The Calculating Stars characters

Also known as Elma Wexler, the Lady Astronaut

Appears from the start

A mathematician and physicist who flew for the Women Airforce Service Pilots during the Second World War and now works as one of the human computers at the national aeronautics agency. A prodigy who went to university years ahead of her age, she is fast and exact with orbital arithmetic and deeply uncomfortable with being looked at; public attention brings on nausea and panic she works hard to hide. She is Jewish, married to the engineer Nathaniel York, and the book opens with the two of them on holiday at a mountain cabin.

Appears from the start

Elma's husband, a lead engineer for the national aeronautics agency, calm and quick and entirely unthreatened by his wife being the better mathematician. He treats her calculations as work to be checked rather than opinions to be humored, and his standing inside the program repeatedly gets her arguments a hearing they would not otherwise receive.

First appears in chapter 3

Elma's brother, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina with his wife and children. He had polio as a child and gets about with braces and crutches. He and Elma are close, and after the disaster he is the family she has left.

First appears in chapter 5

A decorated military pilot, polished in front of a camera and dismissive of women in cockpits. He and Elma know each other from the war, and whatever passed between them then has left him hostile to her and left her certain he should not be trusted with authority over other people. He is exactly the sort of flier the new space effort will want at the front of it.

First appears in chapter 8

The Secretary of Agriculture, and the most senior member of the federal government to survive the destruction of the capital. Sworn in as president in the middle of an unprecedented emergency, he has to decide how much of a wrecked country's remaining capacity to spend on getting off the planet.

First appears in chapter 11

The director of the space coalition's Kansas headquarters, a blunt, cigar-smoking administrator who decides which missions are attempted and which arguments are worth his time. He is not personally opposed to Elma, but he answers to politicians and to public opinion, and he will not spend either on a fight he does not expect to win.

First appears in chapter 12

A Taiwanese computer and pilot in Elma's department and one of her closest friends. Unflappable at a calculating machine and blunt in private about what the program expects of the women who work for it.

First appears in chapter 13

A computer in Elma's department, part of the group of women whose hand arithmetic stands behind every launch the program attempts.

First appears in chapter 14

A pilot and the wife of the governor of Kansas, as comfortable in a ballroom full of politicians as in an aircraft. She reads a room the way Elma reads a slide rule, and her social access to the people who fund the space program turns out to be a form of leverage the program's engineers do not have.

First appears in chapter 16

A former Women Airforce Service Pilot who flew with Elma during the war and now works as a journalist covering the space program. She is warm, sociable and well connected, and she has a professional eye for the story inside a friend's private life.

First appears in chapter 18

A computer who comes to work at the program's Kansas headquarters, married to the pilot Eugene Lindholm. She is friendly with Elma and entirely willing to point out that a campaign for women astronauts run by white women is not the same thing as a campaign for all of them.

First appears in chapter 18

A Black pilot who flew with the Tuskegee airmen during the war and now works for the space program. Skilled, patient and well aware of the ceiling the corps has set over him, he is one of the fliers pressing for astronaut selection to be opened past the narrow group it currently serves.

First appears in chapter 20

A Black computer and pilot who joins the group of women building flight hours to prove they meet the astronaut corps' stated requirements, and one of the people who pushes Elma to see whose exclusion her campaign has been quietly overlooking.