by Chris Jones
But Expedition Six knew that was so much wishful thinking. They knew that the shuttle was still a long way from returning to space—months, probably years. And even if the fleet did launch again, it would carry up with it a prohibitive failure rate. Despite the best efforts of its greatest defenders, its reputation was sealed. Of the five shuttles, two had been reduced to heartbreak. Expedition Six weren’t in any rush to hitch a ride back to earth on what might prove to be the third.
· · ·
Instead, they spent their time busily turning their desert island into more of a paradise than a prison. Together, they rededicated themselves to making station into a sanctuary, and to figuring out how they might stay hidden away for a long time in it.
They began to experiment mostly on their own bodies, which still, despite decades of advances in weightless exercise and psychological support and their own pure will, represented the greatest single constraint to interplanetary travel. We are well on our way to building the machines that will carry us to Mars and beyond; we just have to find a way to help our fussy, fragile bodies catch up.
Muscle atrophy and bone decay remain the biggest concerns, the loss of the strength that rising out of bed every morning gives us. But long-duration flight presents more subtle dilemmas, too: the long-term effects of carrying too much blood in the head and chest; the rampant growth of kidney stones; nausea; a loss of hand-eye coordination; trouble sleeping and fatigue; and the development of a host of immune system deficiencies evident upon an astronaut’s return to earth, a consequence of so long spent in a germless bubble. There are also the psychological problems that can surface over such a long time away: deep feelings of loneliness and depression (such as those John Blaha experienced on Mir), irritability and moodiness (evidenced by the Skylab mutiny), and even a brand of acute paranoia, the sort of sweaty claustrophobia that science-fiction films have made into a virtual cliché.
The mysterious case of Salyut 5 is the classic example. Having been left empty for two weeks, the capsule was occupied by a pair of highly trained cosmonauts, Boris Volynov and Vitaly Zholobov. It was expected that they would remain in orbit until they broke the Soviet space endurance record. But after just seven weeks in space, they were called back down to earth and hustled out of view. It was never made public at the time, but now it appears that the crew began to break down in the isolation. It started with minor quarrels between them and the ground, escalating into a series of complaints over several unverifiable plagues. The final straw was their repeated bawling over an inescapable, acrid odor in the crew quarters, the source of which could never be found and which could never be fixed. It was also never a problem again.
Home and away, there are countless links between physical woes and psychological troubles, but space seems to be a particularly holistic environment. There have been frequent cases of the mind following the body down a slippery slope, astronauts and cosmonauts having been driven nearly insane by complaints of heart murmurs and shortness of breath, ailments that disappear as soon as they’re back on the ground.
So, like foundation inspectors trying to ferret out the rot, flight surgeons and medical technicians have used the International Space Station’s crews as subjects in a grand experiment, dedicated to improving the physical and mental well-being of long-duration astronauts, in the hopes that one day the men will learn how to keep themselves as fit as their machines. They are so heavily monitored that they can feel as though they’re on the slab and about to have their ribs cracked open, living subjects for an autopsy.
All three members of Expedition Six were dissected, but in some ways, Ken Bowersox was their principal cadaver. In tremendous physical shape from his years of military service—he has been a dedicated jogger since his days at Annapolis—he was an ideal candidate for learning how best to keep the human body from failing. Whatever physical functions could be tested and tracked (his heart rate, his lung capacity, his blood composition, his reflexes) were held up to the light throughout his months in space. But for most of his journey, the focus remained on the fundamentals of his architecture, the root of just about every collapse in the history of manned space flight, muscles and bones.
As recently as Mir, it was found that some cosmonauts—some of the strongest, fittest men in Russia—lost bone mineral ten times faster than do postmenopausal women. Although it’s hard to imagine, bones, like coral, look rock solid but are, in fact, dynamic. They are in their own way elastic, growing and shrinking depending on the forces applied to them. Weightlessness disrupts the balance because, suddenly, an astronaut’s skeleton has virtually no pressure applied against it. Like the biceps of a bodybuilder who stops lifting weights, the bones quickly begin wasting away—the great fear always having been that they will become so brittle, they will prevent an astronaut from returning to gravity’s crush.
Before he was launched into space, Bowersox’s bones, as well as those of the rest of the crew, were measured in every conceivable way, over several days, to determine how the loads on them changed over the course of their usual routines. Once on station, Bowersox was again monitored, with particular attention paid to his legs. Every so often, he slipped into what the flight surgeons called a “lower-extremity monitoring suit.” Really, it looked like a pair of black tights with sensors at Bowersox’s hips, knees, and ankles. He also put insoles into his running shoes and hooked himself up to a portable computer that recorded the data.
Not surprisingly, it was found that a day in his new, weightless life had fewer burdens than the ones he carried on earth. Even when he pushed himself as hard as he could on the treadmill or pulled a hundred squats in the Node, the force was nothing like what he’d reach during his evening jogs in Houston. It was as though he were running on air, leaving technicians on the ground with the hard knowledge that they still had work to do. If they were going to make Mars possible, they needed to invent new and better exercise machines and programs for the astronauts to follow. Otherwise, over the months and even years, the men and women who had been sent away might risk coming back in pieces.
Except that Bowersox never started fading away. Neither, to any great extent, did Don Pettit. Their bodies disobeyed not only math but also physics and logic.
Because they didn’t know how long they might remain in space, each of them spent at least two hours a day exercising, sometimes at fiendish paces—but the numbers that were being fed to the ground indicated that no matter how much they exercised, it probably was never going to be enough.
Instead, every part of Bowersox, especially, remained fit, and in some cases fitter than he had been at home. Against all reason, it appeared that when he finally returned to earth, he would hit the ground running.
For all the head-scratching by the flight surgeons back in Houston, it soon became clear that there was only one possible explanation. Maybe the body didn’t lead the mind after all, or at least not always. Maybe it was the mind that led the body. And because the men of Expedition Six were bent on being as happy together in space as they could imagine being on the ground, their bodies had been fortified along with their spirits. Never mind the readouts from the sensors strapped to their legs and the physics of breakdown. Maybe it was simpler than that. Just maybe, because they were having the best time of their lives, they were in the best shape of their lives, too.
· · ·
In a way that they never had on earth—its landfills jammed with cheap electronics, junked cars, and the latest and greatest in entirely disposable crap—the men of Expedition Six began to feel that everything, starting with their bodies on up, could be built to last. They looked at their small, self-contained universe as a kind of refuge from our throwaway culture. In a place where even the heat of their breath was put to good use, they came not only to accept conservation as a way of life but also to take pride and pleasure in it. They became environmentalists in the truest sense of the word, hyper-aware and vigilant in their housekeeping. Without room to sprawl, they won an intimacy with their su
rroundings greater than they had ever known down there, especially in a big city like Houston, especially in a big state like Texas.
One afternoon Pettit glanced at his NASA-issued wristwatch and saw, to his chagrin, that it had broken. Designed to withstand the rigors of space, it had packed it in all the same, just like everything else, shedding a button that had now become a miniature satellite. Budarin’s also fell apart.
Two weeks later, Pettit found the button for his, wedged tight in a ventilator that he was cleaning. He looked at the button, and he looked at the watch, his mind having picked up on the ticking where the watch had left off.
Like Picasso going through his Blue period, Pettit had once been obsessed with clocks. He had filled days by pulling timepieces apart and putting them back together, falling very much in love with these tiny, complex engines. Although the books and manuals sent up from the ground advised that such intricate repairs were impossible to make in space, Pettit twisted the button between two of his fingers, its chrome finish shining under the light, and decided that it was in him—it was in the new and improved him—to find a way to bring life back to his watch.
He cleared himself a workspace and gathered up the tools that he thought he might need: pliers, a set of small screwdrivers, a flashlight. He had already affixed a loop of white Velcro to each of them, and now he laid out a larger sheet of Velcro on the table, a makeshift toolbox. He also stretched out some pieces of double-sided tape.
With the cameras rolling, first he undid each of the nine tiny screws that bolted down his watch’s smooth metal back. When each screw floated loose, spinning through the air, he pinched it between his fingers and carefully stuck it to the tape. Then he popped off the back of his watch and pulled apart its insides, adding each successive component to his gummy collection of bits and pieces. Finally, he was able to return the lost button to its place, screwing it in tight. With it repaired, he put the rest of the watch back together, finishing the job by driving back in those nine tiny screws. It was, by any measure, a graceful and methodical operation, and he was proud of it. When he was finished, he held up his watch, as good as new, for the camera.
It wasn’t just for show, however. It wasn’t idle boasting. In his repaired watch Pettit saw a message, one that he had long wanted to send to the ground, to those fear-mongering technicians in Mission Control who had put more emphasis on the second word than the first. The men and women of the International Space Station, Pettit now told them in his own gentle way, were not tourists, and they were not ballast. They were mechanics and magicians and inventors, and all they had ever wanted was the chance to show it.
Now that his balky watch had given him that chance, Pettit was emboldened. Suddenly he felt as though he could fix the Gaza Strip, or at the very least a certain Microgravity Glovebox still sitting unused in Destiny. Maybe the ground had been wrong about it—and wrong about him—for all of this time, each of them needing only to be at opposite ends of a healing touch.
· · ·
Pettit finally won permission to crack the box open like a safe, and almost immediately, he found a hint that would help him learn what ailed it: a green LED light on one of the power supplies was glowing more dimly than it should have been.
In the Microgravity Glovebox, there were two different power supplies bolted side by side, one putting out twelve volts, the other five. It was the twelve-volt supply that sported the too-faint light. After opening some circuit breakers, Pettit decided that, in fact, the twelve-volt supply was straight-up dead; whatever juice it seemed to be putting out was nothing more than bleed-over from the five-volt supply. The box’s European technicians had thought only that the supply was diminished, not dead, and they agreed to send up a new unit.
Pettit installed the shining artificial heart and fired up the machine. It looked on the verge of working when suddenly it wheezed to a halt, as though one of its circuits had shorted out.
There were twenty connectors inside the new power supply. After some protracted consultation, the ground and Pettit agreed that he would disconnect them and begin an almost cruel, tedious process. He would connect each of them back up, but one at a time, run the Microgravity Glovebox for three or four hours, and see if he could find which one of them was faulty. With interruptions and a few much-needed breaks factored in, it took Pettit nearly three weeks to run through each connector. And in the end, none of them betrayed a short.
Now staring hard at this infernal machine, Pettit threw away his thinking cap and resolved to take a Fonzie-and-the-jukebox stab at it. He hooked the twenty connectors back up, gave the Microgravity Glovebox a gentle caress (it might have been a hard slap), crossed his fingers, and turned it on.
Lo and behold, it worked perfectly, and it worked perfectly in the days after, and it’s working perfectly today—and some of our brightest minds are still shaking their big, oval heads about the entire episode. They’ve never been satisfied with Pettit’s official diagnosis of “gremlins,” but perhaps he knew better how the universe operates.
Either way, he had won for himself a brand-new toy.
And space had added to its collection of secrets.
· · ·
Of the three men, Budarin grew the most in tune with the mysteries of the Milky Way. His previous long-duration missions had made him the most adaptable to the station’s many quirks, and he had the most magic up his sleeve when it came down to solving the many problems of living in space. Bowersox and Pettit often found themselves watching their Russian friend go about his business, taking mental notes, learning by osmosis from his experience. (Given their checkered history, perhaps it’s not surprising that Russians and Americans, even chummy ones, are still in the habit of spying on each other.)
The Americans were particularly struck by Budarin’s mastery of zero gravity. He seemed downright comfortable in a permanent state of freefall, even more graceful and gentle-seeming than he was on earth. While Bowersox and Pettit still occasionally fought with weightlessness, it was clear to them that Budarin had given himself over to it. He had stopped trying to dig in his heels.
Whenever work needed to be done behind one of the International Space Station’s countless panels—most of the walls are built in sections that can be lifted away to reveal machinery or stores—Bowersox and Pettit dreaded moving the running shoes, notepads, and tools that had been pinned to their fronts. They painstakingly shifted the stowaways from one panel to another, careful to strap each object down lest it take flight (and aim) at something important. After they had removed the first panel, finished their work behind it, and snapped it back into place, they returned the clutter to its former hideouts, piece by piece.
Budarin, however, took no such care. He removed the debris, but he didn’t bother finding another place to stow it, nor did he strap it down. He knew that in weightlessness, each bauble—so long as he was careful not to give it any momentum—would hang in the air around him, as though waiting on an invisible shelf. By Pettit’s eye, every time Budarin went to work behind a panel, it was as though he had immersed himself in a life-size game of Tetris, the puzzle pieces falling out of the ether and into his hands when he was ready for them, waiting for him to put them back in their rightful place.
Soon Bowersox and Pettit followed more and more of Budarin’s unspoken lead, and not just in how he worked.
From his first days on station, the Russian had the peculiar habit of taking his allotted breakfast packet of strawberries (or the always delightful berry medley), filling it with water, and leaving it under a strap on the galley table until sometime after dinner, when he ate it like dessert. The Americans watched this routine with growing fascination—Bowersox and Pettit always ate their crunchy fruit when their menu told them to—until they finally asked Budarin why he waited for his helping to turn into a warm mush. It wasn’t until Budarin offered a sample of his creation that Bowersox and Pettit understood. Somehow, the water and the waiting brought out the flavor in the berries, and their soft consi
stency made them all the more delicious. Budarin had learned that much on Mir.
From then on, there were always three packets of berries soaking in water on the galley table from morning until night, when Expedition Six gathered and raced through their dinners to get to their desserts. And each time they did, Bowersox and Pettit paid silent thanks to Budarin’s shared wisdom, another lesson learned, another trick revealed.
· · ·
Some of the tricks were less pleasant to perform than others. After brushing their teeth, for instance, the men couldn’t spit out their toothpaste into a sink. Instead, they had to swallow it, gagging on the glamour of life as an astronaut.
Even something as mundane as laundry turned into an adventure in ingenuity, because for as long as men have looked to the heavens, how to do the wash has ranked alongside dark matter in the order of galactic mysteries. It was Bowersox who faced down the challenge the most, not because he was particularly dirty but because he had one favorite pair of blue shorts that he pulled on nearly every morning. (He had lifted them from the shuttle, which had much more comfortable shorts in its supply chest than station did.) On those mornings when he woke up and went to pull them on and decided that they would be able to stand up on their own (and not just because of the weightlessness), he headed to Zarya and began a long, tiresome process that he had invented from scratch, satisfying only in its results.
He squeezed condensate—a small amount of the water that had been pulled out of the air—from its container and into a large plastic bag, added a little bit of bar soap, and then pushed his shorts into it. With his hand, he mixed them together, working away until the shorts had absorbed most of the soap and water. He then took the shorts out of the bag, turned them inside out, and using a fluffy white Russian towel—the Russians had come up with a towel that was nicely absorbent and yet didn’t leave too much lint behind, the sort of impossible dream that had kept Skylab’s crews raging—he patted them down, looking, whenever he lost his footing, like a man trying to wrestle down two flags in the wind. After a thorough rubbing with the large towel, extracting the bulk of the water and soap from his shorts, he then dug out a smaller striped towel that was reserved for a second dry cycle and wrestled some more.
