Rosemary Brooks is a young woman defined entirely by patriotic devotion from childhood onward. As a little girl she idolizes Barbara Frietchie, reciting the famous lines from her bedroom window. She grows into a fragile, genuinely beautiful young woman, but her absolute prioritization of God and country over personal relationships ensures she remains socially isolated, with young men unwilling to accept the secondary position that accompanying her through life would entail. Her patriotic fervor carries her through successive causes and organizations until she arrives at the Astronette Training Center, established in 1969 under Project Rain Dance after resistance to women in space has diminished. The program seeks six female pilots for a series of weather-control satellite missions. From one hundred accepted volunteers, fifteen pass rigorous physical and psychological testing, and six are selected as astronettes. Despite her delicate appearance, Rosemary not only passes but is chosen for the first mission. Her launch aboard the Rainbow 6 in February 1971 captures worldwide attention. She rides a Saturn booster into a sound orbit, her assignment being to manually orientate a weather-control satellite's instruments to existing cloud patterns and jet streams. Previous unmanned satellites had produced insufficiently accurate telemetric readings to make weather regulation fully functional, and a human operator is needed to bring the system to complete reliability. Rosemary performs her task faithfully across three orbits, high above continents and oceans, watching dawns and sunsets and the slow turning of the earth beneath her. Jettisoning occurs exactly on schedule. The satellite continues in orbit, and Rosemary descends in her escape capsule toward the Atlantic, where a naval task force waits. What happens during re-entry is never determined. Whether the retro rockets fail, the attitude controls malfunction, or the heat shield proves defective remains unknown. Rosemary does not survive. She becomes, as the narrative puts it, a falling star. The nation mourns, as does the wider world. Project Rain Dance is discontinued, though not because of failure. Rosemary has completed her work entirely and permanently. Her orientation of the satellite's instruments places full weather control in human hands for the first time. The program has no further need to continue. The following spring the results of her work manifest across the earth. Rains fall softly and warmly. Flowers grow in extraordinary abundance. Grass achieves an unprecedented greenness. Trees bloom more gloriously than before. Rain touches cities, plains, valleys, forests, and lawns in precisely the right measure, and when the land is satisfied, the sun returns with warmth and clarity. The narrative closes by suggesting that Rosemary has not simply died but has become absorbed into the natural world she helped regulate and sustain. She is identified with sunlight, rainfall, snow, and rainbows. Her presence is felt in morning light entering a bedroom, in the sound of rain against a window, in the shade of trees. Two stanzas from Shelley's poem about the cloud are quoted, presenting her as something that changes form but cannot truly die, passing through ocean and shore and sky, daughter of earth and water, nursling of the sky. The story operates as an elegy framed in second person, addressing a reader presumed to already know and love Rosemary, encouraging that love as something appropriate and even necessary. Her life is presented not as tragedy but as fulfillment, her death not as loss but as transformation. The weather she spent her life and death perfecting becomes her living monument, present in every rainfall and every clear sky that follows.
By Robert F. Young · First published 1957 · Genre: Science Fiction, Romance, Fantasy