....behind the thrills, the glamour, the celebrity status, ticker-tape parades, glossy magazine photo-shoots and receptions with monarchs and presidents, life for the wives of Nasa's pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era astronauts was also a harrowing, fearful and at times scandalous existence.Chronicled for the first time in a new book, The Astronaut Wives Club, the story of the women behind Nasa's elite space explorers of the 1950s to 1970s shows that it was not just the menfolk who were expected to have the Right Stuff.......
......Only by forming a sisterhood they called the Astronaut Wives Club - motto "Proud, Happy, Thrilled" - did they pull one another through the challenges and anxieties of being married to America's first space heroes."If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home," said Barbara Cernan, the wife of Gene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and the last man to walk on the Moon.......
.....Thrust suddenly into the spotlight, the wives were considered by women across America as "seven glorious women they could look up to and emulate," said author Lily Koppel. Their family lives were spread across the pages of Life magazine, and their home-making skills, fashion choices, hairstyles and lipstick colours scrutinised and copied by those who saw them as perfect cookie-cutter American wives and mothers without a hint of domestic turbulence. Yet of the 30 astronauts recruited into the Mercury Project and the successor Gemini and Apollo programmes - which ultimately set man on the Moon in 1969 - the marriages of only seven survived intact.....
.....Many of the wives knew Cape Canaveral and its resort of Cocoa Beach as "that harlot of a town", where a number of the astronauts kept a "Cape Cookie" - a girlfriend on the side.......
..... "I see them as America's first reality stars. Their country looked to them to hold up the public relations arm of the early space programme and the feeling was that if they did not, their men may not go into space or to the Moon," said Ms Koppel."Their story is kind of The Right Stuff meets Mad Men, with a little bit of Desperate Housewives thrown in. Decades have passed and they finally felt they could be more honest with themselves and the public about their experience."
