by Sue Nelson
Wally had met her plus-one at a Women in Aviation conference the year before. Loretta Hall was giving a talk on the Mercury 13 when she discovered that one of the Mercury 13 was in the audience. They’d kept in touch ever since. Loretta introduced herself to me via email and, as both of us were on a budget, we opted to share a room where Virgin Galactic’s Future Astronauts were staying: the Hotel Encanto in Las Cruces. It was a risk considering we’d never met each other before but, via email at least, Loretta seemed friendly, and we had several things in common. We both shared a keen interest in space and, like me, she viewed a glass of wine as an essential form of relaxation. She had also offered to provide transportation during the three-day trip, and rooms at her home for Wally and I before and after the trip, to save us money. This was a welcome relief for the bank balance. Three months earlier, in June, I had made an unexpected trip to New York. The Women with the Right Stuff documentary on women in space that I’d made with Wally the year before – and that had almost prompted a nervous breakdown – had won a New York Festival’s International Programs Radio Award. At the awards dinner, I collected a surprisingly heavy but magnificent art-deco-style piece of hardware, and paid tribute to Wally and ‘all women who aimed high’ in a short acceptance speech.
Loretta greeted us in the driveway of one of the adobe homes. For some reason, I’d assumed she’d be in her thirties or forties, but Loretta was seventy-one years old; Wally a slightly more mature seventy-eight. I was about to undertake a road trip across New Mexico with not one, but two septuagenarians. It would be an elderly version of Thelma and Louise. Plus one.
Trim, with short grey hair, Loretta’s gentle and intelligent manner made me warm to her immediately. She had met her husband, Jerry, as an engineering student and became a high school maths teacher. In 1985, after being a full-time mother for a number of years, she began writing on architecture, engineering and construction. Since her retirement, Loretta had discovered a love of space history, particularly in the state she lived in. Her most recent publication was Out of This World: New Mexico’s Contributions to Space Travel. She had also written a book for children about the Spaceport, illustrated by her daughter. In short, I couldn’t have asked for a better guide throughout New Mexico.
She produced a road map and spread it out on the kitchen island. Wally nodded with approval at the chia-flax-quinoa granola bars nearby and the packets of instant Quaker oatmeal. She opened the fridge and examined the bottles and cartons. One of them contained pomegranate and blueberry juice. Not cranberry, but Wally was happy. Loretta pointed out the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc to me on one of the shelves. ‘That’s for later,’ she said.
Loretta talked us through a suggested route for the following day. The aim was to break up the three-hour-or-so-long journey down to our hotel in Las Cruces with a side trip to the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. The VLA is not one telescope, but an array of twenty-seven antennae (plus one spare) spread across twenty-two miles (thirty-six kilometres) in the plains of San Agustin. Each dish is eighty-two feet (twenty-five metres) in diameter, but they work together as if they were one much larger telescope. Combining their data gives the equivalent resolution of one giant antenna twenty-two miles (thirty-six kilometres) across and the sensitivity of a dish 422 feet (130 metres) wide.
The telescopes study the universe using radio waves which, like microwaves, infrared and visible light, are a type of electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves are the basis for radio communications on Earth, but we can also detect radio waves from space. If an astronomical object has a changing magnetic field – like a star (sun), planet, cloud of gas, or a spinning neutron star known as a pulsar – then it will emit radio waves that can be detected across the universe.
Most radio telescopes, like the VLA, are situated in dry desert locations to avoid humidity, because water molecules in the air distort the radio waves passing through them, which causes problems for radio astronomy. But there was another reason why this facility was a particular draw for women who worked in the fields of astrophysics and astronomy, as well as science fiction fans like myself: the movie Contact. In it, actress Jodie Foster plays Dr Ellie Arroway, a character indirectly inspired by a real-life astronomer, Dr Jill Tarter, from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. There the similarities end, as the film covered humankind’s first encounter with intelligent life from another solar system through the detection of a radio signal.
What made the film memorable for me was the fictional female astronomer’s intensity, intelligence and determination. To my surprise, Wally hadn’t seen it. ‘I’ve heard of Jodie Foster.’
I scurried into my bedroom and got onto my laptop. It turned out that 2017 was Contact’s twentieth anniversary. Perfect. Within half an hour, I’d secured an interview with VLA astronomer Dr Rick Perley for the monthly Space Boffins podcast I’d been co-producing and presenting with my husband and fellow space and science journalist, Richard Hollingham, since 2011. Perley was based in Socorro. I was assured it was close to the VLA, and was where the main work got done as, unlike in the film Contact, no astronomers were based by the telescopes any more or sat beneath them in a straw hat gazing meaningfully towards the sky like Jodie Foster.
The next day, Wally herded us impatiently into Loretta’s car. Our first pit stop was the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Sorocco to meet Dr Perley. According to Loretta, it was about an hour’s drive away. Not long after the journey was underway, the commentary and questions began. This time Loretta, as driver, was in the firing line. Wally’s attention jumped from building to building, subject to subject.
‘What do you think these apartments run to … ? Do libraries, museums whatever, would they buy paintings? Do you have an air circulator at all? Okay, we’ve gotta keep our eyes out for shoe stores.’ One of her shoes always had to be built up with a higher heel, and it required a minor repair.
‘We’ve left a little early,’ remarked Loretta carefully. ‘They might not be open yet.’
‘I gotta get some copper wiring, maybe, to wrap around my wrist. What’s the name of the hotel in downtown Santa Fe? The one that was the old hospital … Do you have an emery board in your purse? I have a nail that’s snagging … What are these mountain ranges?’
Loretta was much more patient than me. But that doesn’t take much. She handed Wally a map.
Wally examined it. ‘This map says 1912.’
‘We got it when we moved to Albuquerque,’ Loretta deadpanned. I liked this woman.
Wally made several phone calls, leaving loud messages for several friends, explaining who she was with and where we were going, and then resumed her questions.
‘Can you still go to Carlsbad caves? Do either of you recall a Beverley Bass? I taught her kids to fly. She helped people out in Gander after 9/11. I was in the air on 9/11 and control tower said, “Get down now”. Her story was made into a play.’ Later, thanks to Google, I discovered that Beverley Bass, now retired, was American Airlines’s first female captain. She had been in the air on duty during the terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001. Bass had been flying long haul from Paris to Dallas when, along with many other airplanes, she was told to divert to Gander, Newfoundland, on Canada’s east coast. Her exploits, along with those of other pilots, were made into a Broadway play, Come from Away.
It was a sharp reminder that Wally may appear like a hard-of-hearing, eccentric elderly woman at times, whose stories sometimes seemed so far-fetched as to include poetic licence, but more often than not they contained a surprising truth. It was just that her life had been so extraordinary, and so beyond what most people experienced, that sometimes it presented itself like fiction. Or the ramblings of a mad woman.
But then I’ve often wondered how I would appear to people if, sat under a tartan blanket aged ninety in a care home, I told anyone who would listen: ‘I used to be on the television … I went in a Moon buggy with an astronaut …’ or, ‘I’ve floated in the air …’ Most pe
ople would assume I too had lost the plot. Instead, that grumpy old woman who kept demanding white wine instead of tea was a former BBC TV reporter who had ridden on a replica lunar rover with Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan, and who had, in her fifties, achieved a lifetime goal of floating like an astronaut by experiencing weightlessness on a European Space Agency Zero G plane.
Heaven knows how Wally appeared to those who didn’t know her background or history. I asked her if she had ever worked for an airline. ‘One and a half months, honey. For Sierra Pacific in Arizona. It didn’t make it.’
I did a fact-check on Sierra Pacific Airlines. It had been set up in the early 1970s in Tucson, Arizona, and was apparently still in business. You win some, you lose some.
‘When you park, can you park the nose away from the Sun? That’s what mother always said. Park north away from sun into the shade.’
We were at the Science Operations Center at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, and Wally was issuing parking instructions. As Loretta reversed into a space, there was a familiar refrain, but this time the query came from Wally. ‘What’s that beeping?’
‘It’s the car,’ Loretta replied. ‘It lets you know if you’re near something.’
Both women sat silently in the room as I interviewed Dr Perley. He had also been the scientist for the upgrade project, transforming the VLA into the Karl G. Jansky VLA. Naturally, my first question was: Who was Karl G. Jansky? The answer was the American engineer whose discovery of radio waves coming from a source outside the Earth led to the development of radio astronomy. The distance between the dishes, we also learned, could be altered since they were mounted on rail tracks that could put the VLA into several different-shaped configurations. We’d see what configuration it was in on our approach.
The remaining hour’s drive was not easy for Loretta.
‘How many feet away do you have to be before something sets it off? Is Karl Janksy still alive? What are those mountains?’
The speed signs changed relentlessly too – thirty miles per hour, fifty miles per hour, forty miles per hour, thirty miles per hour – and my stomach protested with the brakes each time a new signal approached. When sirens erupted, Loretta knew immediately why and pulled over. ‘I was speeding.’
The police car waited behind us. In Britain, traffic cops don’t carry guns and I’d seen too many American films where trigger-happy police officers shot people as they reached for a driver’s licence from a glove compartment.
‘Why isn’t he getting out?’ I was getting nervous.
‘He has to do vehicle registration checks.’
While the officer was still in the car, Loretta retrieved a driver’s licence from her handbag. One less shooting possibility. Finally a cop approached, peered at its three occupants and addressed Loretta through her open window.
‘Did you know you were doing forty-eight miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone?’
She did. Seventy-one year old Loretta received her first-ever speeding ticket and an eighty-dollar fine. The officer left with a parting platitude none of us appreciated: ‘I hope your day gets better.’
But we knew it would. Even from a distance, the Karl J. Gansky Very Large Array was stunning. The twenty-eight white telescope dishes were spread out for miles in a Y formation. On the approach, we could see the rail track stretching into the plains or towards the San Mateo Mountains. There was even a railway caboose, the American equivalent of a guard’s van, at the visitor centre. As we walked towards the closest telescope, there was a straining, grinding, metallic groan. The 230-tonne telescope was slowly shifting into a new position.
‘Well, well,’ said a fellow visitor. ‘I’ve been here on and off for over ten years and I’ve never seen one of them move.’
It was a magnificent sight. And the movement caused an eerie sound. Behind the groans, the metal almost produced a slow melody. It reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Perhaps E.T. was trying to make contact after all.
Among the stills and posters that publicised the movie Contact, two were instantly recognisable to its fans. Apart from Jodie Foster in a straw hat, the other was of her holding a pair of headphones up to her ears. The backdrop for both was one of the huge white telescopic dishes, just like the one that was in front of me. Since I didn’t have a hat but carried headphones for my audio equipment, I copied that particular pose and later, when I posted it online, discovered many other women who loved science and astronomy had done exactly the same thing. There was a lot of love for Contact.
‘Do either one of you know the bunch of wiring that’s inside the VLA?’
The response to Wally’s question, in unison, was: ‘No.’
Back in the car, heading south, Wally got excited. ‘The Spaceport’s on the map!’
‘That makes it real,’ Loretta replied.
Wally also located El Paso, from where most of the other Future Astronauts were being collected to be transported to their accommodation. I assumed many of these ticket holders would be on internal rather than international flights.
‘How big is El Paso airport?’
Wally considered my question. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If you overshot the runway you’d end up in Mexico.’
Spaceport America, according to its website, is the world’s ‘first purpose-built commercial spaceport’. Although it is often mentioned in the same breath as Richard Branson, the state of New Mexico owns the spaceport, which is on 18,000 acres of land and has 6,000 square miles of restricted air space.
Virgin Galactic is a permanent tenant, along with SpaceX, UP Aerospace, EXOS Aerospace and EnergeticX Pipeline2Space. I looked the last one up. EnergeticX Pipeline2Space ‘enables projectiles to deliver payloads to space’. The company was started by young engineers, and plans to put small ‘cubesats’ – miniature versions of satellites often not much bigger than a shoe box – into a pointed bullet-shaped container, inside pipes that were 1,000 feet underground, using a jet engine to fire the container upwards into sub-orbital space. A pipeline to space indeed. It did exactly what it said on the tin. Or pipe.
The trip hosted by Virgin Galactic for ticket holders and plus-ones was not only for their clients to see the Spaceport and be updated on any progress, but also presumably to maintain a level of interest. Some of their ticket holders, like Wally for instance, had been on the waiting list for seven years. ‘There’s gonna be a lot of people within my timeframe,’ Wally said, ‘who will be getting pretty anxious.’
Located several hundred miles south of Albuquerque, there’s just one main road to follow, Interstate 25. I tuned in and out as Wally told an anecdote about skiing while playing the bass drum. I heard the name Branson, but she was referring to Branson, Missouri, a city she visited annually after her church had taken parishioners there on a bus tour. ‘Branson in November has all the Christmas shows. Anybody who’s anybody goes there to perform. They have three shows a day. I love it.’
She stayed in the same room in the same hotel. ‘Number 135, first floor on the left. And I go ziplining. Been there each year for the last six years. I get ten runs.’
That would be a sight to see. Wally on a zip-line. I imagined the photographs at the end showed her smiling, arms wide open. But then a road sign made me read it out loud in disbelief. ‘Elephant butt?’
Wally roared. ‘It’s pronounced bute not butt.’
I took a photo of the ‘Elephante Butte’ sign nevertheless. But that was just the start of it. The Spaceport’s closest town is called Truth or Consequences. Despite knowing that Britain contained towns or villages named Scratchy Bottom, Bell End and Brown Willy, somehow Truth or Consequences – ‘T or C’ for short – seemed even more ridiculous. Better still was the name’s origin. The town was originally Hot Springs, until 1950, when it changed its name simply so that a radio programme, called Truth or Consequences, would broadcast from there for the show’s tenth anniversary. Not that any of this mattered, because we were not staying in T or C but about forty m
iles further south, in Las Cruces. Apparently its hotels were more appropriate for Virgin Galactic’s Future Astronauts.
Technically, Wally became a non-Virgin Galactic branded and lower-case ‘future astronaut’ in 1960, when she first read Life magazine’s article about Jerrie Cobb and the opportunity for female pilots to become astronauts. She became a branded Future Astronaut in July 2010, when she bought her $200,000 ticket. It was another leap of faith for Wally, reflecting a belief that, in the future, space travel would be accessible to all and not just the men. All women needed was the price of a ticket.
Her flight into space will begin on board Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. Some ticket holders, including Wally, had already examined the spaceplane close up and personal at a hangar in California’s Mojave Desert. A month earlier, while on a family holiday in America to see a total eclipse, I’d even seen the Mojave facility myself. Not the spaceplane, just the outside of the hangar, as – despite trying – I wasn’t allowed inside. Too much engineering work was going on, apparently. Instead, I drove around the area, loitered outside and took a few photographs of my son doing a handstand in front of the Mojave Air and Spaceport building. We couldn’t get in that either, as it was locked. Then we noticed the warnings. They said ‘Don’t even think about it’, and surrounded the Virgin Galactic and nearby XCOR Aerospace hangars.
XCOR made the Lynx spaceplane that, in 2013, offered future commercial astronaut seats as prizes in a worldwide competition by the men’s grooming product Lynx (Axe in the United States). Naturally I entered – partly to raise the profile of women, as its sexist ad campaign raised a lot of feminist hackles; partly to get into space. The first stage involved securing online votes. After reaching the shortlist of 250 out of 87,000 applicants from the UK and Ireland – much better odds than those of becoming a European Space Agency astronaut, according to Tim Peake – I then endured public humiliation in the form of an inflatable British Army assault course at a London shopping centre. I was one of the oldest women competing, and listed one of the slowest and most undignified rounds. Not exactly Project Mercury standards, but it was worth a try. Unfortunately for the winners, not to mention the scientists and engineers who worked on the spaceplane, XCOR laid off its entire staff in June 2017 ‘due to adverse financial conditions’.