by Chris Jones
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It wasn’t always a conscious acquisition. There was the usual course of arcane experiments to run (most of them involved measuring the effects of weightlessness on various materials), and there was a demanding maintenance program that had to be kept up (batteries needed charging, computers needed rebooting, filters needed unclogging), but Expedition Six’s principal assignment was simply learning how to stay alive in space.
For its truest believers, the International Space Station has always been an outpost, a stepping-stone, a pit stop. It is the means to learn how to live longer and better in space, and, someday, much farther away. It will take two years to travel to Mars and back, and before men can make that kind of trip, they first have to master less ambitious journeys; before miracles, there are errands to be run. Astronauts have to spend one, two, three, four months and more on station, testing their physical and psychological limits, learning like free divers how to push deeper and deeper each time out. Ultimately, they will need to find a way to live in space so happily that they will start to forget that they have ever missed earth, their days filled with the fundamentals of a new, weightless life. Expedition Six was charged with learning again how to brush their teeth, cut their hair, wash their clothes, the boring things that help anchor those magical moments that make life really worth living. And if they managed to do each of those boring things well enough, simply enough, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit would have found an astronaut’s nirvana. They would have learned how to push through to the other side of the envelope.
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Their quest began first with breakfast, then lunch, then dinner. In their daily schedule, eating occupied much of their waking life. Each member of Expedition Six had a personal menu (although Pettit’s remained tailored to Don Thomas’s culinary wishes), built into that strict eight-day rotation. At the end of the cycle, they would go back to the beginning and start plowing through it again. It didn’t help that, because of their general state of zero-gravity congestion—their faces swollen with fluid and sinuses blocked—food tasted blander than it might otherwise. There are stories of shuttle astronauts having filled their two-week-long menus with the same few meals, indulging in stacks of their favorite foods, only to crack open the first pouch and find something inside that tasted like puke. Variety, then, is important. So, too, is making a couple of zippy selections, such as shrimp cocktail (probably the most popular food in space because of the horseradish) and spaghetti with spicy meatballs. Still, Pettit remained grateful for his cans of green chiles, which he sprinkled on just about everything he ate. He had opened his first can with his crewmates, who wrinkled their noses at the acquired taste. Thus freed from the social obligation of sharing, Pettit guarded his little supply as if they were gold coins, recalling the food wars on STS-40, when taco sauce became currency, traded for favors and hidden away in secret stashes. The astronauts on board that flight even drizzled taco sauce on their Rice Krispies in the morning, just so they would have something to taste.
For astronauts tucked away inside station, food selection is even more critical—not just for flavor but to fight their body’s inevitable decay. They can’t go off their appetites; they can’t get caught up in dreams about a steaming hot pizza fresh from the box or Peggy Whitson’s steak and Caesar salad. Each day, they have to push through all that they have to choose from, three nutrient-packed meals with plenty of snacks in between.
In the case of Expedition Six, NASA’s food laboratory had balanced their diets between six categories: Beverage (B), Rehydratable (R), Intermediate Moisture (IM), Thermostabilized (T), Irradiated (I), and the rare, blissful Natural Form (NF). (Once in space, the food was divided by a more mouthwatering nomenclature, including “Vegetables, Soups, and Sides” and “Snacks, Sweets, and Yogurts.”) Because of space and weight limitations, not a lot was included in the way you might pull it off a grocery store shelf. In Nikolai Budarin’s case, crackers, buns, cookies, nuts, cinnamon rolls, and hard chocolate were about the only things he could eat without some kind of preparation, whether it was adding water to Day 7’s breakfast of Buckwheat Gruel (R), heating up Day 5’s always mysterious “Appetizing Appetizer” (T), or hauling into Day 4’s nuclear-fired BBQ Brisket (I). But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Each day boasted a thoughtful mix of Russian and American munchies with the occasional dash of more exotic inspiration, including Kharcho Mutton Soup, Peach Ambrosia, Pork with Lecho Sauce, and Jellied Pike Perch. Budarin had also fortified his menu with staples that he couldn’t do without and enjoyed almost daily: tea with lemon and sugar, gallons of apricot juice, and prunes stuffed with nuts. (They came in especially handy when Day 1’s thermostabilized meat loaf got caught in his pipes.)
For all of them, but especially for Pettit, mealtime became a chance to experiment as well as to refuel. Eating became an elaborate form of performance art, infused with tricks and rituals that would have seemed laughable back on earth. It was all part of their adaptation. They learned that tortillas were better than more usual breads because they didn’t leave behind as many instrument-clogging crumbs, and drinks were always mixed in bags and taken through a straw to avoid spills. Sitting down at their galley table with the aid of those foot restraints on the floor, Expedition Six saw even snack time become as choreographed as a dance recital.
In the afternoons, Pettit liked to eat honey and tiny, addictive loaves of brown Russian bread that he called Barbie bread, because it looked like something she might have pulled out of her Easy-Bake Oven for Ken. But he couldn’t just carelessly cram a fistful into his mouth. First, he would open the bundles of bread but leave them tucked away in their package, slipped under a Velcro strap that stretched across the table or pinched in a clip on the side of it. Then he would dig out a tin of honey about the size of a can of cat food from a galley drawer, find the can opener, and keep a set of wet wipes at the ready, just in case some stickiness escaped. He had learned early on to keep the lid attached by a small tab, because that left him one less thing to worry about. He would wipe the can opener and stow it away, and then he would pry open the lid with a set of chopsticks that he had brought up with him. Amazingly enough, he learned that he could stick the tin to the table with just a few drops of water—because of the magic of surface tension, it acted like glue. Suitably prepared, he’d pick the little loaves of bread out of their package and dunk them in the honey, where they would stay until he rescued them one by one with his chopsticks and popped them into his mouth. (Sometimes he would pull out the bread just far enough to coax a long string of honey from the can, careful not to break it, and then let the bread go, watching it fall as slowly as an autumn leaf, caught in the honey’s web and the spirit of weightlessness.)
On those days when he felt like whipping up something particularly creative, he’d snip open a small, single-serving packet of peanut butter, squeeze it into the honey, and mix it up with his chopsticks. Once, filming his routine, he caught himself salivating while stirring the gooey mess. “It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said with a smile. To keep his peanut-butter-and-honey plague from spreading, he’d leave his chopsticks stuck deep into the concoction, a social faux pas that he apologized for, but one that he figured the Japanese would forgive him.
When he was done, he would fill a garbage bag reserved for dry waste. On those rare occasions when some traces of food were left over, they would be sealed away in a separate bag held closed with a rubber band, to keep the rot (and smell) down to a minimum. And anything even remotely moist, like the wet wipes, were left out to dry, every last drop having become an invaluable commodity, almost as precious as Pettit’s chiles. In time, the moisture would evaporate into the air and get caught, cleaned, and distilled by the recycling units. Expedition Six would end up drinking the “wet” from their wet wipes—along with their breath and sweat—sometime later in the week, perhaps boiled up in a nice cup of tea.
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These were the sorts of lessons they learned, the hearts of
their new routines. By the time Expedition Six neared a month in orbit, their days on station had taken on the pleasant rhythm of a cross-country drive, an almost reassuring sameness. Morning, afternoon, and night, the temperature remained a perfect constant; the views were reliably spectacular. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had each begun to master the art of living in his brave new world. They had learned secrets and shortcuts, and each had begun to practice his own magic, finding enough ordinary comforts to ground his extraordinary existence. Bowersox had found that his exercise blissed him out like yoga might, especially when he put on his headphones and disappeared in his music; Pettit had come to like eating his breakfast in bed, maybe checking his e-mail between long stretches of looking out the window; Budarin busied himself with learning a little more English each day, usually adjectives that would help him describe his contentedness. In that, he wasn’t nearly alone.
Expedition Six had the occasional craving, for showers, for coffee drunk out of a cup, for the touch of their wives, for the sound of rain hitting their windows. They might wake up from a dream with their minds latched on to something as simple as the smell of a glass of red wine, and they wouldn’t be able to shake the desire until, like a song stuck on heavy rotation in their heads, it was replaced by a new one. Each of them, then, had his bouts with loneliness and his low moments. But they were rare. These were three joyful men, having struck a fine balance between the epic and the everyday.
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There were only occasional disruptions to their patterns—most of them happy but still enough of a jolt to remind them that, somewhere down there at least, a more real life was still going on.
Christmas, for instance, came nearly five weeks into their time in space. They often lost track of the days (without the changes in seasons or the length of their nights to help wind up their body clocks, sometimes they had trouble knowing what month it was, let alone whether it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday). But calendar landmarks, especially the high holidays, always leaped out. They pulled the men through their mission like the footholds on a rock face.
After long, warm conversations with their families and friends, Expedition Six held a teleconference with the ground. The three of them, surrounded by racks of laptop computers and chattering instruments, donned Santa hats (someone had been thinking ahead) and gathered in front of a camera. Bowersox was in the center, Budarin bobbed up and down to his right, and Pettit floated to his left, along with a small, sparsely decorated Christmas tree, spinning freely.
Bowersox spoke first: “Greetings from the Expedition Six crew aboard the International Space Station,” he began. “We may be only 250 miles from home, but it feels like the longest 250 miles in the universe, and those miles seem even longer now during the holidays. So we’d like to take the opportunity to send our best wishes to all on earth during this holiday season.”
He handed the radio to Pettit. “Of course, we’d all love to be home with our families for the holiday season,” he said, allowing himself to think about his twins opening their presents, if only for a moment. “But working here on space station is all part of exploration: exploration of our solar system, our planet, and ultimately, us as human beings. And this will bring us clo—”
Just then, Pettit’s transmission cut out, his deepest thoughts lost to time and space.
Finally Budarin, perhaps mindful of the spotty connection, took hold of the radio, opting to keep his greetings short and not so sweet. (New Year’s matters more to most Russians anyway.) He recited a grim-seeming proverb that’s been long passed down within the cosmonaut corps. Roughly, it goes, “First, we live in a crib. But we cannot live in a crib forever.” He might as well have said, “Merry Christmas, now grow the hell up.” Perhaps in its original Russian, it sounded more like poetry and less like an order.
He passed the radio back to Bowersox, who tacked on a more uplifting finish: “We wish our families, friends, and everyone back on earth peace, joy, and goodwill. From the three of us here in space”—and then the rest of them chimed in, shouting in unison—
“HAPPY HOLIDAYS!”
The festivities continued. After hanging a white cloth banner of a homespun Christmas tree, and with some strange Russian techno music providing the soundtrack, Expedition Six decided to try making a cake. With no oven at his disposal, Bowersox retrieved a few Twinkies he had asked the ground to supply. (The ground had obliged, but long before Expedition Six had made it to station; the Twinkies were at least six months old, probably older.) He laid them out in the vague shape of a candy cane on a piece of cardboard, using dabs of the frosting that had also been shipped up for glue. He spread the rest of the frosting across the Twinkies in pink and white bands. Pettit, floating over the finished product with his video camera, zoomed in for a closer look at the creation. After a few seconds of contemplation, he rendered his verdict: “Actually, that’s pretty good.”
Bowersox, however, humbly admitted that it looked more like the number 1, which it did. “Our number-one Christmas in space,” he said a little sheepishly, and with that, the three of them began digging in with knives, using them like shovels.
“Not bad,” Pettit said, wiping icing from the corners of his mouth.
That cake tasted like home.
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Another month passed, the days and nights lost in an endless string of orbits. During one of them, Expedition Six reached the halfway mark of their mission. They were deep enough into their journey to make it harder and harder for them to remember its beginnings. Instead, their minds had become preoccupied with its end—not that they wished for it, or that they even looked forward to it, but for the first time they were mindful of its coming. Now, whenever they stared through their windows, what once had seemed so far away looked as close as it had ever been.
On February 1, 2003, Don Pettit began his day as he always did, by fogging glass with his breath. Below him, in a small corner of Florida, the last of the mist had burned away to reveal a perfect morning, cool but comfortable, with just a few clouds stretched across the opening sky. The bleachers that had been set up about halfway down the Kennedy Space Center’s three-mile-long runway caught the sun and began to fill. Reporters, dignitaries, and the husbands, wives, and children of the seven astronauts on board the space shuttle Columbia gathered to watch its gliderlike return after a successful sixteen-day mission. In front of the bleachers, a large digital clock ticked down toward the crew’s scheduled arrival time. Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown, and Ilan Ramon were only minutes away.
Aside from their shared inexperience—Husband, Chawla, and Anderson had each flown into space just once before; the rest were rookies—the crew assembled for STS-107 was as diverse as any NASA had put together.
Husband, the mission’s commander, was a forty-five-year-old air force colonel, a devout Christian, and a graduate of the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. The native of Amarillo, Texas, was also the married father of two.
Sitting next to him in the pilot’s seat was McCool, a Naval Academy graduate (he finished second in his class) and aircraft carrier flier. Born in San Diego, the forty-one-year-old had been raised in Lubbock, Texas. In his youth, he had been a top long-distance runner. Along with Husband—along with every member of the crew except for the bachelor Brown—McCool was married, as well as the father of three boys.
Behind Husband and McCool sat Chawla and Clark. Chawla, acting as the shuttle’s flight engineer, was an aerospace engineer and an accomplished pilot, fond of stunt flying. A native of Karnal, India, the forty-one-year-old was a hero to some in her homeland, where many women couldn’t dream of one day reading a book, let alone strapping in for a flight into space.
Clark, also forty-one, wasn’t quite so removed from her Racine, Wisconsin, home. A navy commander, diver, and physician, she had become the mission’s self-styled documentarian, with plans to film the entire descent. She hoped the upbeat footage might help her
earn the forgiveness of her eight-year-old son, Iain, who had begged her not to make the trip. The family had recently survived a small plane crash unscathed, at least physically. But deeper down, Iain had scars.
Below deck, where Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had been locked away for their launch, the three remaining crew members stared at the same rows of storage lockers.
Anderson, the mission’s forty-three-year-old payload commander, called Spokane, Washington, home. He was one of the few African American astronauts in NASA’s pool. He, his wife, and their two children attended the same church as Husband. Anderson believed in Heaven.
Brown was the only former circus acrobat on board. The forty-six-year-old native of Arlington, Virginia, was, like so many of his crewmates, a product of the navy, an aviator, and a flight surgeon. Unlike the rest of them, he had gone into space certain that he would not return. In the weeks and months before launch, he had been plagued with premonitions that his first flight would be his last. He had gone so far as to tell his friends, if not his crewmates, that he would not be coming home.
And last there was Ramon. He was the oldest member of the crew, forty-eight, and he had the most children, four. The son of German and Polish refugees (his mother had survived Auschwitz), Ramon was born in Tel Aviv to a new world. He held a degree in electrical and computer engineering and had been an ace fighter pilot, leading bombing runs into Iraq and Lebanon. He preferred not to talk about them. He was more open about his becoming Israel’s first astronaut. His surprise selection—he hadn’t even applied for the honor; it was offered to him in a phone call out of the blue—had left him humbled and thankful. “I think I was in the right place at the right time,” Ramon said.
He wasn’t content simply to hitch a ride, however, the way some foreign astronauts had been (namely the Saudi prince stowed in the bowels of Discovery in 1985). He had asked to perform an experiment that meant something to his country and his people. After much debate, it was decided that he would study how the dust picked up by winds across the Sahara affected weather in the Mediterranean.
