by Chris Jones
The shuttle’s crew captured the still-unmanned Zarya with the Canadarm and, with relative ease, brought it together with Unity; the two modules were permanently connected over the course of three space walks. It was a birthing-room moment. At last, station was the object of hope and not just hand-wringing. Like Forrest Gump, omnipresent Russian Sergei Krikalev—there he is again!—and American astronaut Bob Cabana were the first men on board, swimming together through the hatch that had been opened between the two modules, a symbolic shared step over the threshold. Their kicks provided a much-needed injection of optimism to the project, all but forgotten when station entered its troublesome middle life.
By February 2000, more than a year had passed since Zarya and Unity had been brought together. But they had remained empty, because construction delays in the station’s third and most critical component—Zvezda, with its propulsion and life support systems—had left it uninhabitable. (Not coincidentally, the module was the first that the Russians were to finance on their own.) Worse, Zvezda’s absence had left the embryonic station unable to keep itself in orbit; the two modules had lost nearly a mile in altitude each week. Twice shuttles had to be sent up to push them into a higher orbit.
The irony was that the Russians had been brought on board to speed up construction, to tap their experience, to make things go more smoothly. The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic chaos conspired only to slow it down, adding billions to the cost of building the International Space Station and leaving its foundation on shaky ground. Rather than proving the largest construction project since the Great Pyramids, it was starting to look more like the failed Tacoma Narrows Bridge, twisting in the wind.
Finally, however, in July 2000, Zvezda was launched and locked into place. Hopes for a smoother, brighter future were almost immediately scuttled when the first human elements were about to be introduced to station: the veteran Russian cosmonaut Anatoli Solovyov quit Expedition One when American Bill Shepherd was named commander over him. Fortunately, the trio that eventually became the first to call the International Space Station home—Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Krikalev (one more time!)—helped heal the program’s early bruises.
On November 2, 2000, they kicked off what would be a continuous and surprisingly harmonious manned presence in space, remarkable not only for its endless scope but also for the composition of the crews that made it possible. Until station became large enough to host more than three visitors at a time, the plan called for each expedition to consist of two Russians and an American, followed by two Americans and a Russian, until the two countries had sent enough of their pilots and scientists together into space for them to blur into one great string of names and faces, the citizen soldiers of a new country. By the time Expedition Six arrived on its doorstep, station had already hosted fifteen men and women who together had lived for more than two years on board. The stories and memories of their work and play had eclipsed the early fights and troubles. They had taken what had looked destined to become a battleground and made it into a shelter. They had taken what had been given to them and built it into something larger.
· · ·
Expedition Six, having just started to emerge from their private grieving chambers in the days following Columbia’s loss, would see the International Space Station become more for them than it had been for anybody else. Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit would see it as more than a brightly lit place to grow protein crystals and drink their coffee through straws and run on a zero-gravity treadmill. Instead, they would come to see in it a comfort, the makings of a sanctuary. For them, station would become a home, and they would soon become a family built on love and trust and experience, like the one each man had left behind on earth. This new family would be captured in photographs and written about in letters. And somewhere along the way, having been battered by so much time and distance, the lines between Russian and American, man and machine, and even earth and space would begin to disappear. They would break up and vanish, like that finger of white smoke over Texas.
5 GONE
Every so often, one of their orbits followed Columbia’s last flight, right over Houston. For days beforehand, Ken Bowersox’s three boys would track station on their computers, and because they were old enough to understand a little of what he knew about the universe, they could calculate almost to the minute when they might catch a glimpse of their dad’s second home. The timing had to be just right—it had to be dark outside, but the night had to be young enough for the sun to have dropped just below the horizon, still reflecting its rays off the space station’s solar panels. There couldn’t be a cloud in the night sky, and it couldn’t have been so hot for the city’s haze to have stayed draped over Clear Lake. Only once or twice in a very long while did everything fall into place. On those perfect nights, the boys gathered on their front lawn, their feet in the cool of the grass, and strained their necks until they spotted a small, steady white light coming up over the trees. They followed that light for as long as it took to cross their starlit sky on a smooth, predetermined path, the same path that would carry it over South Africa by the time they went to bed.
Six-year-old Luke, Bowersox’s youngest son, didn’t quite have a handle on that part of the deal. Speed and time and distance are relative things to a kid. During each of the long days he waited for station to pass overhead, he made up his mind that this would be the night he would catch his dad and bring him back down. As soon as the light came over the trees, he’d begin chasing it, taking off down the street, hoping to cover enough ground, enough of the curvature of the earth, to earn even one more second in his dad’s line of sight. And always, the light disappeared.
· · ·
On the starry night she met Don Pettit, Micki Racheff, a deejay with a taste for eclectic music and social engagements, was recovering from a hangover and had just begun work on a new one. She had gone from her home in Santa Fe to a house party outside of Los Alamos only because her friend wanted some company while she hunted for a new man. (The party was well-stocked with Beakers from the laboratory; for a woman with a ticking biological clock, it was the sort of gathering that almost guaranteed her imaginary offspring would sport giant frontal lobes.) Wandering into the kitchen—hoping to find just something to begin healing herself with, not a future husband—Micki spied her friend enjoying an animated conversation with a happy man and joined in. Pettit was in the middle of recalling his recent research on board the “Vomit Comet,” admitting that he had, in fact, been sick all over himself. But now having seen this pretty woman with dark eyes sidle up—and seeing, too, that she wasn’t in the mood for puke stories—he switched gears, explaining how the bubbles in her freshly poured glass of champagne would dance in zero gravity. The rest of their conversation that night was just as romantically dorky. Micki left thinking that this guy in the kitchen was funny and obviously really, really smart, but it wasn’t until they met again a couple of days later, alcohol-free, that she decided he was cute, too, smiling and stammering through his endearing brand of breathlessness.
She also liked that they were both Westerners (Micki was from Wyoming) because she believed that the Continental Divide ran through relationships, too. She had always felt that people who had seen mountains were different from people who had not. They were more limitless somehow.
Their marriage proved it. In August 1995, they made the long journey to Australia—opting, true to form, to visit its barren west rather than its urban east—and decided that it was a fine place to get hitched. Staying at a sheep ranch that took in lodgers, they mentioned to their hosts that they planned on getting married. The ranchers first explained the legalities of union Down Under; next they volunteered that their daughter had recently been married at the ranch, and they’d happily put out the same spread again. After Don and Micki drove up the coast for a spell, stopping in Monkey Mia to play with dolphins in the warm water, they returned to an unforgettable setup. About a dozen other leather-faced rancher
s had been invited and come on in from the outback; Don, who had planned on wearing shorts, was scrubbed clean and dressed up (and squeezed into polished shoes two sizes too small); the top half of the daughter’s wedding cake had been taken out of the freezer and set on a table. Under perfect skies, in the folds of rugged, almost breath-catching country, Micki Racheff became Micki Pettit, by witness of sheep and tearful strangers.
· · ·
She didn’t know it then, but Micki had signed on for a life as uncommon as her nuptials.
A couple of years after they had started dating, Don was granted his third interview to become an astronaut. Trying to feel optimistic, he flew to Houston and sat down before a stern panel. But when Micki picked him up at the airport upon his return, she could tell just by seeing him that the interview had not gone well. The candidates had each been told that they would soon receive a phone call. What they weren’t told, but what they all knew, was that if they got a phone call and heard one man’s voice, it was good news; if they got a phone call and heard another man’s voice, it was bad. Sure enough, one afternoon Pettit picked up the phone and heard the Grim Reaper’s telltale wheeze coming across the wires. Don and Micki sat quiet, heartbroken, but together. And together, they began to accept that Don would probably never make it into space. They decided to move on with their earthbound lives, Micki on the radio, Don at the lab.
Then, suddenly, just a few weeks after they came home from Australia, Don was granted another interview, his fourth. It felt like his last, best shot at his dream, and, already like astronauts, he and Micki prepared down to the smallest detail for the big event. They fought to make sure that they didn’t overlook whatever tiny thing had been holding him back, whatever it was that made him good enough to earn interviews but not a seat on the shuttle. For maybe the first time in his forty years, Don bought himself a good suit and tried his best to put himself together. Micki, looking in the mirror with him, made sure that even his socks would pass muster. Immaculate, Don boarded a plane for Houston, and Micki waited back in New Mexico for his return, never allowing herself to imagine that those anxious nights alone might make for good practice.
It was months before the phone rang again. When it finally did, in April 1996, it was someone other than the Grim Reaper calling. It was Don, calling from that cramped cottage in storm-lashed New Zealand, and here he was, telling Micki that he was about to have the chance to travel much farther away from home. They screamed and cried and laughed at each other over the Pacific. It was an unreal moment. That cute guy in the kitchen was now a full-fledged astronaut, and he and his wife would have until August to quit their current lives and head for Houston.
At the radio station, Micki announced to her friends that she would be leaving. With old images of the smoothed-over Apollo wives and their permanent smiles springing to mind, one of Micki’s friends joked that she had better pick up a pillbox hat.
Later, driving in their short convoy to Houston—Don in his junky pickup truck and Micki in her sedan—they filled the lonely hours in West Texas by talking on their CB radio, having assumed truckers’ handles for the trip. First Micki Racheff had become Micki Pettit. Now she had taken to calling herself Madam Pillbox.
But it was months before she really took the change to heart—not until Don was dipped into the Johnson Space Center’s neutral buoyancy pool, the massive tub in which apprentice astronauts enjoy their first chance to splash around in spacesuits. Micki went to watch (wearing a security pass that read ASTRONAUT DEPENDANT) and to take pictures. Don was below her feet, at the bottom of the world’s largest swimming pool, trying to regulate his breathing, weightless for the first time since he’d been sick on a plane that was falling out of the sky. That was when Micki first realized that this new life of hers was real, that she wasn’t just floating through some elaborate fantasy, a dream, or her husband’s sometimes too-fertile imagination. Suddenly she was down there at the bottom of the pool right alongside Don, trying to keep her own breathing under control. Though she kept the thought to herself, she couldn’t help thinking: Oh, shit.
She was finally an astronaut’s wife.
· · ·
The role has changed since that night when Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Aldrin, and Mrs. Collins wore red, white, and blue. Then, an astronaut’s wife had her background and credentials as closely scrutinized as her husband’s had been. NASA didn’t want any of the women saying or doing anything even remotely untoward, anything that might cause the American public to withhold a single ounce of the love and energy that had been pouring into the program. That meant that most of the wives were cut from the same (spotlessly clean, neatly arranged) cloth: they were pretty and deferential, doting mothers, and uncomplaining homemakers. (“You worry about the custard, and I’ll worry about the flying,” Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, had famously said to his wife, Susan.) Most of all, they were to make for good television. During launches, their lawns would be covered by reporters and satellite trucks; in between, they would express their pride in their husbands in feature reports and on the pages of Life magazine. They were to glow through all of it. The wives were an integral part of a giant publicity machine, the women behind the men destined to become heroes.
It was an uneasy life in a lot of respects. Their husbands were often absent and, at best, part-time fathers. Stress was a permanent fixture in their lives, most acute when their husbands were on their way to space, in space, or on their way back from space. (Most of their homes were equipped with “squawk boxes,” which relayed the chatter between the rockets and Houston, but someone from the office was usually assigned to listen along with them, so that the transmission could be disconnected in the event of trouble.) These brave women coped with fear, infidelity, loneliness, and their own pressures of performance.
Not surprisingly, the combination took its toll. Some of the wives, including Susan Borman, began drinking heavily. One of them, Pat White—the widow left behind by Ed White, killed in the Apollo 1 fire—committed suicide many years after the accident.
But for the most part, the wives were exactly what they were expected to be. They were military wives, and their children were military children. They were all too accustomed to their husbands and fathers leaving for long deployments and finding themselves in mortal danger. The families, in turn, assumed a stoicism that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the hard road to migrant California, passing by Tom Joad’s jalopy. They prepared themselves for doom, having learned to assume that one day, two men in crisp uniforms would knock on their door with white-gloved fists and tell them that there had been an accident. Even if they were lucky enough to duck firsthand grief, no doubt they had been brushed by it. Someone they knew had lost someone close to them in a fire or a wreck or a dogfight. They had probably attended the funerals, and they had probably brought over a hot chicken dinner for grieving widows and orphans, and they almost certainly had seen a flag lifted from a coffin, folded into a triangle, and handed to a stone-faced woman dressed in black.
Because almost all of the pilots who become astronauts today are still plucked from the military, their wives, too, remain what they always have been. Most of them are not the snow-white trophies of old, and most of them don’t turn a blind eye to the girls in other ports, the way they once did. But some part of them still exudes the air of widows-in-training. They are the sort of women who have grown into their hard shells. They are also private, formal, careful, pious, and sacrificial. Annie Bowersox, Ken’s wife, is built true to the prototype. She knew what she had signed on for, and she knew what was expected of her. On those rare occasions when Mr. and Mrs. Bowersox attended astronaut socials, she understood perfectly what was meant when women were asked to wear “church dresses.” She had already filled her closet with them.
But when the class of 1996—forty-four members strong, a cull so large that they were nicknamed “the sardines” because there wasn’t enough office space to fit them all—and their families received their first such
invitation, Micki Pettit was baffled. She had no idea what a “church dress” was. It wasn’t until after some whispered consultation with a few of the other wives that she discovered, to her mock horror, that a church dress was one that made a woman look like a barrel. Curves are frowned upon, and cleavage is strictly verboten. The astronaut business is a serious one, she was told—all the more so, ironically, when it is conducted on the ground. There are cliques and favorites and rituals and rites of passage, and with the sardines especially, there was a long line ahead of them to get into orbit, fraught with missteps and peril. No one wanted to stand out, at least not for the wrong reasons, and that included their wives showing too much tit.
Trouble was, no matter what Micki had on, her husband couldn’t help standing out, ignoring even his legendary classroom pronouncements on the color of rocket fuel. Since Skylab, when astronaut-scientists first began joining towheaded military fliers on missions into space, the “civilians” have been looked at as oddities and interlopers, as though they never quite fit with the program. They were cargo, and worse, they spent their precious time in space growing tiny plants and blowing bubbles (which, to NASA’s navy and air force men, was a little like obsessing over how to make perfect toast while riding the world’s greatest roller coaster). Spaceflights suddenly felt like high-school cafeterias, with the jocks and the geeks staring at one another from separate tables across the room.
