by Chris Jones
Keeping up his crew’s morale became the principal mission for Bowersox. He saw the International Space Station as a big, beautiful ship, and as its commander, he felt that his primary responsibility was to keep it afloat—not only by keeping it in orbit but by keeping it buoyant. More than anything else, he wanted Expedition Six to be remembered for its harmony, for helping to prove that it’s possible for three entirely different people to live together in a tin can, under stress, and still get along like old friends.
They had been told by station veterans that their first month would be the easiest, when they would be mindful of one another’s feelings and opinions, like the early days of a marriage. Then, rising to the surface like driftwood, their true selves would come out, once they were homesick enough and tired enough and bored enough for their tempers to boil over. But Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had found the opposite was true. With each day that dawned between them and Columbia, they became only more comfortable with one another and their shared predicament. Station grew only more into home.
They came to appreciate how their days unfolded exactly as they wanted them to. They liked never having to alter their routine to make room for someone else in it. They were never caught in traffic or in the rain, bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the subway, tied to a desk for hours each day. They never caught colds. They never had to keep appointments or cut the grass. They were never rushed. They were never late.
They also came to trust one another in ways that they had never known before, the sort of unspoken trust that comes only with the knowledge that from here on in, they were on their own. Once they had found that, just about everything else fell into its one best place. Their lives were a strange, unnatural kind of perfect, almost cloudlike. Every day but one had begun with the first of sixteen dawns and the promise of peace.
In the days after disaster, the men resolved to find peace once again.
The healing really began when Expedition Six held their first audience with reporters on the ground. They were asked how they had made it along since they had learned of the loss.
A soft-spoken Ken Bowersox answered for the group: “Well, the folks on the ground have been real good about reducing our schedule, and we’ve had time to grieve our friends,” he said. “That was very important. When you’re up here this long, you can’t just bottle up your emotions and focus all the time. I mean, it’s important for us to acknowledge that the people on STS-107 were our friends, that we had a connection with them, and that we feel their loss. After the memorial service … it was very, very quiet on board the International Space Station. But now it’s time to move forward, and we’re doing that slowly. This press conference today is a huge step in helping us move along.”
What Bowersox didn’t say, but what the three men had learned, mostly on their own, was that there was some power in space that had intensified their emotions, the good and the bad equally. Whether it was the luxury of the time that they had to look inside themselves, whether it was the lumps that caught in their throats almost every time they passed by a window, whether it was a manifestation of their extraordinary loneliness, they didn’t know. But they were surprised by how long it had taken them to stop their flow of tears. They were professional astronauts, and they had jobs to do, and they had trained for years for every contingency, including bad news from the ground. And yet their eyes had filled over and over again with great pools of water that wouldn’t fall, and it had seemed for a long time as though nothing would break the sadness, as unshakable as the silence inside station.
Slowly, though, starting with that press conference, they began coming out of it, their collective funk lifting like a fog. No matter how forgiving Mission Control was, they were, ultimately, helped along by having so much work to do. They also took breaks to listen to music with happy memories in it, and they distracted one another with stories and questions, and they savored every consoling phone call from home. But they were helped most by the universe. As low as it had sunk them, now it began lifting them back up, on their way to heights that those of us who have spent our lives grounded can scarcely begin to imagine. Looking down on earth had never made them feel insignificant or small. Always, it had made them feel as though they were standing on the shoulders of giants, and now they started to make their way back up to their lookouts again.
· · ·
It hadn’t hurt that a loaded-down Progress soon arrived, stuffed full with manna from Heaven on earth. Expedition Six gathered around the hatch, like children surrounding the tree on Christmas morning, and together they opened it up.
Living in a place that could smell like an auto body shop, like so much metal and grease and sweat, they were nearly dumbstruck by the sweet aroma of fresh fruit. The Russian support crew had topped their shipment with oranges, apples, and lemons, and that bushel was the first beautiful goodness that Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit laid their eyes on. They grabbed for ripe citrus and held it close to their faces, breathing it in, a wide-smiling Bowersox and Pettit posing for photographs, having turned their oranges into clown noses.
Beneath the fruit, there was literally a ton of food, hardware, batteries, water, replacement parts, and gear for new experiments. There were also care packages from Houston and Moscow, bundles of gifts put together largely by their families. There were notes, cards, and artwork from their wives and children. There were home movies, their young boys splashing in swimming pools. There were candy bars and good, dark chocolate. For Bowersox, there was a tube of garlic paste. For Pettit, there were some books, including one filled with his favorite poems by Robert Service.
That night, tucked away in his sleeping bag, he leafed through it by a thin light. He had read each of the poems before, but now, after what he had been through and given where he was, they took on a new meaning for him. He was especially struck by one titled “The Men That Don’t Fit In.” One stanza starts:
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
In that, and in the rest of it, Pettit saw much of himself, all the more so having spent the day unloading Progress.
For Expedition Six, their first job after Columbia proved to be a therapeutic exercise as well as a transformative one. With every bag and bundle from their old world that they had floated from the ship and into their station, they found more room for the truth of their new lives to sink in. It was as though a raft had washed up on the shores of their desert island, and they saw everything they had won and lost in all that it had carried. And when they were finished with it, and after they had pushed it back out to sea empty—as though they had made the choice to stay on their island rather than try to pole their way home—they said goodbye to what they had been before its arrival. In some strange way, Columbia had started their rebirth, and now Progress had finished it. They were changed men.
· · ·
But with morning came a starker realization. As happy as they were for their new supplies—if they were careful, they agreed, they might be able to stretch out their food and water until June—the full galley and drink bottles reminded them that they could just as easily be emptied.
From station’s earliest days, the shuttle was its principal barge—ferrying not just its modules and parts, but also everything else that its crews needed to survive. Even stuffed to the hatch, Progress couldn’t carry a quarter of the supplies that a single shuttle could haul. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit didn’t need an abacus to do the predictive math. For as long as the shuttle fleet was grounded, each of the three men was going to need to live gently, and even then, Progress couldn’t be relied on to keep them fed and watered indefinitely. They weren’t yet on a convict’s rations, but there would be no more holiday feasts, and for Pettit, there would be days without coffee. Their daily lives would need watering down, if only there was water to spare.
T
hey also had to hope, more than ever before, that nothing went wrong with their ship. If a sizable part broke down and needed to be sent up in the next Progress, there would be less room devoted to their own needs. As much as they had come to love their new home, they feared that they might one day have to fight with it for the ground’s attention, and in that respect, their collective fates had just been tied to their machine in more ways than one.
· · ·
Overnight Expedition Six had become the second kind of science in space. The first is programmatic science—those studies that have been planned sometimes for years, experiments in fluid dynamics or crystal growth or protein production. The second, what Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had become, is fluke science, the science of accident.
None of them was a stranger to it. But now Pettit, in particular, distracted himself by opening random doors in the hallways of his imagination. He no longer confined his experiments to Destiny or to the racks of rudimentary physics and chemistry. He began to look at the entire station as his once-in-a-lifetime laboratory, and everything in it as an object of curiosity. Everything, he decided, had secrets to share.
Solving water became one of his principal riddles. He had stumbled upon his interest in fluid dynamics in weightlessness innocently enough after he grew tired of drinking everything through a straw. First, he began squeezing out shimmering spheres of coffee into the air, where they’d wait for him to swoop in and collect them in his mouth. Soon, though, he realized that he could play his own version of catch and release, pinching the spheres between his chopsticks and popping them down his gullet, where they would splash against the back of his throat like water balloons. For a long time after, he ate his drinks—one more thing that he did because he could do it up here, and he couldn’t down there.
But, as it usually did for Pettit, the play turned into questions, which yielded to the hunt for answers. Although the three men kept up with most of the programmatic science they had been assigned—Budarin the mushroom picker especially liked tending the green pea plants—Pettit found the time for his own brand of research. He pinned up a backdrop comprised of a white towel laid against a dark blue shirt, set up his video camera, and filmed himself turning water into art.
Early on, he created thin films by slipping a wire hoop into a bag filled with water, like those plastic rings with which children blow bubbles. The result was an intricate little window only three hundred microns thick; in essence, he had made water into a two-dimensional object. He could blow on the films and shake them and bounce them and see what they did in response, but that carried his interest only so far. He began injecting food coloring into the water or mica flakes or salt crystals. They would dance in beautiful, unexpected patterns whenever he stirred them with a syringe or heated the water or shone a flashlight on it. After he grew a little braver, he punched his hot soldering iron through the windows, and the water sizzled and bubbled but never lost its shape, throwing off steam and tiny, boiling droplets in every direction. In station, he could use the same ingredients to make coffee or fireworks. Suddenly the possibilities seemed limitless.
Soon he graduated to great spheres of water the size of soccer balls, anchored by the same wire hoops. If he blew on them, gorgeous wave patterns crossed them, swinging back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. If he tossed an Alka-Seltzer tablet into them, they frothed and danced into a white globe that would eventually explode itself into a thousand droplets. (He discovered that if he began to spin it before it self-destructed, however, the bubbles were confined to the center of the sphere, forming a perfect white axis.) And if he used his syringe to make an air bubble inside the sphere and then filled that pocket with droplets of water, they created what he called his “symphony of spheres.” Taken together, they looked a little like rain falling inside itself, until the larger sphere gobbled up the smaller ones, winning some mysterious battle between mass and velocity.
There was a fundamental beauty in each of these tricks. For Pettit, that was reason enough to perform them. But at night, tucked away with his computer, he would watch his day’s work in slow-motion and wonder what made his inventions do the beautiful things that they did. He knew that there was science locked away inside his art, some practical application just waiting to be lifted out of the water. Somewhere in the middle of his symphonies were the answers to thunderstorms and interplanetary physics, the sorts of eurekas that keep men like him up for days at a time, frantic.
He didn’t stop there—he couldn’t. He made centrifuges out of old shampoo bottles, watching their contents collect around the sides, leaving a perfect, circular void in the middle. He set up a metal platform and threw bolts at it, at different velocities and rates of rotation, trying to predict how they would bounce back and almost always finding that they disobeyed him. And he filmed himself spinning just about everything he could lay his hands on—books (including Understanding Engineering Thermo by his old professor, Dr. Octave Levenspiel), empty eggshells, camera lenses, water bottles—just to show that in space, everything charted its own course. Everything followed its own orbit through the universe.
· · ·
For all three members of Expedition Six, it was the travels of light that they liked watching the most. On earth, light had seemed a simple mechanism: when the sun was out, it was there, and after dark, it was not. But from the vantage of space, through their breath-fogged windows, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit saw light do so much more than flick itself on and off. They saw it dance and swirl, change color, and turn into liquid, smoke, and sometimes a mirror. For them, light became a changeling.
They especially enjoyed its company at dusk. Pettit could break down the physics of twilight and explain why they were seeing what they were seeing, but for once, the why of it didn’t matter, even to him.
When the night wrapped its way around the earth, its leading edge looked not so much like a clean, defined band, but more like rolling surf. Expedition Six could see thick, curling waves flooding out the remains of the day—mostly green, but sometimes red, and depending on the phases of the moon and the cloud patterns that they covered up, some blue and a hint of yellow might be mixed in just for gasps. It looked as though the sunset was guided by the tides rather than the other way around.
Minutes later, the view became even better. After night had made its full pass, it left airglow in its wake. Through the window, the earth’s true horizon curved in the distance, smooth and jet-black; above it, the atmosphere remained lit up somehow, by a kind of thinly spread twinkle. That milky layer had something to do with atomic oxygen and its reaction to the billions of solar particles raining down on it, but the men of Expedition Six forgot all about that when they put on their headphones, waited for the strings to come in, and watched stars shine through the earth’s own light.
And still there was more, especially whenever station passed over Canada. That’s when they saw aurora borealis, the northern lights, rising high over the Arctic, swirling around the magnetic north pole like a multihued hurricane. It changed its shape and its color with every pass, sometimes looking as dense and foreboding as thunderheads, sometimes looking as delicate as breath that had frozen in the cold. There were nights when it looked as though it might produce its own soundtrack, when, if only they could crack open their windows, Expedition Six might hear the light howl.
During blessed orbits like that, the men forgave themselves for feeling teary and sentimental, as though they were listening to wedding speeches or a few hundred cellos rise up at once. Moments like those—when it seemed as though the earth and its wonder was there for them and for them alone—made them never want to come down.
· · ·
But the moments in between had little room left for dreaming. They were filled instead with the sort of reality that feels cold and unforgiving, as grimly opportunistic as termites. It would wait to confront them until they were quiet and alone and their window was out of their reach. It knew when their minds were ripe for invasion.
/>
It attacked most often after the ground had delivered the latest findings in the Columbia investigation. Each snippet of news brought back another somber recollection or planted a new seed of dread. The bad feeling reached its zenith when Bowersox and Pettit woke up to find that a short length of film had been uplinked to their computers. The footage was grainy and blurred by heat shimmer, but slowed down enough, it captured what looked like a piece of insulating foam breaking off Columbia’s external tank during its liftoff and striking the underside of its wing. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything.
The men of Expedition Six watched the sequence until they had committed every frame to memory. It became their version of the Zapruder film—and like those who had turned away when Kennedy’s head had snapped back, Bowersox and Pettit always shuddered at the moment of impact.
Foam had often fallen from the tank (during Expedition Six’s own launch, fragments had peppered Endeavour’s belly hard enough to crack its heat-resistant ceramic tiles), but it had never wielded the heft to damage the shuttle fatally. Now, although there were still engineers and technicians within NASA who continued to dismiss the theory, it looked more and more plausible. It was finally confirmed when a piece of foam was fired out of a gun at a reinforced carbon-carbon panel, replicating the collision, and it made like a cannonball. Looking at that entrance wound gave every astronaut the feeling that they had cheated death only because the aim of their own lost foam had been less true. It was as though they had each been lucky enough to duck bullets, but their friends had not.
For the men on station, having survived the trip up and having yet to make the trip down, the realization left them swallowing a hot, sick feeling. They suffered from the sweats that follow catastrophe averted, the closest of calls. Perhaps sensing their discomfort, the ground told them not to worry, the foam problem would soon be fixed, the shuttles would return to flight, and before they knew it, a crack crew would be knocking on their door, ready to bring them home.
