Under A Dark Sky

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Wow. I knew Lori Rader-Day was cool—brilliant and hilarious and skilled and talented and hilarious. (worth saying twice). You definitely want to sit by her at whatever event. She's such a terrific author, and her new book Under A Dark Sky will have you—well, keeping the lights on.

But even though we all have funny stories about weird relatives, Lori’s family story is nothing less than stellar.

Wait til you hear it.

Exploring the stars

By Lori Rader-Day

One of the best things about being an author is that you get to meet other authors. Never has this perk been more enjoyable, though, than the time I participated in a book fair in Indianapolis—and was put into the lineup alongside my own cousin. The astronaut.

            Distant cousin. Didn’t-know-me-from-Eve cousin. But I recognized his name, of course. Out of human history, how many people have been to space? (Not that many, and even fewer of them have had dinner at my grandma’s house.)

            When I sat down by chance next to Jerry Ross at that book fair last year, I got stars in my eyes. I’m enthusiastic about meeting up with other authors most of the time, but especially so with Jerry, who was promoting Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA’s Record-Setting Frequent Flyer and the young reader’s version, Becoming a Spacewalker: My Journey to the Stars. (I bought my dad both of them, and had Jerry sign them to his cousin Mel. My dad is a big fan of having an astronaut in the family tree.)

            At the time I met Jerry at the book fair, I was still finishing up my next novel, “my star book.” Under a Dark Sky is set at a dark sky park, a place that controls light pollution so that visitors can see the stars the way nature intended. 

Over the Headlands International Dark Sky Park in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where my book takes place.
Photo credit to @Scott Castelein 

A young widow keeps a reservation her husband made before his death, and then things really go wrong. To write that story, I studied up on constellations and their stories, on the moon and its two faces, on all things stars and space—and here’s an author who HAD BEEN TO SPACE.

           

It boggles the mind, when you really think about it. Jerry Ross has been 243 nautical miles away from our planet—straight up. He has spent a total of 58 days, 52 minutes in space. He’s done nine spacewalks, a total of 58 hours and 18 minutes outside, dangling in the void. (He probably wouldn’t use the word dangling. Dangling is probably a gravity thing.) He set the record for most flights in space by going up seven times, a record that has since been tied by fellow astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, but Jerry got there first. And—you’re not ready for this.

            I’ll wait.

            OK, here it is: Jerry Ross has orbited the Earth 914 times. 914!

            I had to talk with him about it.

Lori: At what point did you decide you wanted to go to space?

Jerry: I grew up at a time before any satellites or people had flown in space. The articles in newspapers and magazines captured and fueled my imagination. My mother helped me make scrapbooks and making those books helped to educate me as to the types of educations that people who were working in our earliest stages of our space program had and where they got them. I was in the fourth grade when the first satellites were launched into space. I decided then and there to go to Purdue University, become an engineer, and get involved in our space program. Wanting to become and astronaut came later once we started to fly humans in space and the original seven astronauts became my heroes! ...I was between my junior and senior at Purdue when the first lunar landing occurred.

Lori: What is it like to go to space? Besides the job, which probably takes up a lot of your time and thinking on a flight, what do you think about when you’re out there?

Jerry: Flying in space is an incredible experience. It is hard to believe that you are really there, going around the world every 90 minutes as you fly at five miles per second. Almost any free time (which was really limited, and was normally when we were scheduled to be sleeping) was spent looking out the windows at the Earth. What an incredible fragile looking and beautiful planet we live on! It also looks peaceful and you can't see any of the borders between the countries.

           

Lori: Would you go again if you had the chance? What do you miss about space? What don’t you miss?

Jerry: I would love to go again, but it is time for the next generations to have their fun. I miss floating in zero gravity, looking out the windows at the Earth floating by below, and going out on spacewalks. But the thing I miss the most is the people that I got to work with. They were the most talented and dedicated people I have ever known. Working with them on such challenging and rewarding ventures was invigorating and wonderful.

Lori: How is looking at the stars from space different than looking at them from Earth?

Jerry: Not much different, they don’t twinkle because we are above the Earth’s atmosphere, which is what actually gives the appearance of the stars twinkling. We are only about 200 miles closer to the stars and since they are billions of miles away there is not much difference in their appearance. But we do get to see the stars that people living in the southern hemisphere get to see. [Lori: Both hemispheres within 90 minutes, so actually pretty different, Jerry.]

           

Lori: What do books/movies/the news always get wrong about space exploration?

Jerry: We know that flying in space can be dangerous. The books etc always try to emphasize that and to make everything exciting. We at NASA try to make everything as safe as possible. Frankly our flights sometimes appear somewhat boring—and that is the way we like them, to be safe and not overly exciting. There are no aliens and no UFOs!

LORI: If like me, you can’t get enough of space stories, Jerry recommends Apollo 13 as the “most accurate” film about space exploration (my fave, too! And also the highly inaccurate Space Camp) and Gene Cernan’s book The Last Man on the Moon for some good reading. But don’t forget Jerry’s Spacewalker. As a frequent flier outside our atmosphere, he’s uniquely qualified to tell us what it’s really like.

So the real question you have is...are we really cousins? Yes. Jerry is also the family genealogy expert, compiling the next generation’s updates into a collection for us, and there’s my branch, right down the family tree from—well, Jerry’s wife, Karen, actually. But that’s OK. Jerry and I are related in at least one other way. Give us the stars.

HANK: Love this! (And I love what Jerry said about not seeing any borders. I first learned that from Merlin.) 

Reds and readers, what’s your relationship to the night sky? Are you a stargazer? Or do you even notice? Have you ever been to a dark sky park? And hey, have you ever met an astronaut? Or wanted to be one?

Lori Rader-Day is a three-time Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee, winning the award in 2016 for her second novel, Little Pretty Things. She is the author of Under a Dark Sky, and of The Black Hour, winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, The Day I Died, a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Thriller Award, Anthony Award, and Barry Award. She lives in Chicago, where she is active in Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and co-chairs the mystery conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago.