Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  The Russian suit was a whole different matter. It was both brilliant and ridiculous, both invention and contraption. The first time Beckwith saw one demonstrated at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, outside of Moscow, she’d had to stifle a laugh. The suit was grandly called the Orlan—for sea eagle—which only made it seem more comical. Then she watched a video of an actual cosmonaut getting dressed in an Orlan in zero-g—a job he did on his own, in less than ten minutes, before heading outside—and she had to concede the genius of the thing.

  The key to the Orlan was that it was only a single piece and you didn’t so much dress in it as climb aboard it. The backpack was hinged at the top and could be lifted up to create a wide entry hatch. Once a crew member had slipped inside, a lanyard hanging near the left hand could be pulled to shut the hatch. A lever on the right side locked it. The life-support equipment was in a chest pack, with a readout screen on top that could be seen through the visor of the helmet.

  Ports and hoses and other controls on the front of the pack were labeled in Cyrillic—backwards Cyrillic, since the only way to see them was with mirrors on the wrists of the suit. Cooling fluid ran through tubing in the suit’s interior at a temperature of 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which, given that the suit would be used for heavy physical labor often in the direct glare of the sun, was barely enough to keep it comfortably cool. Even with the crude air-conditioning system cranking, the average cosmonaut lost at least three pounds in sweat during an eight-hour walk—hence the ripeness of the suit Beckwith would be climbing into today.

  But there was no denying the genius of the Orlan. The Russian technician who had given the visiting NASA astronauts the demonstration Beckwith had attended seemed to sense the Americans’ amusement and ended his presentation with a declaration that was impossible to argue with.

  “We’ve had 107 exits and 107 entrances,” he said. “Those numbers have always matched.”

  Beckwith thought of the technician now with an apologetic appreciation. She stripped off her work pants and short-sleeve shirt and pulled on the one-piece, sweat-absorbent long underwear that was necessary if the Orlan suit was going to be bearable at all. The underwear, at least, was fresh—still in the plastic bag in which it had been delivered by an earlier Progress vehicle.

  Then she opened the back of the ungainly Orlan and peered inside. It was dark and dank and entirely unwelcoming. Attached by a cord to the wall of the module was a ring-bound manual with numbered instructions for getting into the suit. It was in Russian, but there were illustrations too, and Beckwith guessed she’d be able to make some sense of them. At that moment she noticed a red light flickering to life high up on the bulkhead, mounted on the module’s closed-circuit camera. Zhirov’s voice came across the communications loop.

  “No book, Walli,” he said. “It won’t help.”

  “The procedure is for you to ask before you turn that thing on,” she said.

  “The procedure is for a senior officer to be present during suit-up and egress,” Zhirov answered. “I’m present now. No book. Listen instead.”

  Slowly then, going from the manual Zhirov kept stored in his head, not on the page, he walked her through every step she would need to take to board the Orlan safely. He warned her about the clamminess of the inner layer.

  “You’ll think it’s wet. It’s not,” he said.

  She climbed inside, realized he was right, and nonetheless grimaced at the wet that was not wet.

  “Now pull the lanyard,” Zhirov instructed. Beckwith did, but the backpack did not close. “Firm grip,” Zhirov said. “Yank it hard enough to rip the cord off.”

  “But we don’t want to rip the cord off,” Beckwith answered.

  “You won’t. Pull it hard.”

  She pulled—hard enough to rip the cord off and then harder still—and the backpack slammed shut. The air inside the suit compressed, enough to pop her ears and remind her of the post-collision pain that had filled her head weeks before.

  “It hurts?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s supposed to. You’re all right.”

  She pulled on the lever on the right side—hard enough to break it off—and the pack locked with a loud, declarative snap. Beckwith was sealed inside—enclosed in a human-shaped spacecraft within a vastly larger actual spacecraft. For the first time since she had donned her first spacesuit, during her earliest days of training, she felt a small flash of fear—the locked-down claustrophobia that pilots and astronauts were never, ever supposed to feel. They all did at first, a little, which was why the greenest rookies always consumed more suit air during training than the veterans. All the same, she scolded herself. She was wearing no biosensors, but Zhirov seemed to know what she was experiencing.

  “A rest now. Sixty seconds,” he said, through a helmet radio that automatically engaged when she locked the hatch. And then he added: “It is a good suit, Walli Belka.”

  Beckwith closed her eyes, focused her thinking, and slowed her breathing, and at precisely the sixty-second mark—not a second more, not a second less, according to the oversize watch attached to the right wrist of the Orlan—Zhirov came back online. He talked her through the steps to power up the coolant, pressure, humidity, and electrical systems. She played the switches on the front of the suit, glancing at the backwards Cyrillic in the mirrors but paying attention mostly to Zhirov—and watched the instrument panel on the top of the chest pack flicker to life. As it did, she grew more confident—the way she would when she climbed inside an entirely new jet, powered it up, and realized that no matter how unfamiliar this cockpit was, every jet was more or less the same as every other jet, and she hadn’t found one yet that she couldn’t fly.

  “It’s a good suit, Vasily,” she said when she was done.

  “It is.”

  “Still stinks, though.”

  “It does.”

  What was left to do Beckwith knew how to do, since spacecraft were, in some ways, all the same too. She would have to depressurize the Poisk module so that the vacuum inside would match the vacuum outside, a necessary step to prevent the force of the escaping air from blowing off the hatch when she tried to open it. She let Zhirov walk her through this step too, though she often found she was ahead of his instructions.

  The module would take at least thirty minutes to vent fully, and in the meantime, Zhirov handed communications back to Houston. Jasper quizzed her again on the critical steps for the IFHX swap-out, and her answers—crisp, immediate—elicited the whistle he sometimes produced when he was impressed by something.

  “Flashy stuff,” he said. “Just one more thing: You got working tethers on that suit?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Two of them.”

  A pair of heavy cloth umbilicals about eight feet long on automatic retractors were attached to her belt. There was a clip at the end of each that she would use to connect herself to the handholds outside. The procedure called for her to attach both of them, and then, as she moved along the station, to detach one first, advance it farther ahead, reattach it, and then do the same with the other. That way she would always be connected to the station by at least one.

  “Good,” he answered. “Soon as you get outside, use them.”

  “That’s what the procedure calls for.”

  “Just remember to do it immediately.”

  “I’m not gonna float away, Jasper,” she said.

  “Do it,” he answered. “You’ll want to.”

  At last, thirty minutes later, the Poisk module was fully vented. Beckwith unsealed the outer hatch, edged it open, and peered outside warily. The badly trained astronaut would now begin what had to be decidedly good work.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the very moment Beckwith was looking at the great sweep of nothing outside her spacecraft, the world was looking at her looking at it. NASA had rigged c
ameras at various points along the exterior of the station so that controllers could monitor the crew’s work whenever any of them ventured outside. The video feed would stream not just to Mission Control but also to NASA TV, both on the Web and in the few cable markets that carried the station. Watching EVAs as they happened had become something of a compulsion for a certain space-drunk demographic—offering the slow-motion, addictive pleasure of watching bass fishing or chess tournaments—and NASA was happy to feed the need. For Beckwith’s spacewalk, the demand was massive, and all of the networks and news channels picked up the transmission.

  After taking in the scene outside, Beckwith would have to position herself so that she emerged from the station feet first; the next glimpse the world thus got of the space adventurer was a pair of boots slowly emerging from a round hatchway.

  “Looking good, Walli Bee,” came Jasper’s voice, smooth as Southern Comfort. “Got you about halfway out now. Slow and easy.”

  Beckwith edged out a bit farther, then farther still, then felt her hands cross over the doorjamb of the open hatch. Then, with one tiny, final slide, she was outside.

  She had hold of the nearest handrail, still facing the open hatch. When she was sure she had her purchase, she turned slowly around, still holding on, and looked her fill. In front of her, above her, everywhere around her was the trackless reach of open space. Off to her left was the glinting spot of the Soyuz spacecraft, motionless in the void a kilometer away, where she had ordered it parked. To her right was the forbiddingly remote spot she had come out here today to reach—the P6 truss—which at the moment seemed the same kilometer distant. She finally, tentatively, looked down at the blue-white vastness of her home planet far, far below. She felt a sudden rush of vertigo, an unaccustomed mortal terror. She could not fall. Her forebrain knew it; the physics guaranteed it. But her lower brain, her binary brain, the brain in which things were either good or bad, safe or deadly, could make no such distinctions—and it told her with a desperate certainty that she was about to plunge and die. She grabbed her safety tethers and clipped them both to the handholds.

  “Good,” she heard Jasper say in her earpiece. “Smart.”

  She looked up toward the red light of the nearest camera and offered Jasper a shaky smile. He could not see her through her helmet’s tinted faceplate. She knew that, but she smiled all the same.

  “All right,” she said, waving off her momentary swoon and forcing herself to look back down and stare at the cloud tops hundreds of miles below. This time they did not rattle her. “I’ve got some ground to cover.”

  “Copy,” Jasper said. “Take your time. No rushing.”

  Beckwith—not rushing—turned back to face the station and made her way carefully along it, inching across the Russian segment module by module, unclipping and clipping her tethers as she went. It was close-up work, just like in the NASA pool, as she shimmied from handhold to handhold, foothold to foothold, at last reaching the final Russian mating adapter in the center of the station.

  That brought her to the scaffold structure that was the central truss, and she began edging toward the station’s starboard wing, the right wing. There were eight copper-brown solar panels making up the wing on just this side of the station, held in place by trusses of their own—acting as the bones of the wing. Each solar panel—a full 112 feet long by 39 feet wide—contributed to the football-field scale that NASA always used as a point of comparison when bragging about the station.

  “We have us a big machine here,” Beckwith radioed to Jasper.

  She made her way more sure-handedly along the structure now, reading off the onboard road signs as they counted off the numbered trusses—P1, P2, and beyond. At last she reached the P6 truss, where the failed, faithless IFHX was attached—big as a large steamer trunk, just as it had been described. Somewhere inside it, a bit of piping likely no wider than a little finger had ruptured, strained beyond its tolerance by the constant hot-and-cold cycle as the station orbited from the sunlit side of the planet to the nighttime side and back again. She scowled at the useless thing. The replacement unit was ninety degrees away, on the bottom side of the truss, facing Earth.

  “The Eagle has landed,” she radioed down.

  “Roger,” Jasper answered. “Pull that busted box off first.”

  “Copy,” Beckwith said.

  She reached into her bag of tools, each of which was connected by its own tether to the top of the bag, and made quick work of disconnecting the electrical cables. She might have never practiced on an IFHX in the NASA pool, but all of the cabling systems on the exterior of the station worked more or less the same way.

  The bolts that secured the unit to the truss were another matter. Undoing them required a squeeze wrench, but in the heavy, inflated gloves, even the lightest squeeze meant an effort. What’s more, what she had feared might happen with the hatch separating the Russian and American segments of the station had apparently happened with the bolts: Unevenness in the expansion and contraction of the metal parts caused them to jam tight. Beckwith tried first with her right hand—the pain of her bandaged wound not making things easier—and then added her left. Slowly, very slowly, the first bolt gave and tumbled off into space. Jasper saw it glinting as it went.

  “Let those go. We don’t need ’em.”

  “Copy,” Beckwith said as she went to work on the second one.

  That one gave and the next one did and the one after that, but with each bolt, she felt her respiration picking up and sweat soaking through her inner garment. The faceplate of her visor began to grow fogged. The Moscow EECOM, monitoring the airflow in Beckwith’s suit, called a warning to NASA, and Jasper radioed it up.

  “You’re gonna suck all your air up, Walli,” he said. “How’s the visor?”

  “Lousy.”

  “Slow it down, then.”

  Beckwith steadied her breath and went to work on the last bolt. It was absolutely immovable. She squeezed with one hand, squeezed with both, winced at the pressure on her wounded right hand, and shifted her grip repeatedly. Finally she felt the bolt give a tiny bit.

  “Getting there,” she said through gritted teeth. “Getting there, getting there, getting there.” The bolt edged open a bit more and then more still, and now Beckwith’s jaw ached too as she clenched it hard.

  “Little bit more,” Jasper encouraged.

  Beckwith gave it one more torturous squeeze, and finally the wrench closed fully, the bolt spun free, and it tumbled off to join the others in the void.

  “Got it!” she exclaimed.

  “Copy that!” Jasper cheered.

  Beckwith wrestled the IFHX off its bracket, moved it around to the bottom side of the truss, and prepared to strap it into place with cable fasteners that were already connected to the truss for that purpose. But while the IFHX was weightless, it still had plenty of mass, and Beckwith misjudged that bulk as she swung it into position. The unit, moving with more momentum than she intended to impart to it, easily broke free of her exhausted grip and went tumbling away.

  “Damn it!” Beckwith snapped, just managing to stop herself from saying something much worse on the global TV hookup. On the screens in Mission Control and on TVs and computers around the world, the big, clumsy unit somersaulted lazily away, catching the sun and glinting it back.

  “That one ain’t in the manual, station,” Jasper said.

  “Affirm, Houston,” Beckwith responded with irritation. “Apologies for that.”

  “Never mind. We don’t need the thing anyway.”

  “Still . . .” Beckwith muttered, cursing herself.

  Now, much more carefully, judging the mass more precisely, she detached the replacement IFHX from its mooring spot and moved it slowly back to the bracket that had held the broken one. She shoved on it to get it seated, but she succeeded simply in pushing herself back and away instead. She hooked the toe of a boot into a fo
othold and then the other boot into another foothold, straddling the box, then wobbled it from side to side. Slowly, it began to settle into place. When it was seated, she withdrew fresh bolts from her tool bag and bolt by bolt secured the unit, silently thanking the wonderful squeeze wrench for spinning so much more easily and cooperatively when she was fastening than when she was unfastening. Still, she gripped mightily as she finished each bolt, securing the unit as tightly as she could. Finally, with aching hands, she reconnected each of the electrical cables. When that was done, she stuffed the tools back in her bag, closed the flap, and simply hung in space at the end of her safety harnesses, utterly spent.

  “IFHX in place,” she said exhaustedly. “Cabling attached.”

  “Copy that. Stand by one,” Jasper said, then toggled to the Mission Control loop. “Flight, she’s done.”

  “EECOM, she’s done,” the flight director responded.

  “Copy that,” came the response.

  With that, the EECOM began configuring switches and sending commands that would activate the IFHX unit that, until just moments ago, had been a cold, dead box of weightless mass. Signals came back, indicators flickered on, a few more commands went up and a few more obedient confirmations came back, and then, finally, an array of ammonia system lights on the EECOM’s screen began to glow a happy green.

  “We’re online!” the EECOM exclaimed.

  “Copy!” the flight director answered.

  “Walli,” Jasper called, “you done good!”

  Beckwith smiled, closed her eyes, and allowed herself another few moments of effortless float. Then she made her long, slow way back across the trusses and the Russian modules and finally arrived at the Poisk module. She tumbled back inside, slammed the hatch, and repressurized the module. When it was once again habitable, she yanked the lever on the right side of the suit, the backpack popped open, and she squirmed out. A rainstorm of sweat droplets followed her, easily the expected three pounds.