About the Author
Writers love metaphor, which is why I like to think of myself, professionally, as a soap molecule. Soap molecules work because they are hydrophilic (attracted to water) on one side and attracted to oil on the other and are, therefore, able to make oil and water mix. So I, on the one hand, am attracted to metaphor, creativity, the humanities. On the other hand, I love the sciences. At NASA I have enjoyed working as a writer among engineers. In my science writing in general, I get a lot of satisfaction from facilitating communication between scientific folk and the general public or other scientific folk not expert in the same area. I like being a bridge between the sciences and the humanities.
I’m rather a dilettante in the sciences, not able to settle down on any particular one as my favorite. At Indiana University, where I majored in journalism with a science minor, I took honors organic and inorganic chemistry, but loved my genetics course. On the student paper, I carved out a science beat for myself (before majors in “science writing” existed) and got to report on the first recombinant DNA lab built at the university in 1976. Fortunately, as a writer I don’t have to pick: I can continue exploring across a range of disciplines.
The Sky Is Not the Limit
In 7th grade, my sister Janice Voss stood up in science lab and declared she wanted to be an astronaut. At a time when women weren’t allowed to become astronauts, she determined to be the girl who could be chosen for the space mission.
Braiding memoir, biography, and cultural observation, The Sky Is Not the Limit is her extraordinary journey, balancing the brushstrokes of close portraiture with a broad sweep of the historical moment. She was one of the first 25 women astronauts, the most flown among five other woman astronauts of the shuttle era. When she entered college in 1972, abortion was not legal, there was no EEOC or Title IX, and women weren’t allowed to be astronauts.
How do you go from smart kid to the payload commander of the space shuttle? Daily courage, or as Jack Gilbert put it, “the normal excellence of long accomplishment.” I use personal anecdotes; her interviews, scrapbooks, and flight logs; and stories from people who knew her or went through the same experiences to bring the reader on a journey that is hard, but not impossible, with lessons along the way.
The book is a timeless explorer’s journey. Her difference as an explorer—the personal qualities that enabled her to become an astronaut and who she was as an astronaut—came into sharp relief during her cancer journey. For her narrative, her death from breast cancer opens the story into choices and the meaning of a life. She died as she lived—on a mission of her own choosing.
Now, with NASA soon sending the first woman around the moon and women’s rights are eroding around the country, Janice’s story of empowerment, aspiration, and self-determination is more timely and powerful than ever.