Out of Orbit

by Chris Jones

  At the last possible moment, Romanenko had been rescued from himself and the almost inexplicable pull that space holds over us. It’s an attraction so powerful that America’s first spacewalker, Ed White, had to be dragged back inside Gemini 4, finding himself the object of frantic orders first from Houston and then from his powerless commander, James McDivitt. The star-crossed White, who would later die in the Apollo 1 fire, finally relented and returned to the capsule, but not before announcing to the world: “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”

  Now, along with Pettit, it was Bowersox’s turn for happiness. They had been carried through the monotony of their preparations by a giddiness usually reserved for children. They had topped up their batteries and made certain that their nitrogen-thrust backpacks would fire if they needed to move in a hurry, their one shot at returning to station if their tether snapped; they triple-checked every rubber seal that separated them from the front pages and changed out their carbon filters; they layered their gold-plated polycarbonate visors with antifog solution, but not so much that it might make their eyes raw. (During an earlier assembly mission, Chris Hadfield was left with tears in his eyes after they were stung by excess juice. It was a lesson that every other astronaut had learned along with him.)

  Bowersox and Pettit were just as diligent in preparing their bodies for the trip. As it is for deep-sea divers, nitrogen had become their enemy as well as their friend. While it would power those emergency backpacks of theirs—called SAFER, appropriately enough—their body’s own natural stores of it threatened to turn into bubbles when they opened the door. Those bubbles would course through their bloodstreams until they became snagged in their joints and bronchial tubes and frontal lobes, leaving them incapacitated with a good old-fashioned case of the bends. That potential for crippling agony was perhaps the only link between East River tunnel workers and astronauts, between those who scrape out their livings under the earth’s surface and those who fly above it.

  To reduce the chance of locking up their knees and elbows and turning their lungs into a hacking pink soup, Bowersox and Pettit each took turns riding the station’s exercise bike for ten minutes, while sucking back as much pure oxygen—via the masks that they had donned—as they could take in. Then they beat a hasty retreat to the airlock and spent forty more minutes behind those masks, breathing deeply. After they had completed the prescribed course of inhalation, Bowersox and Pettit slowly reduced the pressure in the airlock over the next thirty minutes. They brought it down to 10.2 pounds per square inch—the same atmosphere that they would experience on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, about 9,200 feet above sea level. Only then could they begin wrestling into their diapers, water-cooled long underwear, and 300-pound spacesuits.

  Pettit inserted metal sizing rings into the legs to stretch his suit out a little, while Bowersox made sure the membranes were wrapped tightly around his headset, which were prone to shorting out if sweat leaked into them. Each man also installed a drink bag against his chest, careful to burp out whatever air was trapped in the water. (Otherwise, their faces might have been showered with drink, with no way to wipe them clean.) They checked and rechecked the flood- and spotlights that were attached to the sides of their domes before they slipped them on and locked them at their necks. (They checked that seal more than once.) At last, they pulled on their white gloves, which made a comforting click when they had been attached properly at the wrist.

  The long process made Pettit think of knights heading into battle, wrapping themselves up in chain mail and sharpening their swords. But these modern suits were made of no ordinary armor. Even something as innocuous-seeming as those white gloves were the products of years of advanced materials engineering and dream work.

  On the ground, in fact, there was an entire team dedicated to making gloves that would offer sufficient protection from intense heat, cold, and cuts, while also giving the astronauts enough flexibility to complete the delicate tasks that they had been assigned. Beneath a slick outer layer of unscuffable Teflon, there were five layers of aluminum-coated Mylar, as well as a comfort layer that Bowersox and Pettit cozied their hands into. If their digits got cold—shivering was a more likely problem than a good case of the sweats—there were even individual heaters tucked into the end of each fingertip. Those heaters could be fired up at will, leaving Bowersox and Pettit with warm and toasty hands when, without the luxury of those gloves, their mitts might have shattered like hoarfrosted glass.

  It was that sort of attention to detail that filled nearly six hours of their busy morning. Finally, they made certain that their safety line, a shared cloth tether, was strung between them, and that Pettit, who would follow Bowersox outside, was tied to the inside of the airlock. Once they were certain of the integrity of both lines, they nodded at each other, watched their pressure gauge needle drop to zero, and moved to push open the hatch. “I hope I don’t wake up and find out this is a dream,” Pettit said.

  And the goddamned bastard thing was stuck.

  So close to what felt like destiny, Bowersox began banging on the beast, pushing it, pulling it, cajoling it, and finally swearing at it, none of which had any effect. Pettit, worried that Bowersox was going to turn their home into a vacuum, asked whether he might take a swing at it. The hatch resisted him the way the driver-side door on that junky pickup of his had always dug in, and he remembered, and he found his touch, and the hatch opened to a wash of the sun’s bright light. It had been snagged on a loop of white fabric that had come out of place just outside, the sort of thing that could be pulled away like lint on earth but in space can turn men into satellites. Shaking his head, Bowersox resolved to cut that loop and every other one like it before he came back inside.

  Outside the hatch was spooled a fifty-five-foot length of thin steel cable. Bowersox unhooked himself from Pettit and onto it. Next, he took a breath. Some astronauts throw themselves out of the hole like bomber pilots, but Bowersox had already decided on making a more graceful exit. Using a handrail for leverage, he tossed his legs out into the emptiness, allowed their momentum to pull the rest of his body outside, and finally looked down between his feet at the earth. For the second time in his life—for the first time since he had last landed on an aircraft carrier—a short length of steel cable was all that kept him from a good push into a black eternity. It was all that tied him to one of his worlds and, in turn, to the other.

  Although it was unlike him to do so, Bowersox allowed himself to stall on that. It was so special a moment that he gave himself permission to turn off the automatic pilot, and he took the time to take it all in:

  There’s my feet. There’s the earth. There’s my feet, and there’s the earth, and there’s a long way in between.

  · · ·

  Now, should something go wrong—a snapped tether, a hand or a foot restraint breaking free of the hull, the hatch door locking shut—there were only so many outcomes. Now, in all of that wide-open space, your range of possibility was terrifyingly narrow.

  It would begin, like all knowing deaths, with panic. Probably not a screaming, thrashing panic, because your years of training wouldn’t let you accelerate the process like that—and because you wouldn’t want the voices on the radio to sense the tremors in yours—but there would be panic nonetheless. Your heart rate would rise. Your breathing, as much as you tried to keep it slow and even, would pick up, become shallower. Despite the cold water still running through your long underwear, sweat would start coming out of your forehead, but without gravity it wouldn’t fall. If any drops were somehow shaken loose, they would float around inside your helmet, like the flakes inside a snow globe, until they had gathered enough steam to splash into your visor or bounce back into your face. That’s when you would taste the salt, when you would lick your lips and begin whispering to yourself, looking for angles, for oversights, hanging on to the last living moments of your reason, trying to find a way home.

  Depending on when you were cut loose, you might spend as long as seven hou
rs staring out into your own private abyss: forever, but not long enough for any of the astronauts inside to suit up, and even if they could get themselves out in time, they would have no way to gather you in. If you were set adrift by force, bit by bit the station would become another star in the night sky. More likely, you’d be stranded maybe a hundred feet outside the hatch, just out of reach, the nitrogen in your backpack lost in a misfire, and you would hang there, locked into a new orbit running alongside your old one, without ever having the chance for them to meet. All of this you would come to understand. The panic would yield to resignation, the resignation to grief. You might pass along some last wishes. You might ask the ground to play your favorite songs. You might just turn the radio off. When the air began to sit too heavily to ignore the weight of it any longer, the most strong-willed astronauts might open up the two emergency oxygen canisters strapped to the bottoms of their packs. That would give them another hour to say goodbye. But like most of them, you wouldn’t. You would just tell everybody you loved them and choke back the tears and let inevitability wash over you.

  Suddenly the life would really start draining out of your blood. You would start to tire, as if you were on the final leg of a long flight. It would be hard for you to know it, but your lips would start turning blue. Your fingernails, too. Then your vision would start to fail. It might become fuzzy, or you might see two suns in the sunset, or you might find yourself unable to focus on anything outside of a single point in the distance, near or far: one of those drops of sweat set loose inside your helmet, the light reflected off a solar array, a white cloud on its way from Cuba to Puerto Rico. And then the first waves of headaches would come, your brain calling out its last orders for oxygen, cramping like a muscle that’s been pushed too far. That might give way to dizziness or to light-headedness or to sickness, but all of that unpleasantness would eventually pass. In time, you would forget why you had been sweating. It would all begin to seem like a movie, as though you were watching someone else’s nightmare, as though the distance between you and the station wasn’t anything at all, as though you could swim on over and climb inside and crawl into your sleeping bag, if only you wanted to, if only you weren’t so tired. If only you cared …

  Your training might kick in again, one last gasp, and you would try to shake off the dreaming, but your fight would wane along with your ability to concentrate. The brain has a built-in kindness, a genetic predisposition toward self-mercy: it goes first. It might still fire enough to register the tingling in your hands and your feet, the dryness in your throat, the little earthquakes that seized random muscles in your arms and legs and chest, but mostly it would be occupied with snuffing out awareness and replacing reality with good feeling. Close to dying, your brain would fill with euphoria, one final, blissful push into the ether.

  The hallucinations would pile one on top of another, the whole of your life, real enough for you to see and hear and touch, burning up the very last of your oxygen. And then all of it at once would fade into black. Your eyes would remain open, your body stiff, but your brain would have finished signing off, catatonic, waiting only for the rest of your organs to follow. One by one they’d pack up and join the parade out of town: kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, lungs, and, finally, your heart. That would be the end of it. That would be the death of an astronaut, like drowning without the struggle, a man left empty instead of filled up.

  That is, if you’re one of the lucky ones.

  · · ·

  If you’re unlucky, you would come out on the short end of the 1-in-496 odds that you’re on the flight path of something moving really, really fast. There are a million things it might be: a micrometeor, a hailstone, a piece of trash that slipped out of Mir and never burned away, even something from station. It might be a dropped tool, a bolt, the good luck charm that somehow slipped out of your pocket forty-five minutes ago. Then you would know the true meaning of orbital karma, first documented by John Glenn, who passed through his own exhaust every time he circled the earth in Friendship 7 and wondered whether he was cutting through fireflies. That’s when it was discovered that in space, what comes around really does go around, and too bad for you if you are in its way.

  If it hit you somewhere that counted, in the head or the chest, you would die instantly, as if struck by a bullet going ten times faster than a gun could fire it on earth. If it was a large bullet, it might tear your head clean off, and the technicians in Houston would be left scrambling, wondering why your vital signs went from near-perfect to nil in the time it takes to sneeze.

  But if it was something small, if it was the MADE IN JAPAN label that had peeled off some tin-can satellite or a wayward rock the size of a raspberry, and if it hit you somewhere other than your head or chest—if it caught you in the arm, say—well, then, that would represent some stone-cold misfortune. Because your brain wouldn’t have nearly enough time to work its magic. Against the impending sensory overload, your life wouldn’t have the chance to flash before your eyes. Instead of a seven-hour-long farewell, you would have nine horrific seconds to make your peace.

  First you’d feel your skin break at the point of impact, and your bones shatter into chalk, and the rush of white blood cells to the hole that had been carved out of you. The pain of it would have pushed you into shutdown if the terror wasn’t steaming in so close behind, because now, suddenly, the worst thing of all is that only the instant before, you had felt more alive than you ever had. You would know only too well what was happening, and what was about to happen, and that the hole in your suit was graver than the one in you. You would recall instantly the cold language of the space medical experts whose research you had read, like that of the American College of Surgeons describing the effects of and countermeasures to explosive decompression: “These insults are likely to be lethal, precluding the requirement for medical care.”

  Those insults would include, first and foremost, pulmonary barotrauma: the vacuum of space would empty out your lungs with a loud pop. Some of the air would come out of your nose and mouth with enough force to blow out your sinuses or dislodge your teeth. More of it would tear through the walls of your lungs, left flapping against the outward rush like tissue paper, and fill your thoracic cage. The rest of it would be pushed into your bloodstream, great bubbles of air suddenly choking your body to death. Those bubbles would enter your joints and paralyze you stiff, like the bends that you had worked so hard to avoid. They would also clog your veins shut, which would stop the flow of blood through your arteries, which would cause your heart to quit. Never mind, then, that every drop of water in every last one of your cells would still be turning into vapor, expanding your body to twice its normal size, squeezing your eyes out of their sockets, stretching your skin to its splitting point, and turning your ear canals into oceans. Never mind that all of that water, depending on whether you were in the sun or the shade, would begin either to boil or freeze almost instantly. Never mind that the gases trapped in your stomach would explode it, blasting your diaphragm upward and crushing the last scraps of your lungs, or that your large and small intestines would have been left in better shape had you swallowed a hand grenade. And never mind that all of the galactic radiation in the universe would pour into your body’s new openings, cooking you from the inside out, if only your insides weren’t already outside and your outside hadn’t been blown to bits. Never mind all that.

  Only those first nine horrific seconds would really matter.

  One Mississippi … two Mississippi … three …

  · · ·

  Jump.

  Having clamped shut the worst parts of their imaginations, Pettit and Bowersox made the leap outside, each hooked on to his own length of steel cable. They were careful not to cross each other’s paths or tie their lifelines in knots. They were also careful not to look down as much as they might have liked. There was work to be done.

  All told, astronauts will perform 160 space walks to finish building their home, during which more than a hun
dred separate components will be fitted, wired, plumbed, and bolted together. On this walk, only the second American space walk to originate entirely from within station instead of the shuttle (called a “staged EVA”), Bowersox and Pettit were to put the last touches on the P1 truss, the massive girder assembly that Endeavour’s crew had delivered along with Expedition Six.

  Because it would eventually help funnel the juice generated by the station’s football-field-size collection of solar arrays, the truss was wisely equipped with a radiator. For every watt of power it generated, a watt of heat would need to be released, which the hostility of space would help along by providing some mighty chilly shade. (There’s a 400 degree difference between light and dark up there, which helps explain why galactic radiators have ammonia running through their veins instead of water.) But for all of its importance, the truss’s radiator seemed a fragile bit of hardware. To protect it during the shuttle’s launch and the truss’s installation, it had been folded safely away and locked down tight. Now Bowersox and Pettit headed out to pick those locks.

  Hanging on to the truss—while traveling 17,000 miles an hour—and watching the earth spinning so quickly beneath them, each of them was reminded of those vintage black-and-white photographs of New York City ironworkers balanced on girders fifty stories up, lunch boxes on their laps, downtown opening under their asses. For Bowersox and Pettit, the bottoms of their drops were less concrete, but every so often, they shared the sensation—the same sensation shared by just about every spacewalker, high-wire daredevil, and riveter—that they were already on their way down, trapped in the middle of a long fall. Only when they zeroed in on their work or on some star in the distance, the way seasick passengers are instructed to stare at the horizon, did the feeling pass, left to percolate just under the surface.