It's 1952, and Elma York is enjoying a vacation with her husband Nate when a massive asteroid slams into the Atlantic ocean and obliterates Washington DC and most of the Eastern seaboard. The Yorks are just outside of the radius of absolute destruction, and make their way via her Cessna to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, where Elma uses her mathematical skills (she's a computer for NACA, when that was a profession and not a machine) to calculate that while civilization is rebuilding, the impact was an extinction level event. The problem is not asteroid winter. Rather, enough water vapor has been lifted into the upper atmosphere to trigger a greenhouse effect cascade. Humanity has a matter of decades to go extra-planetary or go extinct.

What follows is Elma's personal journey through an alternative history space race. It's both pretty good and oodly mundane. Elma is thoroughly modern, practically Mary Sue-ish in her intellectual abilities, her amazing rocket scientist husband, and her circle of friends. The two threats are her crippling stage fright and anxiety, and Stetson Parker, the lead astronaut who bears a grudge against her from WW2 when she tried to get him cashiered for harassing WASPs.

I'm torn about the book, because it starts strong and then has a great touch that living through history doesn't feel historical, it just feels like work, but it also feels bogged down. Rebuilding from the asteroid and the international (though non-Soviet) space effort are mostly not used. The space program tracks closely to actual history, diverging in the construction of an unspecified large space station. The 1950s setting is used mostly to highlight the main character's feminist and mostly colorblind attitudes against period norms.

And the basic conflict of the book, why does Elma want to be an astronaut get spotlighted in a direct conflict with Stetson Parker, and also lost in a moral generalities about... I can't even remember why, except that no one has stopped Elma from doing what she wants before.

I'm interested enough to check out the next book if the library has it, but this book is less than the sum of its parts.