Liked it. but I would have liked more emphasis on the astronaut's duties and the technical part of the space mission. Most of the book is really about racism, sexism and a smattering of LGBT issues. Elma wants to be inclusive, but she's pretty close to clueless in a lot of ways. I thought the code was inventive but again, clueless - the length of the code they sent would raise suspicions anywhere. I know there's a big character arc in there for one of the other astronauts, but I don't remember The Calculating Stars well enough to appreciate it fully. In fact, I was unsure for a bit if this was the second or third book because events really seem to have moved on from what I remember. But I loved Elma doing orbital calculations on paper, using a sextant to determine their position, there's a lot of emotion in various scenes, basically a good read.

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