The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

In 1952 a meteorite crashes into the ocean off the east coast of the USA, causing earthquakes and tsunamis that wipe out cities and leave hundreds of thousands of people dead or homeless. Married couple Elma and Nathaniel York work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as a computer and rocket scientist respectively. They realise the meteorite has caused an extinction event and they must convince the makeshift new government of the need to get off the planet asap. Mathematician, physicist and pilot, Elma is a woman ahead of her time and she is determined to be an astronaut in the newly vital international space program. Colonies should be the prime motivation, rather than the military industrial complex, and that will require women to be involved. The story is Lessons in Chemistry meets For All Mankind, with a touch of Hidden Figures. Elma and her friends must battle 1950s patriarchal misogyny along with casual and institutional racism to claim their places in history. Kowal draws clever parallels with today’s climate wars in her depiction of how progress is held up. It takes some suspension of disbelief to swallow that the powers that be would get their act together sufficiently to advance the Moon landing by ten years, but perhaps wiping out Washington really would smooth the path.