Challenger Park

To Infinity and Beyond

I was born the year an American first traveled into space, and I grew up calculating everybody's coolness by how close they were to NASA. My mother had been Alan Shepard's daughter's synchronized swimming coach (middling cool), but my father worked on the systems leading up to the Apollo program, which sent his coolness quotient to the moon. My friends and I drank Tang and used pens that could write upside down because that's what the astronauts did. Little boys (and big ones, too) dreamed of colonies on Mars by the early 21st century. But of course, a funny thing happened on the way to the final frontier. Those Apollo missions started to feel a little mundane (no aliens up there?). Then in 1979 a disintegrating Skylab made us all duck and cover. And by the time Challenger exploded in 1986, the whole enterprise seemed sad and aimless. Besides, technological wonders had moved from the galaxy to the living room. Little boys (and big ones, too) now dream of getting "My Humps" on an iPod.

And yet the space program keeps flying along, albeit a lackluster sequel to the drama reached on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969. Small groups of men and -- finally -- women regularly strap themselves to 2.5 million gallons of fuel, shoot into earth orbit for a few days and then skid home on a wave of fire without tickertape parades or White House ceremonies. The weirdly routine nature of this otherworldly work provides a fascinating setting for Stephen Harrigan's Challenger Park. It's a blast to the present after his well-received historical novel The Gates of the Alamo (2000). But as his characters break the sound barrier, he's breaking the gender barrier: This is a super-macho novel all about the trials of motherhood . As a publishing venture, that's as risky as looking for water on Mars, but Knopf is set to launch 100,000 copies. It'll take a rare alignment of space flight fanatics and domestic fiction readers to make that pay off, but Challenger Park deserves it.

The story opens in 2001 at the NASA facility in Texas. Harrigan's heroine is Lucy Kincheloe, a devoted wife and mother who thinks she has the right stuff to endure the demands of family life while carrying on a full-time job as an astronaut in training. Although there's plenty of opportunity here for creaking, chauvinistic jokes, Harrigan never moves in that direction. In fact, he's about as funny as a NASA press release, but he's smart, sensitive and deeply committed to studying this family during a period of extraordinary challenge.

"She had not yet flown in space," he writes, "but she lived, had always lived, for the day when her rational, achieving mind would earn her a mystical departure from the earth." When that opportunity finally comes, she has to deal with all the demands of intensified training and the bitterness of her husband, an experienced shuttle astronaut whose career is sinking fast. Her son's chronic asthma constantly makes her wonder if she can dare leave him alone. (Christa McAuliffe's ultimate sacrifice haunts Lucy throughout the novel.) And on top of all this, she falls in love with her flight trainer, a decent older man who's still mourning the death of his wife.

Will Lucy's marriage survive the stress of disaffection and adultery? That's a moot point if she doesn't survive her dangerous shuttle mission, which Harrigan portrays expertly: long stretches of regimented tedium interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

The setting may be out of this world, but Challenger Park is really a rather old-fashioned feminist story about a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her family. You don't need to be an astronaut to endure "the anxiety-ridden wonder of motherhood." And anyone who drops a child off at day care can sympathize with Lucy when she feels "like she was cutting corners in a part of her life where compromise should never be considered." It takes courage to fly into space, of course, but Harrigan knows that it takes courage to fix a bad marriage, too, and what parent wouldn't rather float outside a damaged shuttle than listen to her asthmatic child gasp for breath?

Harrigan's descriptions of space training and flight sound as though he could pilot the shuttle himself, but what's more impressive ultimately is his knowledge of the conflicted feelings of a woman struggling to figure out what matters to her most. "Why would any mother," Lucy thinks in a moment of crippling self-doubt, "voluntarily leave her child to travel to such a place, a place that was as blank as death, and in whose perfect soundlessness his cries to her were sure to go unheard?" The gravity of that question has weighed down women since they first dared to look up. Lucy's answer won't satisfy everyone, but it's explored here with great insight and a bracing touch of adventure.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.

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