Out of Orbit

by Chris Jones

  Thomas had also undergone a more sinister indoctrination. Without the apron of earth’s atmosphere to protect them, astronauts are exposed to higher-than-usual amounts of solar radiation. Because little is known about exactly how much exposure will trigger cancer, and rather than risk its astronaut corps becoming lumpy with tumors, NASA has set an arbitrary radiation “red line.” If an astronaut approaches that ceiling, he’s grounded and stuck behind a desk until his cancer-free retirement (fingers crossed). Extensive medical investigation had revealed that Thomas, for whatever reason, had come unacceptably close to NASA’s red line. Another four months in space and he would have gone over it. He would have carried too much of the universe home with him.

  The flight surgeons had passed on their findings to Mission Control and, in turn, to Bowersox. As the commander of Expedition Six, he had been left facing down three possible outcomes following the unsettling news: he could choose to ignore the evidence and fight to allow Thomas to fly; he could see Thomas scratched from the mission and replaced with his designated backup, a chemical-engineer-turned-rookie-astronaut named Don Pettit; or Bowersox could ground himself, Budarin, and Thomas, and order all three members of Expedition Six replaced by their reserves. He had taken the options to bed with him and been surprised by how much time he spent turning them over.

  Through training and by nature, Bowersox had acquired a certain cool. He carried a sense of detachment with him almost always: a pilot’s life, if he wants to see the end of it, doesn’t hold a lot of room for romance, and Bowersox had mastered the hard art of bottling up his feelings. Confronted with a dilemma that would keep most men up at night, he’d hold it under the light like a clinician, pulling it apart without emotion. The walls he’d built carried clean through his eyes, which were the same hard, glacier blue that had become a trademark of the best pilots, like Chuck Yeager’s drawl or a strong chin. (Bowersox, who grew up in Indiana, owned the chin but not the accent.) Since Norman Mailer had pointed out that all but one of Apollo’s first class of sixteen astronauts boasted blue peepers, that genetic fluke had become a virtual requirement of the astronaut corps. It was as if the color of a man’s eyes revealed the tenor of his heart, cold and colder.

  But here Bowersox struggled, even though the facts were plain. Thomas’s health presented a risk, and a trip into space was marbled with enough risk already. That should have been all there was to it. And yet, for one of the few times in his life, it was finally his turn to lie awake, allowing the data to be clouded by late-night sentiment. He had grown to like Thomas—a quiet, hardworking, serious-minded man, the sort whose hands never shook. Bowersox’s affection for him, when viewed through the peculiar prism of space travel, was a particular kind of love: it meant that he was both comfortable in his company and confident in his abilities. They had developed an abiding faith in each other, and now Bowersox was confronted with a decision that, in an instant, might break what had taken years to build.

  He didn’t want his friend killed with kindness, however, and he began casting his mind toward switching out the entire crew. It didn’t take him long to shake off that option like a shiver. The clean sweep would have crushed Budarin and brought Thomas no closer to space. And in the honesty of his private company, Bowersox had to admit that his own itching to fly bordered on a sickness. Through the semidarkness, he stared down the prospect of spiking what might be his last stab at it. He was forty-five years old, almost forty-six, growing long-toothed by astronaut standards; he’d lost his ginger hair a long time ago. Deep down, he knew his time was running out. He also knew there were dozens of astronauts lurking in the wings behind him, first-stringers their entire lives who’d found themselves in the unnatural position of waiting, sometimes for seven, eight, nine years, hoping that their phone would finally ring with the call that gave them the go-ahead. No part of Bowersox wanted to put a line through his own name in exchange for one of theirs; no blue-eyed pilot would ever volunteer to give up the stick.

  All of which had left him with a single option: replacing Thomas with Pettit, exchanging one Don for another, and, in the process, learning how to think of a friend as though he was just another part of the machine.

  · · ·

  At Star City, an hour north of downtown Moscow, down a road cut through a green forest, a contingent of exiled Americans had gathered in the small cottage occupied by Don Pettit. He had been in Russia for more than a year, mostly going through the motions. Although he took his training seriously, he knew that, as a reserve, his chances of getting called up to join Expedition Six were close to zero. Really, his agreeing to a semipermanent exile was part of a grander plan he had drawn up for himself. For a rookie astronaut, clocking in as a backup was viewed favorably by those few, untouchable men in Houston who put together crews. So long as Pettit performed well enough in training, and providing he didn’t do anything that might make the Russians wary of him, he would earn a better than average chance of one day making the trip to station. Until then, he would uncomplainingly do his chores, biding his time as though serving a prison sentence, pushed along by the hope that perhaps Expeditions Nine or Ten or Eleven might include him, front and center.

  Pettit looked the part, at least, every inch the science guy—glasses hiding brown eyes (not blue), curly dark hair, an affinity for cargo pants held up by a belt full of tools. He was a chemical engineer, an inventor, a veteran explorer of molecules and optics rather than of space, a man who couldn’t help wondering how engines worked, why clouds formed, what lived in the hearts of volcanoes. In his endless quest to understand more about the inner workings of the universe, he had tried and failed to become an astronaut three times; the fourth time around, he was finally given the chance to dissect the stars.

  To fill the hours until he made the jump from reserve to prime, he hosted loud parties in his cottage, especially when his wife, Micki, and their tiny twin boys made the flight over for a spell. She was a singer, and along with some of Pettit’s astronaut colleagues—including Chris Hadfield, the amiable Canadian guitarist—had formed a band. Late one night in August 2002, they had taken seats wherever they could find them, on the floor and the couch, and they had played and sung and laughed until they were interrupted by the phone ringing, not long before midnight. The noise in the room stopped. Pettit answered, and after he had listened to the calm but serious voice on the other end of the line, he hung up the phone, shot Micki a look, and rushed out the door.

  He had been told a few days earlier that there were “anomalies” in Don Thomas’s medical evaluation, but nothing more specific. The news had been passed along as a courtesy more than anything else. Hiccups were not unusual, and Pettit had never thought, at least not for more than a moment, that this minor tremor might become an earthquake. But by the time he had returned to his cottage—by the time Micki had the chance to lay her eyes on him again—she knew what he knew: in three months, both of their hearts would thump through their chests, counting down the seconds to liftoff and a long time away.

  · · ·

  Ken Bowersox’s decision was not clean in its consequences; one dilemma begot a dozen others. First, Thomas’s clothes and food had been shipped ahead to station. His set of embroidered blue golf shirts had the right first name stitched on their pockets, but the taller Pettit would need to pack along his own pants and sneakers. More troublesome from Pettit’s perspective, Thomas—like Bowersox and Budarin—had forgone coffee in his food allowance, a hand-picked menu served on an eight-day cycle. Pettit, who liked to kick-start his day with a jolt of caffeine, begged for permission to carry up some coffee. After threatening tears, he was allotted about one hundred bags of freeze-dried instant; because the cost of shipping cargo into space runs about $10,000 a pound, he was lucky to get that much. (A fan of spicy food, Pettit was also permitted a dozen cans of New Mexican green chiles to dress up Thomas’s humdrum choices.)

  Pettit’s more immediate concern was Thomas’s emotional health. His grounding had left him gutted. Th
omas had fought the findings as soon as they were announced; the scientist in him had always loathed the “red line” that ultimately did him in, railing against it as so much hokum theory. He believed in evidence, in hard arithmetic and indisputable sums, and now, in his mind, all of the time and hope that he had invested in this mission had been wiped away by calculations fraught with doubt. In the weeks that followed, after he had returned to Houston and sat alone with the lights out, his mood had continued to swing from anger to upset, the spaces in between occupied by a kind of disbelief, those sad moments when he tried to convince himself that he could change his fate and win his return to space.

  Switch-outs for still-living crew are rare, much rarer than replacing the recently deceased—a grim reminder that pushing the limits of astronautics is usually an all-or-nothing proposition. Their scarcity had made them the ultimate bad omen, even in a profession routinely beset by metaphorical broken mirrors and black cats. Over the course of space travel’s voodoo history, the next man in line had replaced Elliot See, Charles Bassett, David Griggs, and Sonny Carter after each had been killed in an air crash before his scheduled launch. But before Thomas and Loria had lost their spots, bad news had been delivered to an astronaut rather than to his wife only twice. Deke Slayton’s irregular heartbeat bumped him from Mercury’s flight order in 1962. And more famously—thanks to the blockbuster film—Tom Mattingly was replaced by Jack Swigert after he had been exposed to the measles before the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13 in 1970. Bowersox had seen flashes of the movie in his head when he had dropped the bomb on Thomas. He marveled at how much harder real life played out than it did on film, all the while trying not to fixate on the fate of the last crew broken up so close to launch.

  Swigert had joined Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, and they had been none too happy for his company. Unfortunately, he also happened to be the man who flicked the switch to stir the oxygen tanks in Apollo 13’s service module on its way to the moon. Because of an earlier, long-forgotten mishandling of the No. 2 tank—it had been dropped and replaced during Apollo 10’s kitting out—exposed electrical wires shorted and lit the tank’s Teflon insulation on fire. The oxygen was slow-boiled, the fire spread along the wires to an electrical conduit, and the tank blew up. The explosion damaged another oxygen tank and the inside of the service module, and it ejected the bay No. 4 cover into space: in terrible sum, it put a hole in the machine. Although the crew of Apollo 13 somehow managed to limp their way home on courage, they were destined to become part of astronaut lore for different, darker reasons. Their preflight drama, coupled with their mission number, meant that their lessons were the kind passed on in whispers. When it came to catapulting yourself into space, there was no such thing as superstition. There were only signs.

  · · ·

  For Expedition Six, the signs continued to suggest that they might be better off staying home. On October 7, their sister shuttle Atlantis had a close call when a set of explosives—designed to blow apart the eight giant bolts that pin down the vessel until launch—failed to detonate. Atlantis still lifted off because another set of explosives had done its job, but the misfire raised alarms and caused onboard computers to seize up, forcing controllers on the ground to override automatic systems. More worrisome, no one could figure out in the aftermath why the charges hadn’t tripped. Workers went to the trouble of replacing wiring harnesses and electrical connectors on the launchpad, but in a lot of ways, that work was helpless. It was a blind stab at solving an unknown problem. When it came time to let loose Endeavour, no one could guarantee that the right kind of blast was about to take place.

  A little more than a week later on the other side of the world, the wrong kind happened. At the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, an unmanned Soyuz-U booster became a fireball about twenty seconds after liftoff, killing a soldier on the ground and injuring eight others. An investigation found that metal contamination in the rocket’s hydrogen peroxide system had triggered the disaster. Russian officials wondered openly whether the fatal flaw had been the work of terrorists. At the least, the accident delayed the launch of a Soyuz taxi mission to the International Space Station, which pushed off the ferrying of Expedition Six from the early morning of November 10, 2002, until shortly after midnight on November 11.

  Then and there, cast in spotlights, Endeavour would be waiting for them, looking from a distance like a monument to miracles and up close like a bottle rocket.

  Always, it had been a little bit of both.

  · · ·

  The space shuttle is a complex jumble of bones and arteries, but at its heart, it’s a gas tank. The majority of its juice is bottled up inside the massive rust-colored external tank strapped to the shuttle’s underbelly. At 153.8 feet long and with a diameter of 27.5 feet—the size of a Boeing 747, the plane that the shuttle sometimes hitches a ride on—the tank dwarfs the vehicle it fuels. A car’s gas tank is about 5 percent of its total mass; a fighter jet’s is about 30. The shuttle, including the two solid-rocket boosters locked to its sides, is 85 percent propellant. It’s 1,107,000 pounds of powdered aluminum mixed with oxygen off-gassed by ammonium perchlorate, and, in the external tank, it’s another 143,060 gallons of liquid oxygen and 383,066 gallons of liquid hydrogen, good for an additional 1,585,379 pounds of spark. Upon ignition, they combine in dual pre-burners to produce high-pressure gas that drives turbopumps in the shuttle’s three engines. The rest of it is torched in the main combustion chamber, which reaches a temperature of 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

  In the anxious hours before that last button is pushed, the hydrogen and oxygen will have been supercooled and pumped, very carefully, into the tank. Exhaust vents work at preventing rupture, but even with every precaution and an inch of insulating foam at work, the tank’s aluminum housing creaks and groans under the pressure, sounding like an icebound lake breaking up in spring, like whale music.

  · · ·

  On November 10, at 9:35 p.m., Endeavour’s seven-man crew answered that call.

  Wetherbee and Lockhart had readied themselves to fly. For Wetherbee, the first American to command five space missions—by the end of this voyage, he was scheduled to have logged more than 1,500 hours in space—the preparation for launch felt close to routine, or as close to routine as rocketing into space ever could. It helped that he had completed a nearly identical mission in March 2001, having ferried Expedition Two to the International Space Station and brought Expedition One back to earth.

  Despite Lockhart’s late substitution, he had also found comfort in his unexpected mission, and not just because of his custom-fit chair: his single previous shuttle flight had exchanged Expeditions Four and Five.

  In addition to helping Wetherbee guide the shuttle toward station, Lockhart was charged with coordinating the space walks planned for the two men seated immediately behind him. Mission specialists Mike Lopez-Alegria (the third Naval Academy graduate on board) and John Herrington (the first tribally registered Native American tapped to fly into space) would need to head outside three times after docking, continuing the construction of the still-expanding station. Along with his tools, Herrington carried with him six eagle feathers, a braid of sweet grass, two arrowheads, and the Chickasaw Nation’s flag. A native of Madrid, Spain, Lopez-Alegria—“Mike LA” to his crewmates—also had the hopes of an entire people resting on his shoulders. Like Wetherbee and Lockhart, he had visited station once before, becoming something like a celebrity after his appearance in Space Station 3D, an IMAX documentary narrated by Tom Cruise.

  Meanwhile, Expedition Six—Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit—had finished resigning themselves to disappearing mid-deck, hiding out like stowaways, like kids sneaking into a drive-in by getting locked in the trunk of a car.

  Assigned seating aside, the seven men remained equals in the most important respects. All of them shared the burden of foreboding during the traditional prelaunch supper that had been prepared for them, one last meal off plates. The heroes of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo wou
ld tuck into something suitably stout, steak with liquid centers and eggs over hard, but on that day, not everyone had an appetite. The less that went in, the less that could come out, and no one wanted to be the first to throw up.

  Next they returned to their private quarters. Outside of their rooms, a flight diaper and what looked like long underwear—a full-body garment strung with hoses that would be filled with cold water to wash away the heat of the moment—were waiting for them, and they put them on. Then they each walked to a room lined with burgundy recliners.

  There they were helped into eighty-six pounds of spacesuit, not including their helmets and gloves. All of it was designed to improve their chances of survival, with or without an accident, and it was hard to escape the feeling that they were dressing for danger. Their armor and shields included an integrated exposure suit, a parachute harness, and flotation devices; the big pockets on their legs were stuffed with survival gear; even the bright orange color of the suits was a nod to safety, because it would make the astronauts (or their bodies) easier to spot if they were ditched into the ocean.

  The spacesuits were relatively new inventions, changed up and bolstered after Challenger had come apart seventy-three seconds into its flight on January 28, 1986—and after Joseph Kerwin, a former Skylab astronaut and a biomedical specialist in Houston, determined that the crew might have survived the initial explosion. “The forces to which the crew were exposed during Orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury,” he wrote in his final report. He did leave the hopeful opening that the crew might have been unconscious had the cabin lost pressure, “but not certainly.” He regretted to note that there were several troubling signs that they were, in fact, aware of their fate, including the activation of three personal egress air packs connected to the crew’s helmets, which had to have been turned on manually. That raised the specter of the seven lost astronauts having been very much alive during their freefall into the Atlantic Ocean, killed only by the impact of splashdown.