Lily Koppel’s new nonfiction book, The Astronaut Wives Club , looks at the historic time in America when astronauts were heroes and their families were emblems. She talks about the book and the photos she gathered.
The family of Jim Lovell (of "Houston, we have a problem" fame) watching Apollo 8 liftoff on Dec. 21, 1968. From left: James, Jeffery, Susan, Marilyn Lovell, and Barbara.
Via: Courtesy: NASA
The adventurous spirit of the space era of 1960s America feels awfully far away. Spending billions of dollars for the sake of science and exploration — are we still doing that in any way anyone notices, or wants to know about? I have no idea.
Lily Koppel's new nonfiction book, The Astronaut Wives Club, out this week, takes its readers from the inception of the astronaut program in 1959 through Apollo 17 in 1972, the final manned moon landing. It effectively — and rivetingly, I found — goes through those 13 years of U.S. history by telling the NASA story through the domestic sphere: specifically, through the wives' lives. And for most of the space program, a wife and children were a job requirement for the astronauts — though fidelity and being physically present were not — so there ended up being a lot of them.
And they became close to each other. There was a literal Astronaut Wives Club. "They really had to sort of rely on each other to make it through the space race — and they were on this parallel mission to their husbands," said Koppel in a recent telephone interview.
Most of the wives went from being military spouses just scraping by to celebrities with cash they'd never had and reporters trailing after them. "It was intoxicating," said Koppel. "The whole country had space fever. And they were a part of it. They felt very much like they were playing a really important role."
Their marriages, like that of the space-championing Kennedys', whom some of the astronaut families got to meet and befriend, were meant to reflect an ideal. It was a fulltime PR job. "All the astronauts, even today, fully attest to the fact that without them, it would have been sort of impossible, because they were just working all the time," said Koppel. "The women kept the whole public relations image that everything was still perfect back on Earth."
Koppel shared some photographs with BuzzFeed that she had gathered during the reporting of The Astronaut Wives Club.
Here is the Lovell family.
Via: NASA
This photograph was taken in their home in Dec. 1968, a few days before Apollo 8, which was the first mission to orbit the moon, and "was given a 50/50 chance by NASA," Koppel said. Describing the Lovells, Koppel said: "In a way, they're representative of many of the astronauts and their wives: they were high school sweethearts, they got married after Jim graduated from Annapolis. Marilyn was with him all throughout his test pilot career. These are careers that were sort of built on partnerships. Although they started in the '50s when we don't think of women as particularly liberated, you had to be adventurous to the point of almost being a superwoman to be married to one of these guys. Because their job was so dangerous, and they were so macho."
