Artemis and Me

One of my kind readers suggested that I write about Artemis, the fierce virgin goddess who lent her name to the moon launch. I’ll do that eventually, when I introduce Euripides’ Hippolytus. The bastard son of a king, Hippolytus devoted himself to Artemis. He spent most of his time hunting, as she did. He vowed never to have sex, even though the celibate goddess didn’t require that of her worshippers. He overdid it when he publicly refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love. Things didn’t end well.

Oddly, until that reader suggested that I write about Artemis, I realized that I hadn’t given a thought to the mission’s divine namesake. All I could think about was my childhood, when I knew zero about Greek mythology, or even that there was such a thing. Yet the names Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini were as familiar to me as my address, because I was surrounded by astronauts. Literally.

John Glenn, the first American in space, Scott Carpenter, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, Walter Schirra, and James Lovell, the first to nearly die in space – these were our neighbors. We were the ‘Houston’ in ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’ (the actual words James Lovell said), but we weren’t really in Houston. We were in Clear Lake, NASA’s actual location in unremarkable countryside. Real estate poets had named our neighborhood Timber Cove.

My family was there before the astronauts moved in. They were bigger than any movie star in America, but we didn’t pester them. The rest of America was not so respectful of their privacy. On weekends, behemoth tour buses moved slowly down our streets so that people could see their houses, maybe catch a glimpse of them doing yard work. That didn’t happen. I never saw a single one of them in person. Most of their wives socialized only with each other.

My mother was irked by the near-religious idolatry. “They’re just test pilots,” she said, with considerable scorn, and indeed in those days, before NASA started sending scientists into space, that’s what they were. Why it was a bad thing to have been just a test pilot, I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. Sometimes she would continue the lesson by adding, “The real heroes are people who get up and go to work every day, no matter what.” I didn’t know what that meant, either.

I did know that the astronauts’ kids were pretty ordinary. I was far more impressed that these lucky children had been to the White House and met President Kennedy than I was by their fathers. Kris and Candy Carpenter, my age, introduced themselves with the story of jumping up and down on some important bed with Caroline Kennedy. I kept my distance from James Lovell, Jr., who held farting contests in the back of our school bus and made up naughty lyrics to TV theme songs. My best friend and I were needlessly mean to little Suzanne Schirra; I don’t know why. My big sister was friends with Lyn Glenn. It’s worth noting that my mother liked and admired Mrs. Glenn for the way she dealt with unwanted fame and for her kindness to my sister. Mrs. Schirra and Mrs. Grissom seldom came out of their houses.

Mr. Grissom died in an explosion on the launch pad of the Apollo 1 mission. I wish I could tell you how that affected our neighborhood, but by that time we had moved away. I was glad to go. My best friend had changed into a teenager who shoplifted and stole liquor from her parents and didn’t speak to me at the bus stop, leaving me a bookish loner who cried every day after school.

My dad’s job took us to Brazil. Our new home was a high rise on the beach. Best of all, school was no longer a lonely place. The other expat kids -- American, British, Danish, Japanese -- were innocents like me. I didn’t pine for Timber Cove.

We didn’t have a TV, so I missed the first moon landing. The next day, while I was getting my braces adjusted, my dentist joyfully acted it out for me, taking big bouncy steps around the room and exclaiming in Portuguese, “They were just like children! Like children!” When I found out that they’d planted an American flag on the moon, I was furious. The moon was everyone’s. How dare they. (I am my mother’s child.)

We were only vaguely aware of the Apollo 13 crisis. I didn’t even know that Mr. Lovell was part of it until the movie came out. When Alan Shepard hit a golf ball into space on the next moon landing, I was even angrier than before. What a crass American thing to do! But then, he was just a test pilot.

Like everyone, I was horrified by the explosion of the Challenger and then the Columbia, but I felt no personal grief, nothing for the NASA of my childhood.

The Artemis II mission was different, and I don’t know why. Only when my husband came into the room to watch liftoff with me did I realize I’d been bouncing up and down on my toes for twenty minutes, like a child waiting for Santa. Every time I saw the old NASA logo, the one discarded in the 70s and then brought back, I teared up as if seeing the flag of a beloved country. Was it my memories of the place where I made my first best friend, mastered long-division, stayed up all night reading The Prince and the Pauper, jumped off the high dive of the community pool that was shaped like a space capsule – was that what got to me? I honestly don’t know, and I’ve decided not to analyze it, a rare move for me.

And what about Artemis, the goddess? Someone in the naming-things department of NASA must have known that she was Apollo’s twin sister: back to the moon, etc. Possibly they knew that she was closely associated with the moon, unlike Apollo, associated with the sun. The story is that she was born first, and then assisted her mother Leto with her brother’s birth. She hunted with bow and arrow on horseback, like a man, but was also the protector of wild animals. She was an untamed virgin, but also a goddess of fertility and a protector of women in labor and midwives. Read my postscript below: the former director of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, did indeed know who she was, and insisted on the name.

All the Greek gods contain their opposites.

It would please Artemis to see the women of her namesake: the mission’s director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the astronaut Christina Koch, her curls flying proudly unbound in zero-gravity, and as many women as men in the mission control room. In my 1960s childhood, when men were in charge of everything, such a scenario would have counted as science fiction, all by itself.

After I hit send on this, I realized to my chagrin that I hadn’t checked to see how NASA chose Artemis for the mission name. In an article for Aerospace America, journalist Christian Davenport explained that Jim Bridenstine, who was Director of NASA from 2017-2021, did indeed know who Artemis was, and chose the name purposefully. He championed it when he was told that there had already been an Artemis and people would be confused. (Funny, nobody thought that the fourteen Apollo missions needed new names each time.) He overrode those objections. I apologize and salute him.

“The first time humanity went to the Moon, it was under the name Apollo,” [Brindenstine] said. “The Apollo program forever changed history, and I know all of us here in this room and on the phone are very proud of the Apollo program. It turns out that Apollo had a twin sister, Artemis. She happens to be the goddess of the Moon. Our astronaut office is very diverse and highly qualified. I think it is very beautiful that 50 years after Apollo, the Artemis program will carry the next man and the first woman to the Moon. I have a daughter who is 11 years old, and I want her to be able to see herself in the same role that the next women that go to the moon see themselves in today. This is really a beautiful moment in American history, and I’m very proud to be a part of it.”

The White House was not happy with the breach of protocol and let Bridenstine and his staff know they should have given them a heads-up. But it was too late. The name was out there. There was no taking it back now.”*

Read his article in full here: https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/excerpt-how-the-artemis-program-got-its-name/

*(Breach of protocol, my asteroid. It was the name and the sentiment behind it.)

Davenport has written a book about the new era’s space race:“Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.”

#NASA #Artemis #astronauts #1960s #Apollo #greek mythology #moon launch # Houston #Christina Koch #aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org #christiandavenport

Were you moved by the moon launch? Were you surprised by how many women were in positions of importance? Were you alive when the ‘space race,’ as we used to call it, was new? I’d love to hear your thoughts.