Vanessa didn’t respond. Instead, she grabbed a bottle of wine off Joan’s counter and began to open it. “Let’s stay in tonight and drink this bottle and listen to records and make out,” she said.

Joan had become a flake since falling in love. “Yes,” she said, “Let’s.”

—

The next morning, Joan was outside Antonio’s door at seven forty-seven, despite knowing he usually didn’t get to the office until after eight.

She waited patiently by his door until she saw him coming down the hallway, holding a briefcase.

“Come on in,” he said, opening his office door.

He had a corner office in Building 1, the large windows giving him a view of the campus. And Joan saw a future, in a flash, of who she might be when she was no longer an astronaut. Might she be Antonio one day? She did not want to go back to academia. She wanted to be here at NASA for as long as they’d have her. But that would require her getting this part right first, the astronaut part.

She sat down as she waited for him to get settled.

Antonio put down his briefcase, hung his suit jacket over the back of his chair. When he sat, he situated the notebooks on his desk and then looked at her.

“Joan Goodwin, always a pleasure.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me, how would you feel about going up into space?”

“What?”

Antonio started smiling and leaned back. “How would you feel,” he said again, this time slowly, “about going up into space?”

“I would feel…great about that,” Joan said. “I would love that, sir.”

“I thought you might.”

He took a long pause, and Joan felt herself leaning forward. A smile spread across his face and crinkled his eyes.

“We are assigning you to STS-LR7. Your commander will be John Donahue, who I know you’ve spent some time with during training.”

“Yes, sir, he was one of the survival-training instructors.”

“This will be his second mission, so you’ll be in good hands. And your pilot will be Greg Menkin. The mission specialists will be you, Mark Simons, and Harrison Moreau. You’ll be flying on Discovery, slated for launch November of ’84, which gives you more than a year to train.”

“I…I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you accept.”

“I do, I absolutely do,” Joan said.