DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
The new novel "Atmosphere" starts in 1984 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Joan Goodwin is an astronaut, but her job this day is with mission control. She's tasked with being the only person who speaks directly to the crew aboard the space shuttle Navigator. Joan is a calm person, which is good, given the crisis that quickly unfolds.
TAYLOR JENKINS REID: (Reading) Everyone is up out of their seats. Joan can barely hear herself think. She has been through simulations like this, with the pressure dropping rapidly and no way to stabilize it. They have ended only when the leak is found or the crew dies. This is NASA. We have a plan for this.
ELLIOTT: We have a plan for this. I love that line.
REID: Thank you. I think I stole it from NASA (laughter), so all compliments go to NASA on that one.
ELLIOTT: That's author Taylor Jenkins Reid. She didn't just write a gripping story about a space accident. "Atmosphere" covers the early days of the shuttle program and the challenges faced by the first women astronauts. That includes proving themselves. It also includes self-discovery. High-achieving astronomer Joan Goodwin never thought she'd ever fall in love. When she does, with fellow astronaut Vanessa Ford, the two have to keep their relationship quiet. The stakes get especially high during the crisis, 250 miles above the Earth, when Vanessa is the only astronaut aboard the Navigator who can communicate with mission control.
REID: They are deploying a satellite when something goes wrong. There are two explosive cords that detonate. And one of them detonates incorrectly and sends shrapnel into the airlock, and also somewhere into the cabin. The cabin pressure begins to drop rapidly, which can be very fatal very quickly.
ELLIOTT: Introduce us to Joan Goodwin. Who is she? And what is her life like before she joins NASA?
REID: Yeah. So Joan Goodwin is an astronomer. She's been in love with the stars since she was a child. And when she hears that women are being accepted into the Astronaut Corps, she becomes very eager to apply. She actually applies twice before she gets in. And it's only once she gets to the Astronaut Corps and she is surrounded by this new group of people that she starts to realize she may not understand herself as much as she thought she did.
ELLIOTT: At one point, Joan says to one of her new colleagues, I've always felt, when I look at the stars, I'm reminded that I'm never alone. What does she find at NASA?
REID: She finds like-minded people. She finds people who understand her in a way that no one else really has before. They're all attempting to do something really exceptional. They're all attempting to leave the atmosphere. And the pull to do that is something that has been in her for a long time, but has always been hard to describe. And so when she meets a group of people who also feel that pull, she feels a kinship that she's never felt before, and she feels that most specifically with Vanessa Ford. Vanessa seems to be able to articulate why she wants to go up there in a way that really captivates Joan.
ELLIOTT: So the novel takes place - this is the early 1980s. It's toggling back and forth between the space disaster - right? - and the years leading up to it. As Joan and Vanessa and others are training, they are the second-ever astronaut cohort with women in it. What was NASA like for them back then?
REID: You know, I read a lot of books about the space shuttle program. And one of the things that I kept seeing was how NASA, but also the press, had a lot of adjusting to do in allowing women into the Astronaut Corps. It's not just that a lot of the men had to learn how to work with women. It was also things as simple as the spacesuits were made for a male body. The parachutes during water survival training, the harnesses - all of them were made for a male body.
So there were a lot of things that the first few rounds of women entering the Astronaut Corps had to sort of raise their hand and say, hey, here's where we need things to change. And I'm always curious about that moment for anyone. But for women in general, how do they handle that moment? How do they make the world change in these small incremental ways? It was part of the appeal of writing about NASA for me. I got really curious what it was like to be one of those women in Group 8 or Group 9.
ELLIOTT: Now, how did you research all of this? Did you actually go talk to people at NASA in those early days?
REID: You know, the first thing I did was I went to the Johnson Space Center. We actually went into a decommissioned space shuttle, which was really incredible. I watched all the great space movies. I watched "Gravity" and "Apollo 13" and "The Right Stuff" and all that. But the fact is, the hardest part of this book was getting the mechanics of the space shuttle right and understanding the specifics of mission control. And for that, I needed help. And I'm very fortunate to be able to say that Paul Dye, who is the longest-serving flight director at NASA, who served during the space shuttle program and has since retired - he was very generous with his time and really helped to make this book what it is.
ELLIOTT: That explains how you knew exactly how many latches there were on every hatch, and...
REID: (Laughter) Yeah. And also, I will say, one of the things that I was surprised to find is that because NASA is a government organization, there is a lot of old PDFs you can find on the internet. So I have papers about the payload bay doors that were written in the 1970s. And, you know, when a sentence just got too convoluted for me to understand without an engineering degree, I called Paul Dye.
ELLIOTT: Joan is a scientist, but she's also, at times, sharing her sense of faith. I'm wondering if we can get you to read some of that section of the book. It's this moment where she and Vanessa are talking about religious belief. And Joan says, the pursuit of a unifying theory to explain the universe is science, but it's also the pursuit of God.
REID: This is Joan speaking to Vanessa.
(Reading) I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I'm breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now - the cells, the air, the bacteria - it's not only mine. It's a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kind of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.
ELLIOTT: Where does this come from? Is this your belief, as well?
REID: I'm writing as Joan, but I would be lying if I didn't admit that a lot of Joan has rubbed off on me. When I decided to write about space, I didn't know that I would feel like that necessitated writing about spirituality, but the two feel very linked, to me. And I felt like Joan would be prompted in her life to have thought about these things, and I believed she would think of them this way. I'm not putting forth any new ideas, but this is who I believe Joan is. And it's one of my favorite things about her, and it is certainly something I've taken with me myself.
ELLIOTT: Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her new novel is "Atmosphere." Thank you so much for being on the program.
REID: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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