by Chris Jones
By then, it started to feel as though Pettit had become an experiment all on his own, measuring how much disappointment a man could stand.
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While Don Pettit contemplated throwing himself into one of his volcanoes, Ken Bowersox raced toward the edge of his dream. After only eighteen months at China Lake, Bowersox was accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps in June 1987. Despite its seeming inevitability, the moment remained a jubilant one. Every year, more than one hundred pilots—already culled from the best of the best by their superiors in the navy and air force—submit applications for an astronaut pin. No more than a dozen are interviewed, and, in a bumper year, perhaps three will receive a phone call from the Johnson Space Center, telling them to pack up their things and head to Texas. But Bowersox’s arrival in Houston was ultimately bittersweet. NASA was still reeling from the Challenger disaster the year before, still deep in its long recess of reflection and self-doubt. By the following August, Bowersox had completed his training, passed every evaluation, and was ready for flight, but the shuttle fleet was not. It wasn’t until September 29, 1988, almost three years after the accident, that a short-staffed Discovery took an abbreviated trip into space. It was longer still before the shuttles were running at full capacity, and the astronaut backlog that had built up—new recruits are planted at the back of the flight selection line—meant that it was almost five years before Bowersox was finally weightless.
Whether by design or by fate, his abnormally long ground tenure gave way to the sort of career that seemed destined to end on station. For his first flight, in the summer of 1992, Bowersox piloted a specially equipped Columbia on the longest shuttle mission yet, STS-50. It had been equipped with the first United States Microgravity Laboratory and, more important, the first Extended Duration Orbiter, a collection of improvements that included additional hydrogen and oxygen tanks for power production, more tanks to pump nitrogen into the cabin’s atmosphere, and a better system for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the crew’s air. Combined, the changes allowed for shuttle flights lasting more than ten days. In this, their inaugural test, they pushed things a little further than that, spending thirteen days, nineteen hours, and thirty minutes away. (In fact, the trip was a day longer than expected because heavy rain back at Edwards Air Force Base delayed the scheduled landing.) In less than two weeks, Bowersox had gone from Houston greenhorn to the veteran of 5,716,615 miles in orbit.
A little more than a year later, in December 1993, he again piloted a high-profile mission, this time on Endeavour. STS-61 was devoted to repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, which, after much promise and anticipation, had delivered pictures that looked more like rain-streaked windows than anything that resembled the heavens. After a successful capture and a record five space walks lasting more than thirty-five hours (none by Bowersox), the Hubble was saved. Solar arrays, gyroscopes, an improved planetary camera, and a system of mirrors were all installed to fix the telescope’s power, pointing systems, and focus. Aside from rescuing NASA’s reputation, the mission also boosted confidence that the shuttle and its crews could help construct and maintain the embryonic International Space Station. It was the sort of accidental first step that made crawling seem obsolete.
In the fall of 1995, Bowersox made his own graduation, this one to the rank of commander, returning to helm Columbia on STS-73. The mission did not start well: its launch was scrubbed six times to tie the record for prelaunch jitters set by STS-61-C. Glitches included a main fuel valve leak, hydraulic problems, a failure in the main engine controller, and a minor meteorological inconvenience called Hurricane Opal. But Columbia’s belated tour was a success, as well as Bowersox’s longest flight, at fifteen days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-two minutes. He also threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the World Series from space: a giant television audience watched him toss a ball that ducked out of camera range before falling out of the night sky into Cleveland’s Jacobs Field.
Most recently, Bowersox had commanded STS-82, strapping into the front seat of his third shuttle, Discovery, in February 1997. For the second time, he helped capture and repair the Hubble telescope. Another five space walks prolonged its life span; Bowersox demonstrated the fine touch he had acquired at the controls by boosting the telescope’s orbit, too. By the time he succumbed to gravity’s call for the fourth time, he had logged a total of fifty days in space and rocketed across more than 23 million orbital miles. Given that rookie astronauts were forced to wait years for their first flight—just as he had been—Bowersox had become the sort of man who walked down the halls in Houston trailed by stares and whispers.
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Pettit also heard his name whispered, but for different reasons.
In April 1996, he was punching his version of the clock: living on a small boat with five other scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, anchored back in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, collecting gas samples from the White Island volcano. The previous autumn, he had traveled to Houston to interview for a fourth time with NASA. In the months that had passed since, it had become harder for him to hold out hope that this time he’d clinched it. Occasionally, most often late at night, he would wonder what if, but now he was more occupied with his work and trying to beat down a sinus cold that was making his life miserable on board that tiny boat.
Things got worse when a storm began blowing in. Soon the waves were too large for the men to parry; they would need to raise anchor and head for shore. By the time they made it to the seaside town of Wakatani, almost all of the accommodations had been booked for the night. The six scientists, Pettit included, squeezed into a small cottage, rolled out their sleeping bags on the floor, and tried to shake their fevers and chills. They had just drifted off when the phone rang. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it was Houston on the other end of the line. Pettit tried not to sound as sick as he was.
“Are you still interested in becoming an astronaut?” a smiling voice asked him.
“Yep,” he said.
And that was it. Pettit had made it, fourth time lucky. He tried to get back to sleep, but the elation of the moment—not to mention his awful cold and the sound of the rain beating against the cottage windows—made shut-eye impossible. Still, it took until morning’s first light for him to realize that the conversation hadn’t been a dream and that the course of the rest of his life had changed with a single phone call. He would be leaving the lab, selling his house, packing up Micki and their three dogs, and moving to Houston. He would become an astronaut. He would fly in space.
But first, he would feel like a freshman on an unfamiliar college campus. Houston was new. He didn’t know his way around this sprawling, landmarkless city or where the nearest grocery store was or where the good restaurants were. Newer still was his job, far from your usual office transfer. Only a few days after arriving in town, he was shipped off to Pensacola, Florida—nearly two decades after Bowersox had passed through—to complete ground survival training, just in case the T-38 he would be mentored in went down. He sat in shuttle simulators and marveled at how different it felt from sitting in an airplane. He pulled on a big white spacesuit and jumped into the world’s largest swimming pool, feeling more like a manatee than an astronaut.
Through it all, he did his best to fit in. He did his best to feel like part of the gang. In a lot of ways, however, he remained a man apart. He had begun unpacking his tools and lab surplus into his new tricked-out garage, and a curious Pettit—busy exploring his new universe—had taken it upon himself to stir up a bowl of liquid oxygen, one of the principal agents of rocket fuel. Now, sitting at the back of a crowded class during a lecture on propellants, Pettit shot up his hand when the talk turned to the very liquid oxygen that he had stored where most men kept their hedge trimmers.
“Do you know what color liquid oxygen is?” Pettit asked when called upon.
“Well, no,” the lecturer said. “It’s not really the kind of thing you can take a peek at.”
“Well, um, I know,” Pettit said. “I just made some. It’s blue.”
The rest of the class turned around in unison and stared hard at him, as though he’d just farted. It reminded him of the way his schoolmates had stared at him when he started that fire back in Tucson.
This time, Pettit stared back. “I just thought you’d be interested to know,” he said.
In that moment, his reputation in the astronaut fraternity was sealed, probably forever. Even in a class filled with extraordinary men and women, even among dozens of astronauts as accomplished as Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit stood out. It was clear from the beginning that he would chart a different course. It was clear that he was something like a satellite, on an orbit all his own.
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And yet, for all their differences in personality, for all their divergent history, Pettit and Bowersox would make for a seamless team. On the surface, they looked like the oddest couple, the pilot and the scientist, the arrow and the archer, the veteran and the rookie, the first-stringer and the reserve, blue eyes and brown, short and tall. They were a bad buddy cop movie come to life. But in the end, they had enough in common to find ways to tie themselves together; in them, somewhere, was the foundation for an impossible-seeming union.
Not surprisingly, neither can remember when or where they first met. Their memories of each other begin with time spent in the pool, training for weightlessness. Although their paths might have run next to each other long before that dip—somewhere out in the desert, or in the Florida panhandle—they probably first saw each other in the crowded halls of the sixth floor, Building 4 South, at the Johnson Space Center. Even then, even if they had bothered to make eye contact or perhaps nod and smile, they never would have dreamed that they would come to live together in space. It would have been harder still for them to imagine that one day they would cry together over the loss of shared friends and a space shuttle. How much would need to happen for that to happen, too?
Against very long odds, it did.
The simplest explanation is that, from childhood, Bowersox and Pettit were both drawn to space as though it were a light-filled window. That sort of yearning must spring from the same place, a place deeper than even John Glenn’s voice. Perhaps their collision was born of their heading for the same destination.
Perhaps, except that every astronaut bunked down in Houston has a different motivation. For some it’s the thrill of it. For others it’s the glory. For many of them, it’s pulling on an orange spacesuit that gives them an almost electric charge. For guys like Bowersox, it’s the flying. For the rest of them, for guys like Pettit, it’s the possibility of finding out something new about how the universe works that gives them goose bumps. For each of them, the most honest reasons for having landed here are as varied as what they like to eat or how they like to spend their Sunday afternoons. Their occupation is not what binds them, and it’s not where they’re going that matters.
What counts are the places they’ve been and the places they’re from. The landscapes of their hometowns might seem as different as their faces, at least on the surface—the heartland and the harbors, the flats and the mountains, Indiana and Oregon. But their geography is the same: all of them are from the places that call to people who know what it means to be alone. They come from our empty places, our hidden small towns and the folds in the map, as far as you can go away and still be home.
Of course, there’s another, better reason why astronauts are born lonely. City kids don’t have the room nor any need to dream. The lights and chaos burn away their imaginations. The only decent dreaming gets done out here, in our wider landscapes, in our deserts and canola fields, those beautiful places where we don’t even have to look up to see all of the sky at daybreak and every last star at night.
4 TIME AND DISTANCE
There are wide-open spaces in Russia, too. Nikolai Budarin had looked up at the same stars that Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox had taken in like breath. He had imagined the same journeys, dreamed the same dreams, and now here he was with them, in space, only three decades after their two countries had raced for the moon. In the middle-aged lifetimes of Expedition Six, a seemingly impassable distance had been closed twice over.
Once, the Iron Curtain might have seemed the greater divide. The exploits of the Soviet space program were as much rumor as fact, secretive enough for officials to fail to include the Kazakh town of Tyuratam, home to 50,000 inhabitants and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in any official census. Though already in the middle of relative nowhere, the Soyuz launch site had been made even more remote by the loss of its anchor: the town was even rubbed off maps, with just another uninterrupted vista left in its place. In the absence of meaningful satellites, Tyuratam was invisible to the outside world. It was the ghost at the heart of the machine.
Under the cover of that darkness, pulled back only by the periodic flashes of rocket boosters, the Soviets had recovered from their loss in the lunar race and would even begin pulling ahead. The next frontier—the turning of space from destination to colony—would become their dominion. The Americans had conquered distance and, with that, seemed satisfied by their temporary stewardship; the Soviet view of the universe looked a lot more like rent-to-own. The Soviets aimed to conquer time.
Their crusade would prove the more difficult one, perhaps because it offered no easy finish. There was nothing finite about their goal, no endpoint looming on the horizon, no unexplored ground to stick a flag into. They could never say they’d done it, pack up, go home, and have a parade. But in the process, they learned something that the Americans wouldn’t catch on to for decades: the most important journeys and dreams are those without end.
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The beginning was Salyut, the first of seven manned stations that the Soviets rushed into orbit between 1971 and 1982. It was an almost unqualified success, at least until it came time to bring home its three-man crew. Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev had become that rare combination of hero and celebrity during three fantastic weeks in June 1971. Their playful weightless exploits—including a seemingly insatiable appetite for somersaults—made for nightly viewing across the country, reality programming with an all-time great payoff. Their success helped restore Russia’s collective faith in itself after the Americans had danced across the moon. They were exactly what the Soviets needed to see in themselves. They were triumph.
But all of that good feeling was lost when a recovery team reached their blackened Soyuz capsule on the Kazakh steppes and found disaster. Somewhere along the way, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev had died. Early fears that their long-duration mission had weakened them past the point of safe return proved unfounded. Their deaths were the result of a more mundane misfortune. The heroes suffocated when a broken valve leaked every last drop of their atmosphere into space. There was evidence that they had lived long enough to try to reverse their fate, that they had felt the life hissing out of their spaceship and tried to plug the hole. But the harder evidence revealed that they had run out of time. One by one, their bodies were laid out in the tall grass, and plans for a celebratory national holiday were canceled for mourning.
Years of gloom followed. Salyut 2 was lost shortly after it was launched in July 1972. Never having been occupied, it fell out of the sky after it was punctured by debris when its delivery rocket exploded. Although a truthful history has been lost in the mire of Soviet misinformation campaigns, it’s believed that two other failures followed. Finally, what came next was worst of all: the Americans prepared to send their own station into space, and in Moscow, there were fears that they would use it for more than somersaults.
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In reality, the star-crossed Skylab was a halfhearted effort at a semipermanent space colony, pulled together using hardware left over from the Apollo missions that never were: 18, 19, and 20, each submerged under the rising national sentiment of been there, done that. The third stage of a mothballed Saturn V rocket was slung into orbit with the hope t
hat a series of crews would occupy it, learning a little of what the Soviets already knew about bunking down in space rather than just passing through it.
The rocket’s shell was fitted out and launched unmanned on May 14, 1973; not much went smoothly after that. When Skylab reached orbit 270 miles above the earth’s surface, Mission Control discovered that the module’s meteor shield had broken off, which was bad news on a couple of fronts. First, the shield was designed to help shade Skylab’s workshop from the heat of the sun. Without it, the crew inside would slow-roast at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature twice as hot as those felt on Death Valley’s salt flats. And second, the shield took one of Skylab’s two power-generating solar panels into oblivion with it. The remaining debris had jammed Skylab’s second and only remaining panel, preventing it from deploying properly, like a bird’s broken wing.
Undeterred, NASA chased Skylab’s first crew after it, only eleven days later. Instead of conducting the full range of planned experiments, Pete Conrad (a veteran of Apollo 12), Paul Weitz, and Joseph Kerwin were assigned the difficult task of making the ailing station habitable. Under challenging circumstances, they did some kind of job, unfolding and attaching a makeshift tarp to replace the lost meteor shield as well as clearing the station’s lame-duck solar panel of debris and popping it into place. That gave them just enough power to head back inside and hang out for the better part of a month—for twenty-eight days, then the record for space endurance.
