by Chris Jones
The dust analysis was one of more than eighty experiments that had been scheduled for the mission, most of which took place in a double-wide Spacehab module dropped into Columbia’s cargo bay. They included the usual investigations into bone loss and the physiological effects of weightlessness. There was the latest episode in the seemingly endless survey of zero-gravity protein crystal growth. New technology in space navigation, satellite communication, and thermal control systems was tested. The amount of solar radiation reaching the earth and what was left of the planet’s ozone layer were measured. A sample of xenon was carried into space to watch how it behaved in low temperatures. A small zoo was also carefully tended—the proverbial guinea pigs, albeit in the shape of thirteen rats, eight spiders, five silkworms, three carpenter bees, fifteen harvester ants, and a school of fish.
It was a full load, partly because Columbia’s flight would be the last devoted exclusively to scientific research. Until the fleet was finally scuttled in a few short years, every other shuttle mission would visit the International Space Station to help finish its assembly. That distinction left STS-107 subject to intense prelaunch criticism; some felt that the flight’s $500 million price tag was too high given the expected returns. NASA officials argued otherwise, but their protests began to ring hollow when the mission was repeatedly bumped, from July 2001 to July 2002, until, finally, to January 16, 2003. The discovery of cracked fuel lines and frayed wiring in the notoriously prickly Columbia contributed to the delays, but so, too, did two favored missions to the Hubble telescope and the continued treks to station. That’s how STS-107 came to lift off nearly two months after Expedition Six had on STS-113. Rick Husband and company had been repeatedly tapped on their shoulders and pointed toward the back of the line.
The crew had tried to make the best of their sometimes torturous dragging out. For more than nine hundred days, Husband, McCool, Chawla, Clark, Anderson, Brown, and Ramon had worked toward their shared goal of finally reaching space. They even found the time to lift themselves at least part of the way there, scaling 13,000 feet to the top of Wyoming’s Wind River Peak. They had hoped that the climb would boost their spirits, and it did. On top of that mountain, they were reminded of all that they were waiting for.
· · ·
Liftoff had been seemingly flawless, as had been the mission. Over the course of 255 orbits around the earth, the only snag had come when one of the Spacehab’s air-conditioning units sprang a leak and, to avoid the risk of condensation building up in the module, the unit was shut down. Given their previous hurdles, the crew wasn’t about to complain about a slight spike in temperature.
During their busy time aloft, they had stopped only once, on January 27 at 12:34 p.m., to call up Pettit, Bowersox, and Budarin. (“We’re really excited to be able to talk to you guys, one space lab to another big old space lab on that beautiful station of yours,” Husband said.) Pettit was probably the closest to the shuttle crew; McCool, Clark, and Brown were classmates of his. The rest knew one another only casually. But over the preceding days, they had forged a deeper bond. Six billion people were on the planet. Only ten were in space, and they knew that together, they were virtually alone, united in their isolation. Ramon had promised to hug Bowersox’s three children for him after his return. Pettit, looking down at the Black Sea, and McCool, orbiting over Brazil, had been involved in a longer dialogue.
In his waiting for his own mission to get off the ground, Pettit had designed a chessboard (patent pending) made of the soft half of a square of Velcro. He had then cut out white and black pieces from swatches of the sticky half. By e-mail and over their radio, Pettit and McCool had announced their next moves, each prying their pieces from their respective boards and pressing them back into place. The game was made one for the record books by the distance between them. All that was going on, and they could still trade pawns.
During the single conversation between the shuttle and station crews, McCool had been scheduled for sleep. Before lights-out, however, he had asked Husband to relay his move to Pettit, and Husband had obliged: E2 to E4.
Before hitting the sack himself, Pettit moved the piece and stared at his makeshift board, reflecting on McCool’s latest play. He went to sleep thinking about his next move.
· · ·
Five days and four nights later, when Pettit woke up again to his life’s beautiful sameness and fogged over his window, he and the rest of Expedition Six knew in the backs of their minds that Columbia was to return to earth, but traveling in a vessel that was eight times faster than a rifle bullet didn’t hold the same awe for him as it did for the crowds gathering on the ground. Across the southwestern United States, shuttle watchers switched off their alarms, stepped outside into the chill, and turned their cameras and telescopes to the sky, waiting for a white light to streak across it.
In Florida, the bleachers were now nearly full. A few of the children played behind them. The husbands and wives talked about their plans for welcome-home meals, maybe a drink or two, and some overdue time together on the couch, hearing stories of magic and impossibility.
In Columbia’s cockpit, Husband and McCool monitored the instrument panels. The shuttle’s descent is automated, its safe return one of the marvels of physics. The friction from the atmosphere conspires to slow it and drop it, bit by bit, toward home. McCool had been looking forward to reentry; he had heard so much about the accompanying fireworks, and now he would finally get a chance to see them with his own eyes.
Northwest of Hawaii, Columbia dropped below 400,000 feet, pushing through the first molecules of the upper atmosphere. The few early sparks didn’t impress McCool as much as he had hoped. He felt let down. But as the shuttle continued its descent, the fire outside its windows continued to build.
“It’s going pretty good now, Ilan,” McCool said, trying his best to describe the view for his friend below decks. “It’s really neat, just a bright orange-yellow out over the nose, all around the nose.”
In time, the bright orange-yellow turned into a full-blown inferno.
“You definitely wouldn’t want to be outside now,” Husband said.
“What, like we did before?” Clark joked, distracted for the moment from her filming. She returned her focus to the camera’s viewfinder, capturing the smiles of her crewmates while they charted their course over Hawaii, across the last patches of the Pacific Ocean, into the airspace over northern California …
Mission Control noticed abnormal readings from four temperature sensors in the shuttle’s left wing.
… over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico …
Husband called down: “And, uh, Hou—” His transmission was cut off.
Mission Control saw then that more sensors had tripped, indicating a loss of tire pressure in the left landing gear.
Husband tried to talk to the ground again. He had seen the lights go off in front of him: “Roger, uh, buh—”
… on into Texas …
When, just sixteen minutes before touchdown, all of those shuttle watchers on the ground saw that heartbreaking flare, and that one streak of white light becoming several.
But Mission Control couldn’t see what those sky-turned eyes had seen.
They knew only that on liftoff, just eighty-one seconds into Columbia’s flight, a chunk of the external tank’s insulating foam had broken off, striking the underside of the left wing. Over the course of the crew’s sixteen days in orbit, film of the foam strike was watched again and again by engineers on the ground, just to make sure that no serious damage had been done. They decided that it wasn’t cause for concern. Wayward foam had struck every shuttle during launch. Always, it had bounced away harmlessly, like a bug off a windshield.
This time, however, it had not been harmless. The foam had punched a ten-inch hole into something called RCC panel 8, one of the black, heat-resistant, reinforced carbon-carbon panels that cover the shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of its wings. The same superheated plasma that had enraptured Columbia’s c
rew poured through that hole like mercury, burning away the sensors that first raced hearts at Mission Control. While the shuttle continued its journey home at eighteen times the speed of sound, thirty-seven miles up, that plasma melted the wing’s aluminum skin from the inside out. Without it, Columbia first began to shake, and then to tumble, and finally it broke apart.
“Columbia, Houston, comm check …”
There was no reply.
There was only quiet. In their desperation, technicians willed Husband’s voice to crackle across the radio, for streams of data to begin pouring out of the heavens, for a blip to appear on a screen so that everybody could breathe again.
Outside, in the bleachers at the start of this seemingly perfect day, the adults waited for the two sonic booms that would signal Columbia’s arrival, one after the other, two minutes before touchdown. The countdown clock ticked past that deadline, and still there was no sound. In a growing silence that was broken only by the sounds of the children playing, the crowd watched the clock continue its countdown, second by second. Before they could watch the clock reach zero, the families were taken by their hands and loaded into vans and smothered in hugs.
In a family video conference during Columbia’s final flight, Laurel Clark’s doom-fearing son, Iain, had asked the question that even those who knew intimately the answer now found themselves asking:
“Why did you go?”
· · ·
Still warm in his sleeping bag, Pettit found himself thinking about coffee. As it had for the Russians before him, it was becoming a concern. He didn’t have anything like one hundred pouches anymore. But looking out through his window at another orbital sunrise, he decided to hell with it: this was the sort of morning that coffee was made for. He put on his glasses, pulled himself out of his sleeping bag, pushed his way out of his private quarters, and found his center of gravity. With it, he propelled himself in clean, practiced movements, like a swimmer who’s found his stroke, past a sleeping Bowersox, toward the far end of station. There, Budarin remained zipped away. Pettit opened the metal drawer that held his fixes and took out a pouch, a silver bag with powder packed hard into the bottom of it. He filled it with hot water and began hunting for a straw. He found one, as well as a little Russian tvorog to eat, and headed back for his sleeping bag. Pettit tucked himself in, savoring another breakfast in bed, and turned his mind toward the day ahead. It was a lazy Saturday. He’d finish his coffee, check his e-mail, and then spend the rest of his weekend cleaning house—scrubbing fingerprints from windows, wiping down handrails with antiseptic solution, even mopping up the occasional coffee splatter. But there wasn’t any hurry. Although he had sometimes felt like it was flying, he knew that time was the single thing he wasn’t really running out of. He was still weeks away from home.
Pettit took another sip and watched the sun rise for a second time. The rush of it still drew him to the window, the sun coming and going every forty-five minutes, good for sixteen dawns and dusks a day. Next he looked down at the vapor trails that were folding on top of the United States like a quilt, the way they always did, one by one by one, New York to Los Angeles, Boston to San Francisco. They had become his way of catching a glimpse of home even when it was shrouded in storms. But on this day, the horizon was clear and the sun was bright, so bright that he didn’t notice the finger of white smoke spreading out over Texas.
He finished his coffee. He got up and began puttering, checking his watch every so often to make sure he didn’t miss the ground conference scheduled for that afternoon. At about two o’clock, Greenwich mean time—sailors’ time, the official time zone of station—there was a conversation planned with Houston to draw up next week’s activities. Usually the voice coming out of the radio told the crew what they already knew, and they floated about, keeping their ears half open for news or drama. This time was different. This time, the voice told Expedition Six to stand by.
There are two main rooms at Mission Control, next door to each other, almost identical in design but now cast under different shadows. In the first, from which the shuttle is commanded, the silence had turned hopeless, watering eyes turned toward the end of Columbia’s last orbit, a line left incomplete, frozen on the giant screen at the front of the room. In the second, from which the space station is tracked, and where numb technicians sat behind consoles labeled ODIN, OSO, ECLSS, ROBO, and a dozen other things, a heated debate was unfolding. No one was sure how to tell Expedition Six that Columbia, the shuttle that Bowersox had twice piloted, had just disappeared in the thin blue-green envelope beneath them. No one was sure how to tell them that seven friends were probably gone, too.
Jefferson Howell, a retired marine lieutenant general and the plainspoken director of the Johnson Space Center, ended the debate when he sat down at the radio. He considered his words for only a moment before he pressed a button that would bounce his voice off a satellite and into the space station’s tinny air.
“I have some bad news,” Howell began, and because it was Howell who was delivering it, Pettit and Bowersox knew exactly how bad before he got the rest of it out: “We’ve lost the vehicle.”
Nine words. That was all. Everything else was left unspoken, and in the quiet, the blanks were left for each of them to fill on his own. In the way the parents of missing children hang on to the smallest chance that their loved ones are just lost, not lost for good, Pettit and Bowersox wondered whether any of Columbia’s evacuation systems had triggered, and whether any of their friends were floating down to a cloudless earth under parachutes.
They held on to that faint hope until a battered helmet was found on the grass later in the afternoon. The flight data recorder was also found. So was Laurel Clark’s videotape.
Each grim discovery was reported to Expedition Six. Each pushed aside their faint hope to make room for more sadness.
Pettit folded away his chessboard, finally knowing that the game would remain forever unfinished.
The sadness settled itself in.
· · ·
Every so often, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had been allowed to use the Internet phone on closed channels, with the tape recorders turned off. This was one of those times. Before, when no one was home—when it was time for her to get the groceries or for the kids to go to soccer practice—they had left messages on the machines: “Hey honey, it’s me, in space.” Sometimes those messages were saved and listened to in the still of the night, again and again. After the conversations of that afternoon, those messages would almost always be saved, because she never knew when they might become all she had left.
In that way, their families had finally caught up. In their time away, the men of Expedition Six had learned already that the everyday interactions of life on earth—the messages left on machines, but also the smiles and waves from school buses and the notes left on fridges and pillows—were the things worth carrying with them up into space. They had made room for them in their memory’s permanent collection, just as they had learned to forget about the trivialities that they had once kept too close. And they had come to understand the true order of things, because they had learned how the universe works. Some astronauts become the first men to walk on the moon, and others burn to death sitting on the launchpad or seventy-three seconds after leaving it, or sixteen minutes from returning to earth.
Now they knew, too, that they were no longer weeks away from home. The next shuttle up was to take them down. But they remembered Challenger, lost nearly twenty years ago, and they knew that their ride wasn’t coming anytime soon. They were suddenly much farther gone, although they weren’t really sure how far, because just like that, the miles were made more meaningless than ever before. It was distance without measure. There were instants when Dallas was farther away from Houston than they were. But what mattered now, what separated them from home, was time. Suddenly they were locked in a souped-up Airstream, trapped on the other side of that single pane of glass.
They told Mission Control that they were all ri
ght, that they had trained a lifetime for this, that they could hold on to their memories for another year, maybe longer. Part of them might even have believed it.
But in the coming dark days, after Columbia’s memorial service was piped in from the ground—after they had heard President Bush say, “Their mission was almost complete, and we lost them so close to home”—and after they’d rung the ship’s bell in Destiny, seven times for seven astronauts, they couldn’t help thinking that their friends hadn’t been so close to home after all.
3 THE GEOGRAPHY OF ISOLATION
But this is how close they were:
The men and women of Columbia returned to earth the way they had left it, accompanied by sonic booms and vapor trails. The first debris reports were called in from the small town of Lufkin, Texas, only a three-hour drive east of the crew’s homes in Houston. Heat-scarred wreckage landed in forests, fishing holes, and parking lots. Smoke rose from front lawns. A piece crashed through the ceiling in a dentist’s office. An engine fragment weighing six-hundred pounds hit the sixth fairway at a golf course with enough velocity to break through the water table and create a small pond.
Frank Coday was sitting in his mobile home in Hemphill, Texas, smoking a cigarette, when he heard strange noises outside and pictures began falling off the walls. On the uneasy hunt for answers, he went outside, casting his eyes up at that perfect blue sky. He decided to climb into his truck and make the short drive across to his brother’s house, down their shared country road. On the way, he saw an unmistakable, lifeless shape on the gravel in front of him. He steered around it and picked up the pace.
His brother, Roger, had heard the same noises and was waiting for him. Frank told him that he’d seen something on the road, something that he didn’t want to look at alone. The two men drove back and got out of their truck. There, at their feet, were the remains of an astronaut.
