ABOUT THE BOOK
Edited by Peter J. Westwick, the book is a collection of essays about Southern California aerospace. My essay is “Cold Warrior’s Daughter.”

PEOPLE ARE SAYING
This is an understated, reflective book that packs a wallop in ideas, social commentary and history…a vibrant overview of the what, why and how of a Southern California that was the birthplace of an industry that eventually created real space ships.—Sheryln Morris, Librarian, Los Angeles Public Library.

EXCERPT
I am the daughter of a Cold War rocket engineer. Although my father was a civilian, we lived like a military family. Each morning he donned his uniform—short-sleeved shirt, skinny necktie, plastic pocket protector—and drove off to ply his brain, which is to say, his weapon, in the all-consuming fight against Soviet Russia.

Mother and I stayed home. If a wife had a brain to ply, she did so in the house, or volunteered with, say, the Girl Scouts, a paramilitary organization that promoted cleanliness, piety, and obedience to patriarchal authority. 

In 1962, I was six years old. I remember a spat between my parents about whether women should be allowed to fly in space. Astronaut John Glenn, freshly returned from his triumphant orbit, had declared this a bad idea in his testimony before the House of Representatives’ space committee. “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,” he said. It’s just a “fact of our social order.”

My mother was oddly ticked about this. She herself had a degree in chemistry but quit work to keep house for my father—an endorsement of the “social order,” if ever there was one. She instructed me that being a Catholic wife and mother was the highest of callings. Yet she empathized with that woman pilot from the hearing—Jerrie Cobb, I now know her name to be—and those other women who aspired to blast off. They had trained; they could do the work. Did Glenn have any right to ground them?

And besides, rumor had it that the Russians planned to launch a woman. “Well, of course,” my father countered. “The Russians are savages. They have no decency. No respect for life. They sent up a dog, remember? And they killed it—intentionally. We’re better than that. We brought Sam, our monkey, back.”

 “Then we sent up Miss Sam, and brought her back.” My mother smiled. “We’re very fair when it comes to the animal kingdom.” My father scowled. “What if a woman died up there? What if she suffocated?”

My mother said nothing, but her look suggested that quick suffocation in space might be preferable to slow suffocation in this house…