by Chris Jones
The rest of the trip passed as though in a movie, projected on the giant blue screen stretched out underneath them. Everybody took his turn in a front-row seat. They could see the Blue Nile meeting the White Nile at Khartoum, boat wakes and vapor trails, the northern and southern lights in the same shift, cloud shadows that stretched for hundreds of miles.
The rapture was tempered only by the still-haunting specter of absent friends. During Endeavour’s long chase of the International Space Station—it would take nearly forty-eight hours to track it down—Bowersox gave a surprisingly revealing interview about Don Thomas to the Associated Press. Maybe, as with the bee, there were still strings attached after all.
“This emblem that’s on our shirt was designed by Don,” Bowersox began, talking about the triangular Expedition Six patch that had been stitched to their flight suits, depicting a stylized station eclipsing the sun during yet another orbit around the earth. “So he’s with us every minute in spirit and we think about him a lot and we can only wish him the best. We know this has been very, very hard for him, so that’s been the toughest thing for us, too. But he’s a big part of this mission. Everywhere we go we see reminders of him, and there’s no way we could not think about him.”
At the same time, Bowersox admitted that he hadn’t spoken to Thomas since that awful night when he told his friend that he had been bumped from the mission: “It’s still kind of painful and sore for Don. When he talks with us, it becomes even more painful. We’re going to try to connect with him when we get on orbit or after we get home, after he’s had a little bit of distance. But this is a hard thing, to be so close to accomplishing a dream—going for a long-duration flight was Don Thomas’s dream—and when he wasn’t able to do it, it hurt him pretty bad. So as the distance and the time heals that wound, then I think it’ll be a little bit easier for him to discuss how much fun we’re having in orbit. I’m happy to get to fly with Don Pettit, but I was really looking forward to flying with Don Thomas, too, because he’s such a great guy.”
Like athletes, however, the men of Expedition Six needed to start thinking only of tomorrow. Along with the rest of Endeavour’s crew, they helped examine the Canadarm to make sure its earlier brush with disaster really hadn’t limited its function. Happily, it appeared to work just fine. Testing it further, the crew turned on the cameras attached to the end of the arm and began scanning the luggage stowed in the shuttle’s massive payload bay. The biggest, most important piece of cargo would soon be locked onto the International Space Station: the P1 truss, a $390 million chunk of station’s ever-expanding backbone, a girder assembly that all on its own measured forty-five feet long. In addition to supplying structural support for the modules that housed the astronauts—acting like the sticks in a giant kite or the flying buttresses in a Gothic cathedral, depending on your feelings toward station—the truss contained three ammonia-filled radiators, folded up like accordion panels, that would help vent the excess heat generated along with much-needed electricity by the station’s solar panels.
Looking at the almost ghostly images of the truss from the safety of the crew cabin, Expedition Six reveled in their special delivery. They could see something beautiful through its utilitarian mass—not so much in what it was but in what it represented. It was a part of what has been called the most ambitious single construction project since the Great Pyramids, and now it had made the giant leaps from drawing board to space to impending installation.
With it, Expedition Six was about to become a part of history, too.
· · ·
After two nights in space—sleeping with their heads strapped to their pillows, so they could feel the softness of them, and with their arms sometimes floating freely, leaving them looking like drowned sailors—Endeavour’s crew woke up excited to catch their first glimpse of their final destination. With each successive rocket burn, still being coordinated and fired from the ground, the shuttle was drawn closer to what first appeared as a small, white light, like a star that was brighter and closer than the rest. Inside that light, Expedition Five—two cosmonauts, Valery Korzun and Sergei Treschev, and the American Peggy Whitson—waited eagerly to greet their visitors. Because of Endeavour’s earlier troubles, they had spent nearly 170 days in space, and they were ready for new faces and hugs.
“You guys look pretty good out there,” Whitson radioed.
“We were just saying the same about you,” Mike Lopez-Alegria said in return.
Although both the shuttle and the station each rocketed across space at five miles a second, their relative distance closed slowly, and for good reason. There was disaster lurking behind their dance. A collision would almost certainly see these ten astronauts made to look more permanently like drowned sailors, with their newfangled ships done in by old-fashioned holes.
Nine miles out from station, at 2:15 on a Monday afternoon, a short burn of the shuttle’s left-hand orbital maneuvering system put it on a nearly perfect course. At that point, the ground began ceding some of its control, giving permission for Commander Jim Wetherbee to look through his window and fire as many as four short correction burns over the next couple of hours. Once Endeavour was within six hundred feet of station, the previously shared load was placed entirely on him. With a gentle touch of the stick, he could nudge the shuttle up or down, left or right, as though lining up the biggest pool shot of his life, until he was satisfied that he had found his dead aim at the docking port in Destiny, the last in the station’s chain of modules. When it came right down to it—having come so far, so fast—Wetherbee had a margin of error of just three inches to work with. Not surprisingly, he took his sweet time in closing the last of the gap.
Docking was scheduled for 4:26 p.m., but it wasn’t until just before five o’clock when the shuttle and the station finally connected, 250 miles above the great blue expanse of the South Pacific, making contact just behind the top of the shuttle’s cockpit. For the last several feet, Wetherbee had slowed his approach down to a little more than one inch per second, a veritable crawl considering the urgency with which the shuttle had left earth. The union was as soft as a first kiss.
The astronauts waited for the gentle waves of their impact to subside before they triggered the hooks and latches that would keep the shuttle in place. It took another hour for the small tunnel that had formed between the shuttle and station to pressurize. It was checked for leaks, and after they had been given the all-clear by the ground and each other, Expedition Five and Endeavour’s crew opened their respective hatches and finally, literally, flew into one another’s arms.
With Whitson snapping pictures, Wetherbee was the first to cross the threshold into station. Bowersox followed closely behind, already in the blue shorts and sock feet that he would sport for most of his mission, and next came Budarin, still giddy and smiling. Hanging like subway riders on the restraint bars bolted to the station’s ceiling, everybody hugged and clasped hands with everybody else and started shouting greetings in Russian and English at once.
“Nice to see you!”
“Nice to see you, too!”
But with only Wetherbee, Bowersox, and Budarin having made it on board, the flow of traffic stopped. “Where is everybody?” Bowersox asked after planting Whitson with a peck on the cheek. At last, Pettit burst through the hatch, bearing two warm silver bags with straws jammed into their sides.
“Coffee!” Pettit shouted, handing the bags to a laughing Korzun and Treschev. The Russian crewmates had each run out of caffeine during their extended mission and made a desperate pitch for some more. Pettit had obliged by sharing two servings out of his private, under-the-seat supply. “Coffee!” he shouted again, nearly doing a backflip on his way through Destiny.
It would be a while yet before he could explore the rest of his new surroundings, although he, Bowersox, and Budarin were immediately impressed by the size of their new home, how roomy it seemed after they had spent nearly two full days packed into the shuttle’s claustrophobic quarters. It felt
as though they had stepped into the foyer of a mansion, or at least the makings of one. Like Pettit and the happy rush he had experienced when he first saw Budarin’s toy bee take flight, the three men were flush with feelings of arrival, sharing the relief that comes at the end of such a long journey.
Relief, but not rest. Aside from unloading tons of supplies from Endeavour and trying to make themselves feel a little more at home—Expedition Six took over the station’s three sleeping compartments, about the size of phone booths, from Expedition Five on their first night on board—they also had to pitch in during the installation of the P1 truss, three days of work scheduled to begin the next morning, Tuesday.
Wetherbee, at the controls of the Canadarm, continued his busy assignment by lifting the truss out of the shuttle’s payload bay. Only his grasp kept it from floating into space, and there it dangled, against the black, looking for all its size like a good sneeze might blow it to the edge of the universe. But by using every inch of the Canadarm’s fifty-foot length, Wetherbee was able to bring the truss safely within reach of the station’s own Canadarm, operated by Whitson from inside Destiny. Each kept hold for nearly nine minutes, just to make sure that the handover was true. When Wetherbee let go, Whitson was able to swing the truss into its final position, aligning it end to end with the already installed S0 truss, the station’s primary vertebrae. It fit together seamlessly. Using the computers inside station, Pettit commanded a claw on one truss to grab a bar on the other, tacking it in place. Now the connection had to be made complete.
Lopez-Alegria and John Herrington had spent most of their day getting ready to head outside. They had already pulled on their white spacesuits, climbed into one of the station’s airlocks, let the oxygen out, and opened the hatch. Now they took a deep breath and leaped out into the darkness. With the earth spinning fast beneath their feet (a sight that had the unnerving effect of making them feel every so often as though they were falling), they first worked at connecting the P1 truss’s power, data, and fluid lines, critical if its girders were to keep from freezing.
Also attached to the truss like a parasite was something called the Crew and Equipment Translation Aid (CETA), a kind of flatbed mining cart that, in the future, would run along rails stretched the length of the completed truss. (It was designed to help spacewalkers lug heavy equipment from one side of station to the other.) The cart had been locked into place to keep it from moving during the shuttle’s flight and the truss’s installation, and now those locks needed to be released. While they were at it, Herrington and Lopez-Alegria removed some of the pinlike hardware that had kept the truss itself in place during launch.
Lastly, they attached an antenna that would pass along signals from the cameras that were sometimes strapped to the side of an astronaut’s helmet, especially when he had been ordered outside. Already those cameras had provided some of the most terrific images of earth: when the view cut from an astronaut’s gloved hand, tightening a bolt with an ordinary wrench, to the whole of Australia, say, baked golden brown under a hot sun, it was almost hard to make sense of the scene, the mundane and the spectacular suddenly side by side. It was like watching an electrician connecting a wire and flicking a breaker that somehow turned on the moon.
But up there, for them, it was starting to feel like just one more job that needed doing—not routine, but on glamour’s wide spectrum, more routine than red carpet. Astronauts have a higher threshold for drama than most of the rest of us: after you’ve survived the thrill of a shuttle launch and snored in space for a couple of nights, your sense of perspective takes a hit, the way a near-death experience might make you care less about who’s going to win the American League. And so, after taking a day to recharge their spacesuits as well as their own batteries—and to celebrate Wetherbee’s fiftieth birthday, which earned him some ribbing from the ground—Herrington and Lopez-Alegria headed outside once again. Like shift workers punching the clock, they picked up where they had left off, releasing the launch locks on the three radiators and pulling the CETA cart toward its home position, wedged onto the S0 truss.
After another daylong break (although packing and unpacking continued apace), Saturday called for more of the same, finishing up the truss’s installation with six hours of plumbing. Exhausted and fresh out of adrenaline, Herrington and Lopez-Alegria clambered back inside and slept as soundly as men who had seen everything in their lives go exactly as they had hoped it might. Making full use of their eye masks and earplugs, they slept a deep, dreamless sleep.
When they woke up, the last morning’s worth of work was well on its way to being finished. A computer printer, sent up to replace a balky one that had already been punted into the station’s junk drawer, was the last bit of cargo brought on board. Expedition Five had nearly finished their packing up, too, stowing the last of their gear in Endeavour for the flight home. As a goodbye gift, the ground had given them and their colleagues the rest of Sunday afternoon off, mostly to prepare themselves for Monday’s departure. After the frenzy of the previous few days, it was a much-needed chance for everybody to say goodbye—three to the station, and three to the earth.
· · ·
Part of the farewell process included formal exercises, usually orchestrated by the ground and held in front of cameras. Among these was an elaborate change of command ceremony, which concluded with the following exchange between station commanders old and new:
“Ken, I’m ready to be relieved,” Valery Korzun said before passing the radio to Ken Bowersox.
“I relieve you of your command,” he said.
“I stand relieved,” Korzun replied.
As terse—and rehearsed—as the conclusion might have appeared from the vantage point of living-room couches, for the people involved (especially for Expedition Five, about to abandon the only home they had known for nearly six months), it was an important part of the leaving ritual, as symbolic and poignant as a torch going out.
But more important, perhaps, were the quieter, more private moments before departure. There were meals enjoyed together, and last, longing looks taken through the windows, the bundling up of photographs and stowaway keepsakes. That was the hardest part, because what once were treasures suddenly seemed disposable, like the astronauts themselves, having served their purpose and been told that it was time for them to go.
By Monday morning, the feeling had forced Korzun, Treschev, and Whitson into making a subtle mental switch, the building of a distance between themselves and station. Each of them would have happily stayed longer if needed; a small part of each of them even wanted to—the same secret part of them that had felt stung when they were first overrun by the new arrivals. But now they turned their minds from their leaving one home to their imminent arrival at another. (For them, for all of us, it has always been easier to swallow the idea of saying hello rather than goodbye.)
Korzun, a veteran of a long-duration mission on Russia’s Mir, braced himself for the assault of gravity, imagining himself stepping down from the shuttle’s cockpit onto solid ground. Whitson gave in to lighter-hearted fantasy: she began telling everyone how much she was looking forward to a thick juicy steak, a Caesar salad (with lots of garlic), and a Coke drunk from a glass filled with ice.
Korzun had turned his return into a test that he looked forward to passing. Whitson had turned earth into a resort. In their own ways, both had found something to look forward to when they finally shared a last round of hugs, floated into the shuttle, and closed the hatch behind them. They had found something to soften the blow.
· · ·
Inside station, suddenly it felt as though a big party had finished and the revelers had emptied out, and all that was left in their wake was quiet and mess. Expedition Six had looked forward to this moment from their first seconds on board. Until that hatch had shut, each of them had worried that there might be a malfunction or a change of plans or some internal mutiny that would have seen their time on station end before it really began. Until the shuttle ha
d undocked and disappeared from view—until Whitson was left looking back tearfully at her old home, having forgotten how beautiful it looked when the sun’s rays struck it, flashing like lightning—there was always that chance, however remote, that Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit would be remembered as visitors instead of residents. Now, station was theirs, and they were station’s.
Even as tightly packed as they were, together the men of Expedition Six were more alone than they had ever been in their lives, more alone than most of us could ever even imagine being, adrift in the middle of a vacuum, almost 250 miles above the surface of the earth. For the next fourteen weeks, they could drop in on their families and the rest of the world by Internet phone, radio, and e-mail (they could even order flowers for their wives if they woke up feeling frisky), but if they wanted for genuine company, they would have only one another and the insides of this giant machine to turn to.
In time, they would come to know the International Space Station as well as anywhere (or anyone) waiting for them back in Houston. In time, they would grow to think of it as a living, breathing thing. They would learn its secrets, and they would be able to close their eyes and trace every detail of it with their fingers in the air in front of them. But in those first few moments after their friends had left them behind, they were strangers to the only place in the universe they had to call home.
At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, there’s a full-size mock-up of the station’s interior, and Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had spent some time in it, feeling it out, but really, it was the least effective of their simulations. Those hours had given them a sense of the scale of the place—inside, it is about 150 feet long and eight feet wide—but little else. Apart from a single, empty sleeping compartment, the mock-up had been undressed. The walls were lined with mural-sized photographs of the insides of the real thing, but there were no knobs or switches, no tubes or dials. There was none of the persistent background noise, no whirring fans or computers, no clicks or groans. There were no cables to get tangled up in, no bulkheads to bump into, none of life’s debris. Everything was smooth and clean, all perfect right angles; pacing off its length felt a lot like strolling down a brightly lit hallway with no doors.
