by Chris Jones
Good thing for the glowing, fictional astronauts—and not coincidentally, perhaps, given Aldrin’s real-life entrepreneurial interests—private companies have begun developing their own rockets and are standing by. One, in particular, is primed and ready for its first flight: the StarRescue. Not only can it be readied faster than the outdated shuttle but it can also be lined inside with giant bags of water to prevent its crack crew from turning into mutants on their return.
Out of options, NASA’s embattled honchos reluctantly agree to subcontract this life-and-death mission, and the StarRescue rockets into the black. Its crew approaches station, lassos the sparkless Soyuz, yanks it out of the way, and docks in its place. Once inside, they find the ailing astronauts hanging on to their last traces of life. Their hair is falling out. Blood runs out of the open sores that pock-mark their emaciated bodies. There are gaps in their smiles where they once had teeth. Not a moment too soon, they are zipped into pressure suits and floated into StarRescue, which undocks, drops out of orbit, and finally makes a flawless landing on the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. First ambulances and next the president pull up beside the spaceship, shining white in the desert sun. It’s a triumphant scene. Everybody is safe. Everybody makes it home.
· · ·
No such luck for Sean O’Keefe and company. The whispered conversations that Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit had imagined taking place back home did, in fact, start taking place throughout NASA’s sprawling complexes. With no StarRescue in wait, O’Keefe instead called to order a series of brainstorming sessions, trying to find a solution for his dilemma. But even the wildest imaginations were of little help. Today, when it comes to getting men from earth to space and back again, there remain only so many options.
For Americans, of course, the space shuttle is it. Starting the day after Columbia broke apart, there were conversations at NASA about how quickly the fleet might return to flight. Perhaps it was worth the risks presented by lifting off on short notice—and before anyone could begin to fathom why Columbia had failed so terribly—to retrieve Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit. But that scenario raised two questions, the second more awful to contemplate than the first. Would Expedition Seven still replace Expedition Six, embarking on their own open-ended mission? And what would happen if the shuttle and crew that were hustled up in a hurry were vaporized, too?
Long before he sat down to listen to the grim forecasts of his advisers, O’Keefe had the last question answered. Already, NASA was taking hits. In the February 10, 2003, edition of Time—the issue that carried a cover photograph of fire and smoke over the headline THE COLUMBIA IS LOST—the agency’s manned space program came under attack. In an article titled “The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped,” Gregg Easterbrook wrote: “The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration … This simply must be the end of the program.” While he was at it, Easterbrook also took aim at the International Space Station. “There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes,” he wrote. “The only space-station research that does require crew is ‘life sciences,’ or studying the human body’s response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another’s pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.”
Easterbrook was not alone in his assertions. Across the country, there were calls for NASA to receive its termination notice, for its budgets to be slashed, for its dicky shuttle never to touch space again. Now, if another shuttle blew up—if, however heroically, NASA saw consecutive crews buried in flag-draped coffins—the agency would almost certainly lose its license to fly. For years, for decades, perhaps even forever, Americans would be grounded. There would be no more fire, no more experiments, no more giants. There would be only a more permanent gravity.
· · ·
With so much at stake, the idea of sparking a shuttle was dismissed almost as soon as it was raised. Next, a kind of Avdeyev Option was bandied about, although not in the way that Bowersox and Pettit had imagined it might have been. Because no one knew whether there could be an Expedition Seven, because Expedition Six remained physically fit and psychologically sound, and because, most of all, the three men had seemed so sincerely happy to stay, perhaps it was best to hold steady. Perhaps the trio could remain stashed away, safe so long as they didn’t try to come or go, until the remaining shuttles had been checked out and the wounds left by Columbia had been allowed to heal. Perhaps it was best if everybody just laid low.
But like every answer, this one, too, raised only more questions. What if Expedition Six suddenly ran into trouble? What if some illness lurked in them that hadn’t yet surfaced? What if the remaining shuttles were kept in hangars for as long as they had been after the Challenger disaster? How likely was another two-year-long hiatus? Could their bodies resist breakdown for such an epic stretch? Was it too much to ask for three husbands and fathers (and their wives and children) to remain apart for as long as Pettit’s boys had even been alive? Who would call Micki and Annie and tell them that their men might miss two more birthdays, two more anniversaries, two more New Year’s Eves? Or might they miss three? Or four?
Extending a mission was one thing. Extending it without end was another.
Sean O’Keefe shook his head.
He still didn’t know the how of it. He still had no magic at his disposal, no potions or beans. There was no phone call he could make, no snap of his fingers, no name or face that he might recall that would make everything better. And yet his gut remained unmoved. Expedition Six needed to come home.
· · ·
Soyuz. It was all that NASA had left. Once Americans had feared the tiny green capsule because of what it might one day do. Now they were left worrying about what it might not.
Unlike most rockets, Soyuz was born almost entirely of one man’s inspiration: Sergei Korolev, the previously anonymous so-called “chief designer” of the entire Soviet space program.
Korolev was an engineer who flew homemade gliders and helped design military aircraft until 1938, when, at age thirty-two, he was swept up in one of Stalin’s paranoid purges. He spent months packed into a boxcar on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, shuffled into a prison ship, pushed off at the Siberian port of Magadan, and sent down into the infamous Kolyma gold mines.
Later, his genius missed, he was transferred to a special prison outside Moscow where he was put to work on the war machine, mostly designing rockets for airplanes and missiles. After the war, he tore apart a few of Germany’s V2 rockets until he was imprisoned again—although why and where remains in doubt. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Korolev was “rehabilitated” and elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Always with his eyes and mind turned toward the skies, he poured his pirated knowledge and years of cell-bound imagination into the R-7 rocket, which was meant to carry a nuclear warhead far enough to reach New York City. The rocket proved poorly equipped for that unkind purpose, but following several explosive failures, it did prove a first-rate space booster. After Korolev convinced an embattled Nikita Khrushchev of the political value of launching an artificial satellite, he personally oversaw the development and delivery of Sputnik into space in 1957. (He lived in a small house in a grove of trees just a ten-minute walk from the Kazakh launch site.) Next came the launching of larger satellites, including the first one with a heartbeat, a dog named Laika, and in May 1960, a crash test dummy.
Despite his success, Korolev remained as invisible to the outside world as Tyuratam, erased from photographs the way the city had been from maps. Khrushchev wanted the Soviet success in space to remain one of the people, of the nation, and not that of a single brilliant man. Korolev was forbidden to travel or communicate with rocket scientists outside the Soviet Union. Even behind the Iron Curtain, he became a sort of omnipotent apparition, almost godlike in his status but equally unseen.
He was also fallible. A little more than four months after he had successfully launched his mannequin, his program met with an almost unimaginable disaster, the so-called Nedelin Catastrophe. In October 1960, an unmanned moon-shot rocket exploded on the launchpad. Among the casualties that night was Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the top Soviet missile general. Under political pressure and time constraints, he had ordered an inspection of the rocket—which had failed to ignite moments earlier—without first removing its payload of fuel or waiting for morning. Appearing out of the dark, as many as three hundred scientists, engineers, and technicians began crawling on and around the monster, looking for a cure to what ailed it, when its engines ignited and exploded. Everyone on the pad—including Nedelin, but not the normally hands-on Korolev—was killed, some by sonic shock but more by the fireball that lit up the flats.
It took six months for Korolev and his program to recover, but it did so in spectacular fashion: on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, poised to become the first man in space, lifted off in the rocket Vostok. It was not beautiful but it did the job, and it did it first. It also bore certain attributes that would later become part of the mainstay Soyuz. Gagarin was strapped into a capsule that touched down on land (unlike the American splashdowns), under parachutes. Also in contrast to its American counterparts, Vostok’s function was almost entirely automated; there were fears that even the best cosmonauts would be rendered incapacitated by weightlessness and stress. Although those fears proved unfounded, the Soviets elected to remain faithful to their totalitarian machines. Each of their subsequent successes—longer-duration flights, twin launches on parallel orbits, and the safe return of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space—was built on the premise that the fewer buttons the pilots had to push, the less chance they had of blowing themselves up.
The Vostok program ended in the spring of 1963; next came the cobbled together Voskhod, a stopgap to fill the wait until the new Soyuz was ready. Nikita Khrushchev had demanded that Korolev counter the American Gemini program and its two-man crews (until then, rockets on both sides had been designed to carry a single passenger) with a vehicle that could host three. And while Soyuz was already deep into its planning stages, so many dreams turned into sketches and blueprints, it would never be hatched in time. Instead, Vostok was stripped down and emptied out, and enough room was found for three cramped men, with only enough supplies for single-day missions.
Necessity gave birth to an invention that the Russians have trusted ever since: because there wasn’t room inside the capsule for ejection seats or reserve parachutes (Vostok’s pilots ejected minutes before the capsule landed and floated down to earth separately), a small solid-fuel impact rocket was added to the design. It was fused to fire just seconds before touchdown to make the dry landings feel less like the crew’s space elevator had hit the bottom of the shaft. In the end, there were just two touch-and-go Voskhod flights, allowing the Soviets to record two more space firsts—the first multi-man crew and the first space walk—but it wasn’t well-designed or safe enough, even by the Soviet definition of the word, to keep flying. Development of Soyuz and its accompanying proton booster was picked up again, but not soon enough for Korolev to see it fly. As a final indignity, he died on the operating table in 1966, moments after a hatchet job on a bad case of hemorrhoids.
Two unmanned Soyuz capsules were launched successfully the following winter. And then, on April 23, 1967, came Soyuz 1, piloted by Colonel Vladimir Komarov, the first cosmonaut to visit space twice. He had survived Voskhod’s inaugural manned flight, but he did not live through a second maiden voyage. During his descent, his parachute lines tangled, and his capsule crashed into the Kazakh steppes. Although the reasons for the tangle have never been made public, its terrible effects were: Komarov was killed instantly, having broken his hips, back, and neck, and rupturing virtually all of his organs.
Still, the Soviets remained wedded to Korolev’s original design, and over the coming years—after several successful launches, albeit marred by the occasional nonfatal malfunction—Soyuz proved a simple, if inelegant, workhorse. It wasn’t until the loss of the Salyut 1 crew in 1971, when three heroic space-station celebrities were suffocated and laid out in the grass, that the first in a series of redesigns was undertaken.
The Salyut 1 tragedy had revealed a fundamental flaw in the Soyuz’s original design, one that had plagued it since Khrushchev had made his demand for a capsule that could fit three men instead of the usual one or two. For Korolev to make that possible, he had been denied the room for even the most rudimentary safety systems or, as incredible as it might seem today, for the cosmonauts inside to wear spacesuits. In the sad case of Salyut 1’s lost crew, the faulty valve that did them in could have been closed manually (and there was evidence that the crew had tried to shut it in their desperate last seconds), but the process took at least two minutes. It took half that time for Soyuz to empty itself of air. To have given the three doomed men any chance of survival, they would have needed their own supplies of oxygen, pumped into helmets. In the year of modifications that followed, it was decided that two-man crews were the better bet, and room for oxygen tanks and spacesuits was found.
Still, Soyuz was not perfect by any stretch. Since its first tangled parachute, there has been a weirdness in the machine, an almost natural predisposition toward glitches and snafus—most of them harmless and perhaps even endearing, but downright demonic every now and then. Although Soyuz hasn’t carried corpses since 1971, it has come uncomfortably close to reaching the status of tomb several times. In one instance—Soyuz 23, which flew in October 1976—it landed off course and splashed down in near-freezing Lake Tengiz. The capsule’s inside temperature plummeted, and its occupants were forced to wait several hours until recovery crews could connect a line and drag the vessel and the numb men inside to shore and safety.
But that experience was benign compared to the almost comically bad-luck flight that would have been Soyuz 18.
On April 5, 1975, Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov first ran into trouble some ninety miles up, when their rocket’s spent third stage held on longer than it should have—probably because the exploding bolts meant to help jettison it didn’t fire—pushing them into a violent tumble. (The tumble rate was so far off the scale that technicians on the ground didn’t believe the data; they ignored the problem until they heard the crew swearing loudly over their radio.) After their rocket’s fat ass was finally ditched, Lazarev and Makarov’s emergency reentry exposed them to g-forces that Soyuz had never been designed to handle. The spacecraft’s theoretical limit was 15.0. When the weight rocketed past 18.0, the meter broke, and the cosmonauts each topped out at a ton and a half, snapping their ribs. Thankfully their parachutes opened and broke that hard drop, and their capsule made a relatively gentle landing on a snow-covered mountainside. But like a sled, it began speeding down the slope before the crew had managed to clamber out—narrowly avoiding falling over a cliff, like a barrel dropping over Niagara Falls, when its lines snagged on some pine trees.
The last remaining concern for the cosmonauts was that, after traveling 2,000 miles in just fifteen minutes, they might have landed themselves in China and thus, likely, in a Peking prison. Fortunately, they had landed just short of the border. They learned as much when their rescue team showed up, in the form of a band of Russian villagers who had watched in wonder when these spacemen fell out of the dusk.
· · ·
Since that harrowing night, Soyuz has been tinkered with, usually without enthusiasm, with the exception of one significant overhaul, which saw its capacity increase from two men back to three. Still, its fundamental architecture has stayed the same: it is a child of the 1960s and a flying tank, ugly and hard-edged.
Like the Apollo capsules of old, it is launched on top of a booster rocket that dwarfs it in size. After it has reached space, the Soyuz capsule separates from the rocket and takes on a more manageable scope, leaving its crew with just nine cubic meters of living space
spread across three small modules. The first, the orbital module, is vaguely spherical, capped with the docking mechanism that allows it to mate with its designated port after reaching the International Space Station. (For launch, it is usually filled with cargo.) The bell-shaped second module, called the descent module, contains the crew’s three canvas cradles as well as banks of monitors and control panels, filled with rectangular plastic buttons marked in Cyrillic, like an Aeroflot cockpit. The third module—called the propulsion module, cylindrical in shape—houses the main engine, fuel supplies, and electrical systems, powered by two winglike solar panels.
Like every Russian rocket in history, it remains grimly functional and largely automated (although its crew has plenty of monitoring and switch-throwing to do). And upon its return to earth, during which the orbital and propulsion modules are ditched, it is reduced to that single bell-shaped descent module, saved from gravity by wind resistance alone. It is a barebones solution to the problem of launching men into space and returning them to earth. It resembles, in a lot of ways, those inventions that budding engineers come up with when they’re asked to insure an egg that’s thrown from a campus rooftop. Usually, the student engineers come up with a padded box attached to a parachute. What the Russians had come up with is Soyuz.
And now, it was all that NASA had come up with, too. For Sean O’Keefe, Bill Readdy, and the rest of the agency’s upper management, it was not the happiest remedy. If Expedition Six really did drop into the Soyuz that was latched to the side of the International Space Station, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit stood to become the first Americans ever to return to earth on a foreign vessel, the first Americans to stake their lives on another country’s unhandsome technology. They would also become the first Americans since 1975 to come home in a capsule. It had been nearly thirty years since the last Apollo had splashed down into the South Pacific. All American astronauts since had glided back to earth, as in their dreams. Now it looked as though Bowersox and Pettit were about to be asked to fall.