Chapter One: A New World on Its Way CHAPTER ONE A New World on Its Way
One October night in 1957, a nine-year-old girl named Rhea followed her father out of their Tennessee home. He directed her gaze up toward the dark, toward a tiny blip of light zooming through the night. That moving dot in space was a satellite called Sputnik. Though it was no bigger than a beach ball, Sputnik was making history at that moment. It was the first object that humans had ever sent into orbit around planet Earth.

“You are watching the beginning of a new era,” Rhea’s father told her. “It’s called the space age.” Rhea suddenly understood that a new world was on its way, but she had no idea of the role space would play in her life.

Two years before that, hundreds of miles away in Oklahoma, a twelve-year-old girl named Shannon made a thrilling discovery. She’d been obsessed with space and the idea of traveling through it ever since picking up a science-fiction book in the library. Then, in 1955, she read in a newspaper article that people might soon be sent into space on rockets in real life. Shannon’s excitement kicked into overdrive, and she decided to be part of that adventure. She’d found a way off the planet!

On a May morning in 1961, another nearly twelve-year-old girl, this one named Anna, sat on the dewy grass. She and her classmates were packed around a radio on the lawn of their school in Fort Campbell, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Her teacher had let them out of physical education class so they could listen to a fifteen-minute news broadcast.

That broadcast was the journey of Alan Shepard, the first American to travel into space. In Cape Canaveral, Florida, dressed in a silvery space suit and a white helmet, Shepard climbed into a capsule called Freedom 7 that sat on top of a huge rocket. The rocket’s engines fired, and it rose into the sky, launching the capsule into flight. At sixty-two miles above Earth’s surface, Freedom 7 crossed from the atmosphere into space. Before it splashed safely back down into the Atlantic Ocean, the capsule carried Shepard to one hundred sixteen miles above the surface.

Anna imagined it all as she drank in every scratchy word that came out of the little radio. “As he launched and I listened to him,” she recalled years later, “I decided at that moment that, if I ever had a chance, that’s what I wanted to do.”

Rhea’s Sputnik flight, Shannon’s newspaper article, and the Shepard mission that Anna heard on the radio were not just inspiration for girls who dreamed of space. They were part of a contest between two world powers. This contest, the space race, was both scientific and political.

For almost half a century after World War II ended in 1945, the United States competed for global influence with the Soviet Union. (The Soviet Union was centered in Russia and included neighboring states that later became independent nations.) Many American citizens and political leaders saw the Soviet Union as their country’s chief threat and rival. The Soviet Union and the United States never fought directly, but the decades of tension and conflict between them are known as the Cold War. The space race was one part of this war.

Both superpowers had learned during World War II that rockets had great importance in military operations. They also saw that rockets could advance the human presence into space. Neither superpower wanted to be outdone in scientific or technical achievements, and neither wanted the other to gain a military advantage by controlling space, so both the Soviet Union and the United States began to develop space programs. They planned to launch satellites, then probes and vessels with no crews, and eventually spacecraft that would carry travelers.

Sputnik, which Rhea saw from her yard as it crossed the night sky, was a Soviet satellite. While young Rhea gazed in wonder at the first human-made object to orbit Earth, many Americans had a different reaction. The Soviet Union had beaten the US into space, which filled people with fear. In response the United States beefed up science education in American schools and pushed ahead its own space program. In 1958 the US government created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to run the program.

NASA called the people training for future space travel “astronauts,” from Greek words meaning “star” and “sailor.” The Soviets called their future space travelers “cosmonauts,” or sailors of the universe. The Americans hoped to be the first to send a person into space, but the Soviets beat them there, too. Less than a month before Alan Shepard’s short flight, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth. Not until early 1962 did an American astronaut, John Glenn, orbit the planet.

But the space race was far from over. It would continue over the next several decades while America’s space program grew up—and so did the girls who dreamed of joining it.

Rhea, Shannon, and Anna were not the only ones with their eyes on the stars. A lawn in front of a California house became a space observatory for a science-loving girl named Sally after her parents gave her and her sister a small telescope. As a child Sally often set up the telescope for stargazing sessions under the night sky. She’d look at her favorite constellation, Orion, or the rings of Saturn. But like Rhea, Sally had no idea then that space would be part of her own future, or the important role she would play in the space race.

For two other young women, Judy and Kathy, the spark came later, but all six of these women shared a passionate drive to explore. They also shared a drive to stretch the limits of the possible, especially what people at the time believed was possible for women.

And they did stretch the limits. These six girls would grow up to become the first US women astronauts.

One of them would become the first American woman in space. Another would lose her life journeying there. One would become the first American woman to do a space walk; another would be the first mother to orbit Earth. Together all of the Six would make history not just high above Earth but on the ground. They would usher in another new era by breaking barriers, opening eyes, and showing the world what they could do.