“As mission specialists, you will be required to gain significant flying experience here at NASA, fifteen hours of flight time a month, for the length of your time in the corps. You will not take off and land the jet yourselves,” he said. “But you will learn a lot from that backseat—including how to navigate and, occasionally, how to handle the aircraft while in the air.

“As you know, flying is not without its myriad risks. Today we will start slow. You will watch the pilots from the ground as they take off, barrel-roll, and land,” he said. “Think of it as a flight show, knowing that in the future, you’ll ride shotgun.”

Joan looked to Vanessa, whose face showed nothing. But Joan already knew what she was thinking.

The flight instructor had to raise his voice over the sound of the engines starting.

“Before you are allowed in the planes,” he shouted, “you will have to learn how to survive being thrown out of one. First thing tomorrow you will be leaving for water survival training.”

—

In the swampy August heat, Joan, Griff, Donna, Vanessa, Lydia, Harrison, and the other two mission specialists, Ted Geiger and Marty Dixon, had departed for Homestead Air Force Base, in Florida, for three days to learn how to bail out over the ocean.

In their first test, they’d been strapped to a parachute and then tied to the back of a speedboat. One by one, each of them had been dragged through the ocean while attempting to keep their head above water for as long as possible. They’d had mixed results. Vanessa and Lydia kept calm. Marty almost drowned and had to take a rest on the boat. Donna and Griff ended up somewhere in the middle. And Joan took so much water into her stomach and lungs that she was burping for hours afterward. Her head was thrashed so hard by the chop of the waves that she still had a headache the next morning.

But still, she had done it.

The next day, in the open water, she had successfully swum beneath her floating parachute, come up for air on the other side, and inflated her life vest. It had taken her a few tries—and one full moment in which she thought she might be drowning—but again, she succeeded.

But today was the biggest test. One she was not sure she could pass.

They would start on the deck of a large boat, connected to both a parachute and a harness that were attached to a speedboat. When the speedboat accelerated, they would run off the edge of the first boat and let the wind catch their parasail, the speedboat pulling them high over the ocean.

When they were hundreds of feet in the air, they would disconnect their harness from the tether to the speedboat. This would send them crashing into the water, where they’d have to get themselves to the surface, inflate a life raft, and then crawl into it.