The Fated Sky

The Fated Sky is a science fiction novel by the American writer Mary Robinette Kowal, published in 2018 and the second of the Lady Astronaut novels, following The Calculating Stars.

The book is set in 1961 in an alternate history where the pace of spaceflight has been forced forward, and the International Aerospace Coalition has already established a colony on the Moon. Elma York, the mathematician and pilot known as the Lady Astronaut, works on rotation, flying shuttles down to the lunar surface and back and returning to Earth between assignments. Attention has turned to Mars, and the first exploratory mission is being assembled without a woman on the crew list, because the coalition's leadership does not think the trip is survivable for them. The technical argument against that decision is navigation: the mid-course calculations the flight needs are the work of the computers, the women who do the arithmetic the mission depends on, and Elma has spent her career among them.

Kowal's series follows the same character and the same programme across several books, and it is built around the practical problems of getting people, food and fuel to another planet.