Inside the lives of astronauts’ families

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Last Friday, some red and white striped parachutes opened, and four earthlings returned safely home.

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– A perfect bull’s eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen back on Earth after a journey around the moon.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Throughout the journey, we heard the Artemis II astronauts talk about moon joy, awe, wonder. And without exception, we heard them talk about their families. Here’s Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman in remarks after the mission.

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– No one knows what the families went through. And this was not easy. Being 200,000-plus miles away from home, before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth. And when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: My next guest knows what it’s like to be on the other side. Dr. Tracy Scott is the child of Apollo commander David R. Scott, who went to space three times and was the seventh person to walk on the moon. Now Tracy is a sociologist at Emory University, who studies the lives and families of moonshot-era astronauts. And she’s here to give us a glimpse into astronaut life from the perspective of the family members who orbit them and to weigh in on how this moonshot era compares to the first. Tracy, thank you for being here.

TRACY SCOTT: Thank you so much for having me, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Tracy, what has it been like for you to watch this mission? Is it just deja vu?

TRACY SCOTT: In some ways it is. In many ways, it’s not because it was so different back in the era that I grew up in. When my dad went into space, there was no communication at all. We could hear them, but we could not talk with them. So it was a completely different landscape in terms of communication.

So when our dads went into space, what they did for the families was they put this little communication box called the squawk box in our home that had a feed from mission control pretty much 24/7, although mission control would turn it off at night, and they would turn it off if there was anything that they wanted to talk about technically.

But we could hear that in the background during the whole mission. And it was just sort of background noise. So you heard it, but you’re just like, oh, yeah, that’s the squawk box. As a kid, you didn’t really pay attention to it because we had more fun things to do, like go outside and play with our friends.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, when your dad became an astronaut, you were three. When he started, I mean, being an astronaut was a completely new job. It had been science fiction before.

TRACY SCOTT: Absolutely, Flora. That’s a great way to think about it. So my dad was selected into the third group of astronauts in 1963. So this was a really new occupation. All of the astronauts in the first three groups had been either test pilots or fighter pilots in the military. And this is what they grew up wanting to do, be a really great pilot, a test pilot.

There was no such thing as an astronaut, and they never thought about it. So this is new, and they go into this occupation. And I moved to the area around the Johnson Space Center in Houston that was developed for the NASA Space Center at the time.

No one had lived in this area before. So there were these new housing developments. We all moved there together. And that was life. So as a three-year-old, my dad was an astronaut from as soon as I could remember. And I never thought anything about it. All my best friends’ dads were astronauts. And everybody that lived in the neighborhood worked at NASA, or they knew we were astronauts. They didn’t make a big deal about it. I just thought it was ordinary.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, I’m sure at the time, it was what you knew. But in retrospect, was there a culture to your community, like special quirks or superstitions or rules that you grew up with that felt particular to being in an astronaut community?

TRACY SCOTT: That’s an interesting question, Flora. I’m not sure that I would characterize it like that. I think that for many people, the daily life would seem ordinary. But one of the wives I interviewed had a great way of saying it. She said we lived in a bubble, meaning that the whole area and the community and everybody there was focused on this goal of getting “a man on the moon by the end of the decade,” which is JFK’s words.

So there was a focus and a real communal aspect to life. And in some ways that became so ordinary, especially for kids. At the same time, I think we knew it was extraordinary because the media presence was there. So every time one of the men went on a mission, you had the photographers and the media camped out in the front lawn of your house.

So we knew that was kind of different. But it was just like, OK, it’s my turn. In two months, it’ll be Diane Gordon’s turn for this. So it was this extraordinary thing that was ordinary. It was just a weird time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Was everyone in your circle a super overachiever?

TRACY SCOTT: No. I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know that it translated down like that. You mean to the kids?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, was everyone sort of like– when I think of astronauts, they’re so capable. They’re MacGyvers. And they have PhDs, and they can fly planes. And they can also fix a toilet.

TRACY SCOTT: But see, it wasn’t like that then, Flora. These guys were pilots first. And they did have to learn a lot of science. And in fact, they had to a lot more in terms of flying the spacecraft than anyone now because there weren’t computers like there are now.

But I don’t think– again, when it’s your dad, you don’t think of them that way. And I knew they worked hard. We all did. They were gone all during the week. They were only home on the weekends.

So in some ways, I think a lot of the kids thought, well– they weren’t thinking, oh, my dad’s an overachiever. They were thinking, my dad’s gone a lot. And I don’t get to see him very much. It’s really more a story about how children develop and about families and about how we all have a family context that shapes us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s what I want to talk about. I mean, were families involved with the space program. Is it like the presidency where spouses and kids have a job?

TRACY SCOTT: That is a great way to say it, Flora. I’m not sure we kids had a job, but our moms did. And it was so much more than people realize. The wives had to go make speeches to different places around Houston. They would make trips to the contractors. After the missions, they went on state diplomatic trips to foreign countries. They had a whole staff and an itinerary. I teach a class now about this. And this student said, jeez, they’re more like first ladies.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s what it sounds like.

TRACY SCOTT: They were then. It was a lot of work. And one of my other students said, well, did they get paid? I said, no. And she said, well, could they say no? And I said, no. Again, it’s a different era. None of them had any idea they would be doing this. They didn’t have any training, but they did it, and they did it really well. And they held the families together during the week. They were incredible women.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’ve done oral histories with the spouses of some of these Apollo astronauts. I mean, how do they see themselves in terms of this era? Do they feel like they were– do they feel like they were integral and are under-recognized? What’s their perspective on their own role?

TRACY SCOTT: I don’t think they see it quite like that. I see it more that way. They do recognize they did a lot of work. In fact, Barbara Cernan has a great quote. She was Gene Cernan’s wife. He was Apollo 17 commander. And the quote that I’ve heard her say is, “If you think going to the moon is hard, try staying home.”

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And I thought, yeah. It was a lot of work, and it was a lot of strain on the marriages. And they recognized that. And in fact, the divorce rate was extremely high, probably 80% or more. So it took a toll. And they absolutely saw that it took a toll.

Yet at the same time, they felt like they were contributing to something bigger than themselves. And when I do the oral history interviews, when I ask them at the end, so, OK, tell me overall, what was that time like? One of the wives summed it up very succinctly. And she said, it was the most exciting time of my life because we were going to the moon.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We?

TRACY SCOTT: Yeah. And I thought, that exactly captures what it was like. Even though she got divorced and had lots of heartache and all sorts of other stuff happening, she still looks back on that time as incredibly exciting and important and communal.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love getting a window into this world. We have to take a break. But coming up, a look at today’s Artemis II mission and what’s changed for astronauts and their families in the last 50 years. We’ll be right back.

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Tracy, what’s your relationship to launches.

TRACY SCOTT: That’s an interesting question. You mean current day or since my dad was–

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think I mean both.

TRACY SCOTT: OK, so let me tell you a story, then, about my dad’s Apollo 15 launch. So we as a family went down to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch, along with the Irwin family. And Jill Irwin, the daughter of Jim Irwin, she and I were the same age. And we went to the viewing area where families got to view the launch that was private area.

And we drove out there in cars. And I can remember she and I were sitting in the back seat of this station wagon, reading our books. And I can remember one of our moms came and said, OK, you have to get out of the car now to come watch the launch. And it was spectacular.

But again, it was this thing that was like, OK, we’re going to watch another one of these. It is spectacular. And it’s sort of overwhelming and hard to describe. Yet until it got to that point, we were going to sit there and read our books because that was really interesting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And it wasn’t scary?

TRACY SCOTT: No. I remember when I– was probably before Apollo 15 when there was a reporter that asked me, are you afraid? And I said, of what? As a child, growing up, what your dad does is ordinary. And you don’t think about it as scary. My dad had been a test pilot, which was far more dangerous than being an astronaut.

Now, again, we had friends whose dads had died. And I know we knew about that. But those of us that were younger, I don’t think we really took it in. And I think our moms protected us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You said that Artemis II is not exactly deja vu because there are so many differences. What’s different from a sociological perspective?

TRACY SCOTT: So much is different. NASA was only five years old when my dad was selected into the astronaut program.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That is wild.

TRACY SCOTT: It’s wild. What I tell my students, it was like a startup. It was much less bureaucratic. It was much more flexible. Everybody knew each other. The astronauts had input into how the spacecraft was being designed. They all talked together when they were in the office.

It was informal communication, way different than it is now. There weren’t nearly as many of the rules and regulations. They weren’t as strictly enforced. So I think there was this level of informality and camaraderie that bound people together more closely in that small group culture.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I wanted to ask you about a cultural thing that I have noticed. I have noticed in these messages back to Earth– and I’m a super consumer. So that’s an aside. But the astronauts are not shying away from the L word. Here’s pilot Victor Glover.

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– As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still going to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the moon.

– Houston copies. We’ll see you on the other side.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: He’s talking to us on Earth like we are all his family and that he’s our family. I guess I wonder what you make of that.

TRACY SCOTT: What I think that shows is this, the bigger kind of perspective shift that has happened a lot with many of the astronauts. When you go into space and you go further than low Earth orbit, where you can actually see the Earth in the vastness of deep space. It shifted a lot of the men’s perspectives at the beginning in a way that they didn’t anticipate.

And one of the best accounts of this came from Rusty Schweickart. He was with my dad on Apollo 9. And what he talks about is, you see, again, in this vastness of space, it’s all black except for the white of the stars, the gray of the moon. And the only color you see is this little blue Earth, little blue marble.

And you think, oh, my gosh, that’s where all my people are. And yes, my family, but everybody else is like family. Everyone’s in this together. And what are we doing? What are we doing? So it’s this really interesting perspective.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that because we heard something so similar from mission specialist Christina Koch.

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– I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth but how much blackness there was around it and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet. We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Hearing you say this, I assumed that this is sort of like NASA boilerplate. But it sounds like what you’re saying is that message actually came out of a genuine perspective shift that came with leaving the planet.

TRACY SCOTT: This has been out there for a long time. There was a great quote by Norman Cousins, who was an editor of the Saturday Review, where he said, what is most significant about the lunar voyage is not that man set foot on the moon but that he set eye on Earth.

And that, to me epitomizes all of this. And we’ve had that perspective since Apollo. But we’ve forgotten it. So I’m glad she said that. But it’s a reminder that we’ve had this perspective, and we’ve lost it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I was thinking about, what’s the essence of these moon missions. And it’s not about exploring. It’s about humans exploring.

TRACY SCOTT: Yes, absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I was thinking, in relation to your work, that if we really want to understand the meaning of this type of exploration, we also have to consider people’s human experience at home and what it means to leave your family behind.

TRACY SCOTT: Absolutely that and, again, the fact that we’re not in this alone, and nobody does anything alone or accomplishes anything alone. We’re in it together. There was a great interview with– I think it was a former astronaut, Peggy Whitson. She was in the International Space Station, actually, for a very long time.

And they asked her during the Artemis launch, so what were you feeling when you were sitting there, and it’s getting close to the countdown. And what are you feeling? What were your emotions about yourself basically? And she said, I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about the hundreds of thousands of workers who got me there and how I was doing this for them, for the team, for the group.

Again, as a sociologist, we have to look at how we relate to other people and how you come together and accomplish a lot more together than alone. That’s the other big shift, I think, that has happened since the Apollo era is we’ve become much more individualistic, much more focused on ourselves and what’s going to make us happy and what’s going to make us fulfilled and what can we accomplish as an individual in a way that’s detrimental to a lot of life that’s detrimental to community.

It’s really taken the focus off of trying to help each other. And it’s difficult today. But maybe some of these amazing photos and the words from the Artemis astronauts can bring us back around to trying to have that perspective that thinks about something greater than ourselves.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Tracy Scott is a sociologist at Emory University in Atlanta. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me today.

TRACY SCOTT: Thank you so much for having me, Flora. I really enjoyed it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. Special thanks to Jason Isaac and our colleagues at WNYC for making this sound so good. We will catch you next time. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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