The SIX-NonF First Six Women Astronauts-Should be Interesting but for Naught

Loren Grush is a reporter for Bloomberg News covering space travel and a host for the online show "Space Craft". Her parents were both NASA engineers and she grew up around Space Shuttles and Nasa astronauts. "The Six" focuses on the first women to be selected as astronauts and given the opportunities to travel into space. The subjects promised an exciting foray into a new frontier. Unfortunately, Grush's book is a grueling read as it delves overridingly into the minutiae of details about the women's personal lives outside the space program.  The repetitive meme is on the glass ceiling broken by these women. This trope feels trivial in today's world and the missed opportunities for what the experiences were like would've been far more compelling but were buried under copious anecdotes of little note. Grush's concluding comment resonates along with the style of her reporting which was shamefully fawning and wearisome. "They didn't have any women {astronaut} role models. They were doing it for the first time. For those of us who followed, we had the role models. So that made us more comfortable, more confident, and more welcome." Even the chapter on the Challenger explosion in '86 which carried an educator for the first time into space was centered askew. There was nothing revelatory. Furthermore, this catastrophic disaster was presented with little emotional impact. There is nothing exciting to stimulate or encourage young people to venture into careers as engineers or astronauts. Whereas there were many topics Grush might've examined. For instance, I'd wanted to know more about the training required, and first-hand interviews from these women were flagrantly missing.  What did it feel like in space for these women and what did they think they contributed, gained and found most difficult. Moreover, Grush unfairly spoke for the astronauts in the program following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in Jan. '86, which made them sound petty. "Grief gripped their hearts and uncertainty hung heavy in the air. Underlying the sorrow, each astronaut thought the same thing, but they didn't dare say their fears out loud: Could this be the end of the Space Shuttle program?" As a reporter in the aeronautics field, Grush was grounded in inconsequential details. She failed to gather interviews from any of the surviving women or people with first hand accounts to make a soaring account about trailblazing women in space travel and exploration.