The ignition of the rockets hit her like a bang, her body hurling into the air.

Joan tried to think of how to explain the feeling to Frances. It was like being dragged through a hurricane, all the blood in her brain rushing to the back of her skull.

Discovery dropped its solid rocket boosters. And as the ship ascended higher and higher, going over seventeen thousand miles an hour to fight against gravity, Joan felt an intense lift in her belly. They hit main engine cutoff, and then there were two loud blows, which she knew to be the dropping of the huge external fuel tank, now emptied of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Then everything went quiet and still.

The cacophony, the quaking of the ship, the pressure—gone. Replaced with an eerie sense of calm.

Joan’s body started to catch the air and she felt suddenly, excruciatingly alive—somersaults overtaking her chest and lower body. She detached from her seat.

“And we are in orbit,” she heard Commander Donahue say.

Joan’s stomach was in her feet, her head in her chest. She took off one of her gloves and let it go, remembering just in time to grab the tether attached to it as it began to float away. She removed her helmet and took a deep breath.

She tried to swim to the window, to look out across the expanse of space to spot the terminator line, dividing dark from light across the Earth’s surface.

But she was seeing double, her vision looping, as if replaying a bad videotape. Her stomach felt both full and hollow. Her throat constricted. She could feel bile coming up through her chest.

Within the first hour of being in space, as the majority of the crew got to work, Joan vomited three times.

This continued through revolution after revolution around the Earth. She puked through each of the many sunrises and sunsets, what she usually used to measure days now coming in ninety-minute revolutions. The only thing that made her feel better for the first twenty-four hours was that Harrison was puking, too.

He puked for one day.

She puked for three.

Sometimes, during those days, as she made her way into the Spacelab module and conducted her experiments, she was fighting against a haze of confusion. Joan could not always focus her eyes, could not count her fingers. In fact, at one point, she lost the ability to recognize where her arms were or how to control them. She, twice, could not swim out of Spacelab until she summoned all of her strength—as if lifting a car on Earth—to pull herself through the hatch. On the third day, she developed a headache so painful she could not keep her eyes open.

What are we doing? Joan thought. Believing we have any right to be up here?