The Calculating Stars (lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

Set in an alternate 1950s, this novel depicts a catastrophic meteorite strike that accelerates humanity's push toward space colonization.

On March 3, 1952, Elma York, a mathematician and former Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) member, is vacationing with her husband, Nathaniel, a rocket engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), when a blinding flash fills the sky over their cabin in the Pocono Mountains. Both fear a Soviet nuclear attack, but the radio continues playing, ruling out an atomic bomb. A violent earthquake destroys the cabin, and burning debris confirms a meteorite impact. A broadcast reveals that the meteorite struck the ocean off the coast of Maryland, destroying Washington, D.C. and the sitting government. Elma's parents, who lived in the capital, are almost certainly dead.

Elma and Nathaniel escape in their small Cessna, but falling debris damages the propeller, forcing an unpowered emergency landing. Major Eugene Lindholm, a Black fighter pilot, escorts them to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The base commander, Colonel Stetson Parker, is a pilot Elma knew during the war for harassing women. Parker pulls Nathaniel into security meetings but excludes Elma despite her credentials. Eugene and his wife, Myrtle, take the Yorks into their home.

Television broadcasts reveal the disaster's full scope: Washington has been replaced by a steaming sea, Delaware is destroyed, and tidal waves have ravaged the Eastern Seaboard. The only surviving cabinet member, Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan, becomes acting president. Elma sits shiva, the Jewish period of mourning, for her parents and volunteers at the base hospital alongside Myrtle. When Myrtle reveals that rescue missions go only to white neighborhoods, she and Eugene drop leaflets from Elma's repaired Cessna on Black communities, directing residents to pickup points.

Nathaniel asks Elma to calculate the meteorite's size. After running the numbers three times, she reaches a devastating conclusion: Water vapor from the ocean strike will create a runaway greenhouse effect, and within decades, temperatures will rise until the oceans boil. Nathaniel confirms her calculations and arranges a meeting with Acting President Brannan, where Elma presents her climate projections. A United Nations representative proposes the solution: Colonize outer space.

The narrative jumps to 1956. The NACA has been absorbed into the International Aerospace Coalition (IAC), headquartered in Kansas City, the new U.S. capital. Elma works as a "computer," performing trajectory calculations by hand alongside colleagues including Helen Liu from Taiwan and Myrtle Lindholm. Parker is launched into orbit as the first human in space. Elma confirms his orbital velocity from Mission Control and is consumed with jealousy.

After splashdown, Nathaniel reveals that the IAC is expanding the astronaut corps, but Director Norman Clemons has excluded all women, citing safety concerns. Elma is enraged. At the 99s Flight Club, a women's pilots organization, she discovers every female applicant was rejected. Betty Ralls, a reporter and pilot, agrees to publicize the all-male selection. Elma petitions Clemons directly, but he refuses, claiming a woman's death in space would end the program.

Elma organizes an all-women air show. She recruits pilots from the Kansas City Negro Aeronautics Club, including Ida Peaks and Imogene Braggs, and enlists Nicole Wargin, a senator's wife and former WASP. During the show, Elma hits a flock of birds and loses her engine. She recovers from a violent tailspin and lands safely, delivering a message about women's fitness for space to the reporters who mob her.

Her public profile grows through media appearances, including the children's science show Watch Mr. Wizard. Fan mail arrives addressed to "The Laddy Astronot." Her severe anxiety, rooted in experiences as a child prodigy who entered college at 14 and was bullied by older classmates, worsens with each appearance. When Clemons tells Nathaniel to "control your wife," Elma spirals into panic. A doctor diagnoses anxiety and prescribes Miltown, a common tranquilizer, but Elma refuses, equating medication with weakness.

An unmanned rocket crashes onto a farm due to a transcription error, killing 11 people, and congressional hearings threaten to defund the space program. At her nephew Tommy's bar mitzvah in California, Elma confides to her brother Hershel that her anxiety has returned to the severity of her worst college years, when she attempted suicide. Nicole introduces Elma to a therapist, and Elma finally begins taking Miltown. The medication works: Fear no longer overwhelms her. She volunteers to testify before Congress, walking a hostile senator through the rocket's trajectory equation and effectively silencing his attacks.

Nathaniel places a press release on Elma's desk: The IAC will now accept women astronauts. Separately, a letter reveals that Elma's Aunt Esther survived the tidal waves by climbing a church bell tower in South Carolina. Elma, who believed all her family except Hershel was dead, breaks down weeping.

Thirty-four women report for astronaut testing. The candidates are almost entirely white, since flight-hour requirements effectively exclude Black women and most non-American women. Elma makes every cut and speaks honestly in her interview about space feeling "necessary" and "inevitable." Seven women are selected but designated "astronaut candidates," a distinction that did not exist for the men. Training is marked by sexism: At underwater escape training, the women are given bikinis instead of flight suits while reporters watch. Parker privately tells Elma she is "just a publicity stunt" and asks her to help conceal a spinal condition that causes his leg to fail. When she refuses, he threatens to expose her Miltown prescription.

Parker eventually withdraws from the moon landing, citing a war injury, and Clemons assigns Elma to pilot the command module, orbiting the moon while her colleagues, led by mission commander Jean-Paul Lebourgeois, descend to the surface. Parker tries to disqualify her by raising the Miltown issue in a meeting, but Nicole openly admits she also takes the drug, and Elma acknowledges her own use. Fellow astronauts defend Elma, citing her record, including a moment when she calculated a rescue trajectory in under ten minutes to save two astronauts stranded with a torn hatch seal and dwindling oxygen. Clemons declares he has no questions about her fitness.

Helen, Ida, Imogene, and Eugene Lindholm receive invitations to the next round of astronaut testing. Elma reconciles with Betty, whose past ambush of Elma with reporters had fractured their relationship, by apologizing and offering to tutor her in mathematics.

On launch day, Elma suits up, reads a Superman comic gifted by Hershel, and pauses on the gantry for a final view of the Kansas grasslands. Parker, serving as capsule communicator, relays a coded message from Nathaniel about prime numbers. The Artemis 9 rocket lifts off. As the capsule passes into Earth's shadow, millions of stars emerge, clear and steady without atmospheric distortion, visible for the first time since the meteorite strike filled the sky with dust. Commander Lebourgeois turns to Elma: "Congratulations. You are officially an astronaut." The novel closes with Elma in the capsule, on her way to the moon.