by Mark Kelly
Once the big red-and-white parachutes had deployed, Mark breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. “This little guy over here is having a great time.” He indicated a mouse with its paws planted firmly on the control panel. It seemed to be studying the artificial horizon.
“I think he’s preparing for his next flight,” Scott said.
“And he expects a promotion to mousetronaut,” said Mark.
* * *
Of all the beautiful sights Mark and Scott Kelly had seen during their long day, the last one was the most beautiful of all: Grandpa rowing out to meet them as they floated in the command module in the middle of Greenwood Lake.
Naturally, Mr. McAvoy was relieved and overjoyed by his grandsons’ safe return. At the same time, he couldn’t help adding, “Don’t you ever do that again! My heart can’t take it a third time.”
“It is a pleasure for me to meet you, Mr. McAvoy,” Major Ilyushin said with great formality as he settled himself into the boat. “Your grandsons were very brave and surprisingly intelligent and skillful. Tell me, are all American children like this?”
“Well, of course, I think the twins here are pretty special,” said Grandpa, “but then, I’m biased.”
As Grandpa began to row, Major I looked at his surroundings curiously. “Previously to now,” he said, “I had always thought that returning American astronauts were met in a great ocean by helicopters and aircraft carriers.”
Grandpa nodded. “That’s one way they do it,” he said, “but we here at Greenwood Lake are kind of a low-rent operation.”
While they had awaited Grandpa’s arrival, Scott and Mark had rounded up the rodents and returned them to their carrier. Now the carrier was in the keel of the boat, and the guinea pigs could be heard chittering happily.
From the back of the boat, Richard Nixon looked toward land like a scout. Major I said his legs felt a little shaky after their weeks in weightlessness, but Richard Nixon was wagging his tail, happy to be back amid earthly smells and gravity.
“Now, none of you needs to talk to the press right yet,” Grandpa advised them. “Jenny’s mom—Mrs. O’Malley—has kept them at bay so far. It might be best if you let the NASA press relations people handle that part, at least for the time being.”
“Did the Washington Post run our story?” Mark asked.
“You bet they did. Front page this morning,” said Grandpa.
“And did Steve Peluso get in trouble with his dad?” Scott asked.
Mark looked at his brother curiously. The last person on Earth he, Mark, was thinking of at this moment was Steve Peluso. But then, his brother was often a mystery to him.
Grandpa laughed. “I think Steve and his dad the school board member have worked things out. You’ll understand more about how that happened when you get to shore.”
Crazy 9 had splashed down twenty-one hours after launch. It was now seven thirty in the morning on Tuesday. The twins were tired and hungry. Lisa’s snacks had been nutritious, and even tasty if you didn’t think too hard about how you were eating liquefied peanut butter and jelly, but they were not very filling for two growing boys. Major I was still craving borscht.
Onshore waited almost every human being who mattered to Scott and Mark—their parents, the Greenwood Mission Control team with their parents, Barry’s mom and dad, and Tommy. Behind friends and family were emergency personnel, with the red lights on their vehicles flashing, and then members of the press, waiting with pens and microphones poised. Flashbulbs popped sporadically, klieg lights shone like stars.
It was a lot to take in—especially given how hungry and sleepy the boys were—but they had expected it. There had been a crowd for Scott’s return on Crazy 8 as well, but nothing like this.
There was, however, one person waiting whom the boys couldn’t place. They had spotted him from a distance, a fit-looking man dressed informally in khakis and a white shirt. As they got closer, they noted his thinning, sandy hair. There was something special about him. His square shoulders. His perfect posture. The way other people made a space for him.
Scott stared for a few more oar strokes, then gasped. “Grandpa, that’s not—?”
Grandpa looked back over his shoulder and nodded. “John Glenn. I forgot to mention. Nice fellow, too, if a little correct in his speech. I guess that goes along with being an American hero.”
When at last they got to shore, it was Senator Glenn who greeted them first, then reached in a hand to help Major Ilyushin. “Feeling a little wobbly, I expect, after so much time in zero-G?” The senator smiled. “Welcome back. And welcome home to you, young men. That was quite a stunt you pulled.”
Stunt? Mark and Scott looked at one another. Wasn’t it true that the senator was on their side?
“Yes, sir, Mr. Senator Glenn, sir,” Mark said as he climbed out of the boat. “I mean, no, sir. I mean, stunt, sir?”
“These children were very brave,” Major I said, “and very competent fliers as well. I have not till now met, I think, such, what do you call them here in America? Such ‘kids’? Or is this the word for baby goats?”
“You can call us kids if you want,” Mark said.
“It’s better than children, actually,” Scott added.
“Ah. I must work on my English,” Major I said. “However, what I want to say at this moment, I am able to say. I am very very grateful to my rescuers. And for the future, if you want to call me Ilya, that would be acceptable.”
The senator smiled. “These young men did a brave thing all right, and it was a nice piece of flying as well. Of course, they had help from a solid team on the ground.” He gestured to Egg, Lisa, Howard, Steve Peluso, and Mr. Drizzle, and suddenly the twins were surrounded. For twenty-one hours they had been voices on the radio, relying on one another for survival. Now, as their pulses returned to normal, there was jubilation and exhaustion.
But all of them were thinking some variation of the same thing: When do we get to do that again?
When Tommy Leibovitz joined the gathering, the twins had lots of questions. It turned out Barry was fine, but he would have to wait a couple of days for return transport. In the meantime his hosts were showing him the sights of Moscow. “He says that’s okay with him,” Tommy said. “He’s always glad for an excuse to get out of school, and he’s learning to like borscht.”
Scott and Mark were about to drop from exhaustion by the time the crowd began to filter away. Major I would be leaving with Senator Glenn. As space-travel veterans, they had a lot to talk over, and the senator’s office would arrange with the Russian government for Major I’s trip home. Also going with them in the back of the limousine was a pet carrier full of rodents.
Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was unnecessary, the cosmonaut said. “Every time I attempted to take his blood in a tube the way I was supposed to do, he managed to elude from my hands. For that reason, the canine experiment has been a failure.”
“So what will happen to him now?” Mark wanted to know.
Major Ilyushin shrugged. “If he is lucky, perhaps he can live in a cage in a laboratory and undergo new experiments until he dies of being an old dog.”
“That’s if he’s lucky?” Mark said.
“Mom and Dad—” Scott began, but Mom and Dad were already shaking their heads.
“Major Nelson is enough dog, just like you two are enough kids,” Dad said.
Grandpa stepped in. “Actually,” he said, “I’d been thinking about getting a mutt of my own. If the Russian people don’t mind, that is.”
Senator Glenn climbed into the backseat of his limousine and rolled down the window. The Crazy 9 crew waved.
“It was really fantastic to meet you,” said Mark.
“We’ll never forget it,” said Scott, “and all you’ve done for us. But could I ask for one more thing?”
“Sure, what’s that?” the senator said.
“Could we have your autograph?”
Senator Glenn smiled. “I don’t mind, but turnabout’s fair play.
What if after that, you give me yours?”
* * *
Over the next couple of days, Senator Glenn squared things with NASA. Even though he was, as he said, just a washed-up old astronaut, there were still some folks at the space agency who listened to him. It was also Senator Glenn who had intervened to keep Steve Peluso out of trouble with his father. From now on, it looked like anytime Steve wanted to work on a space project with that O’Malley girl and those Kelly twins, it would be okay with him.
Of course, the boys did not escape without a lecture—this one delivered by Mrs. O’Malley at dinner at Grandpa’s house that night.
“What you did was brave, and it turned out well this time,” she said, “but you took a huge risk, and at many points along the way things might have gone catastrophically wrong. It takes experience to do a good job assessing which risks are worth taking. You’ll understand that when you’re older. For now, I hope you’re done with space travel for a while.”
Scott nodded. “I’m going to remember that,” he said, and he meant it too. He was going to put it in his brain file under Reasons I’m Glad I’m Not Older . . . Yet.
Mark, who knew nothing of Scott’s mental filing cabinet, turned on his brother: “Kiss-up.”
“Am not,” said Scott.
“Are too,” said Mark.
Mr. and Mrs. Kelly looked at each other and sighed. “Boys?” said Mrs. Kelly.
“Yes, Mom?” said both twins at once.
“Your dad and I are really, really glad to have you back.”
Author’s Note
Astrotwins: Project Rescue is a crazy, made-up story about twelve-year-old twins in New Jersey who, with a lot of help from their friends and a little help from NASA, launch a space rescue in 1976.
The twins, Scott and Mark Kelly, are based on my brother and me, and there are additional real-life details about our family in the book too. We really did have a Grandpa Joe who lived near Greenwood Lake. Our parents were both police officers. We had a smart friend named Barry. My sixth-grade teacher was Mr. Hackess.
And yes, we acted like knuckleheads a lot of the time.
While Scott and I both grew up to be NASA astronauts, in truth, neither of us achieved Earth orbit till we were well-educated, highly trained grown-ups with years of experience flying military jets behind us. I doubt that anyone—even twelve-year-olds as fearless as my brother and I—could learn to operate a piece of machinery as complicated as a spacecraft as fast as the twins do in the story.
We would have given it our best shot, though!
Besides the true-life details from our personal history, Project Rescue includes true-life details from world history—like the 1976 presidential campaign, the Apollo-Soyuz missions, the difficulties faced by Vietnam veterans, and the diplomatic era known as détente.
The story also anticipates real-world events that came later, chiefly ongoing cooperation between what is now Russia and the United States in space. As I write, my brother, Scott, is about 249 miles above the Earth orbiting aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with two Russian cosmonauts, Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko. Like the fictional Captain Ilya Ilyushin, Scott blasted off in a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Another real-world event presaged in the book is the experiment on the biological effects of living in space. One element of Captain Ilyushin’s mission was to compare the health of two guinea pig littermates, one on Earth and one in orbit. Today, it’s my brother and I who are the guinea pigs. During Scott’s ISS year, scientists are running tests on each of us in hopes that comparing the results will help pave the way for future long-duration space missions, including a trip to Mars.
Finally, while Project Rescue may be far-fetched, the scientific and engineering basis for Scott’s and Mark’s flight is very much for real. I hope the following glossary will help you better understand some of the concepts—historical, scientific, and mathematical—that are referred to in the story.
Mark Kelly
Fall 2015
Glossary
AMU/Astronaut maneuvering unit: (Page 125) A backpack accessorized with hydrogen peroxide jets to enable space-walking astronauts to move around untethered, in other words, without a line linking them to the spaceship. In the story, someone flies to the rescue using an AMU, but in fact no astronaut ever did get to use one in space.
While the AMU was built and scheduled for service on two Gemini missions in 1966, it was not deployed. As of this writing, human beings have only performed four untethered spacewalks, three in 1984 using the Manned Maneuvering Unit, more advanced but similar to the AMU, and one in 1994 in a test of rescue equipment.
Apollo CSM: (Page 131) The Apollo space program, which flew from 1961–1972, put human beings on the moon. The CSM is the Command Service Module—a cone-shaped command component for the three-person crew and the equipment required for reentry and splashdown, and a cylindrical service component to provide propulsion, electrical power, and storage.
BASIC programming language: (Page 39) A programming language is language that communicates with a computer. Two professors developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) in 1964 with the idea that a consistent, easy-to-understand way to talk to computers would enable lots of people to use them.
And what do you know, it worked! In the 1970s and 1980s all sorts of people, including students like Howard Chin in the story, began fooling around with their own computers, most of them using BASIC to write programs. Updated versions of BASIC are still in use today.
cosmonauts: (Page 11) The space program of the U.S.S.R., later Russia, calls its astronauts cosmonauts. Of course, from their point of view, the U.S. calls its cosmonauts astronauts.
détente: (Page 70) The French word literally means easing of tension. It was used by the United States and Russia in the 1970s to indicate deliberate improvement in relations for the sake of promoting world peace.
Drizzle fuel: (Page 54) In Astrotwins: Project Blastoff, Jenny’s science teacher, Mr. Drizzle, has formulated a uniquely powerful rocket fuel based on a chemical compounds similar to sugar. It is put to use again in this story. Sugar propellants do exist, but none is anywhere nearly as powerful as the fictional Drizzle fuel.
EVA/Extra-vehicular activity: (Page 125) NASA devised the term extravehicular activity or EVA in the early 1960s to describe astronauts leaving a spacecraft, either to “walk” in space or to walk on the moon. The first person to perform an EVA was Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov in 1965, and it lasted twelve minutes.
g-forces: (Page 130) A measurement of acceleration used to describe gravitational effect. A force of 1-G means acceleration is the same as that caused by Earth’s gravity. Astronauts in a spacecraft accelerating at greater than 1-G are pressed against their seats and feel heavier than normal.
gyroscope: (Page 143) A gyroscope is a device made up of an axle that is free to move any which way, and a wheel that spins around it. Angular momentum keeps the spinning wheel mostly stable, enabling the device to measure how the axle is placed in space at any given moment, in other words its orientation. A gyroscope is the basis of the system that keeps a spacecraft or a boat stable.
ICBM/intercontinental ballistic missile: (Page 50) A guided rocket aimed at a target at least 3,400 miles away. ICBMs are often designed to carry nuclear warheads. Many of today’s are still based on the work of World War II German scientists, including Wernher von Braun who moved to the United States after the war. In the United States and the Soviet Union, early ICBMs were the basis of many space launch systems, including the Russian R-7, and the American Atlas, Redstone, Titan and Proton.
Today, a much updated R-7 is still used to launch the Russian Soyuz, marking more than fifty years of operational history of engineer Sergei Korolyov’s original design. In the story, the English-speaker who helps Barry out at Star City is based on Korolyov’s widow.
microfilm: (Page 12) A length of film containing tiny (micro) photographs of documents.
Before computers became common as storage devices, libraries used to save old newspapers and magazines on microfilm because it was durable and took up little space. If, like the Kelly twins in the story, a patron wanted to refer to an old issue of TIME magazine, he or she found the appropriate spool of microfilm and ran it through a machine that projected the enlarged image so it could be read.
orbit: (Page 54) The path one body in space—such as a planet, satellite, spaceship, or comet, follows around a more massive body such as the sun. Until the early twentieth century when Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity explained that gravity is actually a result of the curvature of space-time, it was thought that orbital properties were dictated by Newtonian physics. Even now, orbital calculations made using Newton’s laws are close enough to be practically useful.
parabola: (Page 147) An arc made up of points in a plane each one of which is the same distance from a given line (the directrix), and a given point not on the line (the focus). In ideal conditions, an object flung from Earth and brought back by gravity—such as a rocket or a baseball—follows a path in the shape of a parabola.
Pythagorean theorem: (Page 80) The description of the relationship between the three sides of a triangle that contains one 90-degree angle—a right triangle. It states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the 90-degree angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It is named for Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago. The Pythagorean theorem is helpful in geography, navigation, architecture and engineering, among many other things.
range rate: (Page 184) The distance (range) to something divided by the speed (rate) at which it is being approached. So if you are a spacecraft approaching a space station that is five miles away at a speed of five miles per minute, your range rate is one minute.
Salyut: (Page 12) From 1971–1986, the Soviet Union placed six space stations in Earth orbit, four for scientific purposes and two for military reconnaissance purposes. This was the Salyut program. Among its goals was research into the problems of long-term living in space.
