White hose and white shoes… she looked into the mirror and applied fresh lipstick on her lips. Ready? Not quite. A bit of perfume and a final smoothing of her fluffy hair”. Cindy is expected to look like a nurse, no matter how impractical her uniform in one-sixth gravity; and she must look pretty too.
Ten minutes later, Walden sticks his head back into the suiting room, he spots Dee and says, Have you seen my wife— Oh there you are, Ginny.
Before they go, Ginny needs to visit a rest-room, Walden of course has no idea where one for women can be found, but Dee gives precise directions. After washing her hands and fixing her lipstick, Ginny returns to her husband, and she says her goodbyes to Dee, with promises to keep in touch; and then Walden walks Ginny to the elevator, they descend to the first floor, leave the building and he drives her to the visitor center parking lot, where she left her rental. Walden tells her he’ll be round to see her that evening and they’ll go out for dinner, and she wonders if she has brought enough clothes to eat out every night of her stay in Florida. She gets in her car, winds down the window, they kiss through it, and Walden turns on his heel and strides back to his car, while she inserts her ignition key and gives it a thoughtful twist.
It has been like a holiday these days at the Cape. Each evening, he takes her somewhere different to eat—Ramon’s Restaurant, The Moon Hut, Fat Boys Bar-B-Q Restaurant, Bernard’s Surf, Wolfie’s Restaurant… And everywhere they go, they know Walden, they know he’s one of the Apollo astronauts and they tell him he’s going to the Moon for sure. She can see why he frequents these places, it’s not just for the food. Ginny loves the history, the space memorabilia on display—there are wooden plaques naming the Mercury Seven astronauts on the walls of Ramon’s, signed photographs and “flown items” in the other venues.
And having Walden in her bed every night, it’s doing both of them good, the sex is better than it has been for a long time. Walden is more relaxed, he flashes that aviator grin of his more often; Ginny feels wanted, no longer an accessory, but a partner. They talk, and it’s silly stuff, trivial chatter, they laugh and joke, they have fun together. Walden, for the first time, tells her a little bit about what he’s doing, and he’s surprised and delighted when she understands some of it.
Remember when I showed you the LM simulator, he says, I thought you were going to fly the damn thing all the way to the Moon.
I wish I could, she says wistfully.
They’re lying in bed, only just covered by rumpled sheets, the lights are off and the room glows with moonlight the same colour as the polished skin of a command module. Ginny smiles indulgently. She rolls onto her side, facing Walden, and props her head on her palm. He is gazing up at the ceiling and he’s talking but she’s not taking in the words. She spent today on the beach, basking beneath the sun, and she can feel the heat she took in radiating from her, she is golden with it, and she doesn’t feel like a member of the Astronaut Wives Club for the first time since moving to Houston, she feels like a wife. Grateful, she bends forward and pecks her husband on the lips, silencing him.
#
#
The “couple of days” turns into a week. Ginny has seen all there is to see at the Cape, but she is enjoying her husband’s company too much to want to return to the empty house in El Lago. She explores the surrounding area but there is little of interest, people come here for the beach and the astronauts. She finds a small book store with a reasonable science fiction selection, buys a couple of new paperbacks—one by Kate and one by Marion—and reads them as she lays on the beach, for the first time in her life finding pleasure in pure indolence, enjoying the way the heat soaks into her body, causing her to gently and effortlessly perspire, and, though she would never admit it, she is even gratified by the speculative looks she receives from passing men.
But it has to end, she’s known since the first night it would end, she can’t stay here forever. Walden tells her over drinks in the Riviera Lounge:
The other guys, he says, they don’t like it if the wives stay too long. You have Houston, we have the Cape. You put us off our training.
But I’m interested in all this, she protests.
Yeah, you see, he says, that’s what wrong. I mean, I never said anything about your stories, about your women’s magazi
nes, with their spaceships and robots. I mean, hell, it’s all make-believe, right?
He adopts the serious face he likes to use when he’s about to tell her something he thinks she doesn’t know but is secretly afraid she already does. She has never had the heart to tell him he is usually right to be scared—but marriages survive on the discretion of wives.
You’re like a distraction, Walden tells her; you are a distraction. I have to give it one hundred percent, I can’t have anything around that affects my focus.
You have to go back to Houston, he says.
She’s been feeling a need to write, prompted by the two novels she’s just read, and by what she’s learnt here at the Cape, so she’s sort of glad the idyll is over. But it still hurts to be told to go away by her husband.
He reaches across the table, takes her hand and squeezes. It’s been real good, Ginny, he says, having you here, but the holiday is over.
She gives a wan smile, picks up her piña colada and sucks on the straw, but then her eyes narrow as something occurs to her. What about the Apollo 11 launch, she asks, can I stay for that?
In just over a week, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins will be heading for the Moon, and four days later they will make the first lunar landing, they will be the first people to set foot on an alien world in the history of humankind.
I think you should go home, Walden says firmly.
Ginny really wants to see the Apollo 11 liftoff, and not on television. But she will not plead, she will not wheedle. There will be other launches. And she is missing her Hermes Baby. Her head is full of ideas, baked to a lustrous finish beneath the sun during her hours on the beach, she has written stories in her head as she sunbathed, has dreamt up plots, narratives, settings, and she wants to get them down on paper before she loses them forever.