by Chris Jones
Next came the rinse cycle, which required swishing his shorts and some clean condensate in the same large plastic bag. Finally, he strapped the shorts and the towels to the bulkhead for a long session of air-drying, leaving them looking like flags once again. In about three hours, the water they held had turned back into condensate and been recycled again, perhaps this time not made into tea but into fresh oxygen or a sponge bath.
One storied evening, after Bowersox had spent a good part of his day doing laundry, he arrived at the dinner table proud of his clean pair of blue shorts. Pettit was already in the galley, and, as usual, he was already playing with his food. On this particular occasion, he had squeezed out a huge ball of orange juice and now was blowing on it, seeing what new waves he could create, watching how it reacted to life on station. Even after Bowersox had finished preparing his food and strapped himself down to eat, Pettit was still at play. He filled up his lungs and gave the bubble of juice a good, strong push—too strong, it turned out. The juice rocketed across the galley, taking dead aim at Bowersox, who until then had been happily munching away. He saw the bubble at the last second, filled with liquid menace, bearing down on him like a meteor, but he had time only to raise his hands. When its surface reached his, it exploded, grabbing hold of him wherever it could find an opening. Most of it took root in his shorts; a few wayward drops splashed into his eye. Bowersox unleashed a bloodcurdling scream, grabbing his face as though someone had thrown acid into it. Pettit, frantic, apologetic, and scooting over with a towel, asked Bowersox where it hurt the most.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, Sox. Is it your eye? Is it your eye?” Pettit said, reaching out to dab at Bowersox’s face.
“No!” Bowersox cried, wincing in what was now looking a little more like mock anguish. “My shorts! My beautiful shorts!”
· · ·
The story of the orange-juice bomb passed quickly through the ranks at Mission Control, where ears were always open for something to break the tedium of watching station on its endless flight around the earth.
Their ears were sometimes too open for Expedition Six’s liking. During one particular Internet chat session with elementary-school students, a child asked Bowersox what it felt like to be weightless. Bowersox had thought for a moment, fumbling for a good analogy, until he settled on Peter Pan. He didn’t have wings, and he didn’t have to put on a jetpack, but he was still able to fly. He just had to believe, and he could jump as high as he wanted to.
The next morning, Bowersox woke up, turned on his computer, and saw that some photos had been e-mailed to him. He realized his previous day’s mistake as soon as he had opened the first one: his smiling face had been Photoshopped time and again onto Peter Pan’s lithe, tights-clad body. The navy man and decorated astronaut had been turned, just like that, into a prancing fairy.
But even a blushing Bowersox had to admit there was some truth in the illusion. In ways that were harder to measure and impossible to quantify, the three men thriving on station continued to make departures from the three men who had ducked through its hatch three months earlier. Even they couldn’t put a finger on what it was about them that was different. They weren’t the sorts of things that could be seen in a mirror or charted by a machine, and they weren’t as dramatic as the shift that had taken place following the loss of Columbia and the arrival of Progress. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were in the middle of a more subtle metamorphosis, a change in just a few of the million little pieces that each was made of. And yet those changes were enough to make everything else in them jangle, as though parts of them no longer fit.
For Bowersox, he felt it most acutely in his dreams. For as long as he could remember—maybe even back to the time before John Glenn opened his eyes to the universe—he had dreamed he was able to fly. He had never really thought about it, but for all his life, he knew that if he flapped his arms hard enough, he would lift up off the ground and glide over rooftops. It was in him and he went with it.
Now that had changed. Nestled against his wall of water in Unity, Bowersox still dreamed of the people and places he had always dreamed about. Even in space, he dreamed of his old self, grounded, walking along beaches or driving through the desert. But now, whenever he wanted to fly, he didn’t have to flap his arms anymore. He needed only to pull off the road and onto the shoulder, climb out of his car and give a little kick, and he could fly over mountaintops and look down on skyscrapers. In his dreams, as in his new life, he really was Peter Pan. He was forever weightless.
· · ·
Awake, Bowersox continued to feel just as unburdened, riding a euphoria that might have been hard to predict from the ground. Although the American space program has traditionally paid little attention to the psychological health of its astronauts in space—and most astronauts have been reluctant to discuss any problems they might have had in orbit, lest it harm their prospects for future assignments—there is strong evidence that spending a long time in space can make people crackers. Weeks and months of interrupted sleep, sensory deprivation, isolation, confinement, latent danger, poor hygiene, lousy food, chronic noise and vibration, and close, permanent contact with fellow crew members … Not surprisingly, that wretched mix has proved fertile ground for a host of disorders to take root. While the vast majority of astronauts and cosmonauts repel complete psychological breakdown, many have suffered from fatigue, nervousness, weakness, anger, and memory and motor hiccups. In addition to the innate power of space to push emotions toward the margins of acceptability, it also tends to bring out the worst in its inhabitants. More often than not, space will expose cracks that are invisible on the ground. It can see through masks and bravado.
But in his isolation, Bowersox—as well as Budarin and Pettit—found tranquillity. His loneliness became his salvation. He had spent his entire life busy, going somewhere, working toward something, jogging or hustling or flying faster than the speed of sound. And through all of it, he had been beholden to others and to outside forces, to teachers, superior officers, ocean currents, marching orders, his wife and his children, aerodynamics, the gas left in the tank. He was a man who had done nearly everything he had wanted for himself, and in that, he was better off than billions of the rest of us, but every step of the way, there had always been another test to pass, another standard to meet. There had always been another obligation. It was as though a life even as extraordinary as his had seen a governor strapped to it, tying him into the machinery of life on earth: complex, unyielding, and not without its rhythm; yet keeping that beat always seems to come at the cost of some measure of self. To reach the next in his long string of goals, Bowersox had sometimes felt as though he had become less of his own man.
Now, despite being confined to a single light in the sky, he was as independent as a drifter, an aimless kind of free. He continued to bear responsibilities—to Expedition Six, to the International Space Station, to NASA, and to his family—but now they were remote, more abstract. In some ways, he felt like a married bachelor: he had the comfort of union and the knowledge that his wife was waiting for him but none of the compromise that comes with the day-to-day reality of a shared life. He knew freedom without the longing for anchor, routine without the misery of drudgery.
Every time he talked to someone on the ground or answered e-mails from students or conducted a press conference from space, Bowersox was inevitably asked how he coped with the disconnect: Did he miss earth? And no matter the noun at the heart of the question—no matter the place, people, or thing dangled in front of him—always, he answered with some version of no. He didn’t allow himself to submit to cravings. He didn’t dream of apple pie and ice cream, the sorts of desires that have driven snowbound polar explorers blind with yearning. And in the same way, for the first time in his life, he resisted submitting himself to the whims and demands of other people. He never wanted to be put in better touch with the realities of his former existence. If anything, he felt as though he and the other members of Expedition Six remained to
o linked with it, that there were too many ways for them to talk to earth and for earth to talk to them. He sometimes wished that he could turn off the radio and shut down the Internet phone and erase every e-mail, because part of him wanted to be even more alone than he was. (He and Pettit certainly stopped paying attention to the Columbia investigation, because nothing good could come out of it for them.) That same part of him wanted to make a sharper divide between the best parts of lonely and the worst parts of company. For as long as he stayed on station, he could be his true, original self. In space, Ken Bowersox was entirely his own man, and he liked the feeling very much.
· · ·
So, too, did Pettit and Budarin. For them, the idea of going home had made its own slow turn, gone from feeling like the end of time served to more like the end of summer camp or the last days of vacation. Even with the stress of their now open-ended mission and their dwindling coffee supply, they still felt as though they had remained a crew in the best sense. Their feeling of family deepened, became more defined. Bowersox was the firstborn brother. He was reason and responsibility. Pettit was the wide-eyed kid who loved eating his drinks with chopsticks. Budarin was the weird uncle from Russia.
And yet, somehow, it worked.
Inevitably, though, the time came for them to have it out. They never came close to dropping gloves, but try as Bowersox might to hold everything together, it was impossible for the three of them to make it through all of these weeks and months without disagreement.
The trouble started when Bowersox and Pettit began imagining the conversations that were taking place back in Houston, probably behind closed doors and probably in whispers. They knew that as much as things hadn’t looked to have changed on station, there were new plans being made, new futures being drawn up. Things couldn’t stay the way they were forever.
During their shared daydreaming, either Bowersox or Pettit—neither can remember which of them—raised the specter that one of them would be asked to stay in space while the other would be replaced by an incoming cosmonaut flown up on a Russian rocket. That rocket, in turn, would deliver the replaced man home. They took to calling this scenario the Avdeyev Option, after Sergei Avdeyev, a Russian cosmonaut who, like Sergei Krikalev, had also endured an unexpectedly long mission: he survived 379 consecutive days aboard clammy Mir. Though the single switch-out was unlikely, Bowersox and Pettit made the silent determination that it was not an impossibility. In fact, the more they thought about it, the more they thought it was about to happen. And the more real the possibility seemed, the more they began to talk about—and, eventually, come close to arguing about—which one of them would be picked to go home.
The problem wasn’t that the earth was calling out loudly to them, or that they had grown tired of sleeping as though from a hook, or that they were hungry for something that wasn’t born of a lab, or that they feared what would remain of their bodies and minds after so much time in space.
The problem was, both of them wanted to stay.
· · ·
As the days passed, however, Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin were sometimes alarmed at how much they felt themselves continue to evolve. Change started to feel like decay. Not in any of the expected ways—Expedition Six were on their way to proving that, physically at least, men can last long enough to make it to Mars—but not confined to their dreams alone, either. They could feel, in their souls, the wearing away of the calluses that life on earth had given them. It was as though their skin had been stripped off and replaced with a fresh pink layer.
One night, Expedition Six finally decided to watch a movie. Even though there is a healthy selection of DVDs on station, smuggled over time, the men had resisted the urge to fire one up. They had always told themselves that something better was being projected on the big screen outside. But even sunrises and sunsets can get old after a few thousand ups and downs and, frankly, their to-do list imaginations had been tapped out. So movie night it was. They got themselves some snacks and bags of juice, gathered around an IBM ThinkPad mounted on a rack, and cued up a movie called Tank Girl. It bombed at the box office, but in the meantime, it’s become a cult hit among women astronauts—so much so that Bowersox and Pettit had been told that if they did nothing else while in space, they had to watch this comic book come to life.
It might as well have been playing in fast-forward. It was jagged and bright and loud, an assault on their eyes and ears. But most of all, it was violent. In the first few minutes, a man was forced to take off his boots and walk across broken glass, crunching underfoot with each agonizing step; he was then stabbed in the back with a machine that pumped out his blood and turned it into water. Dozens more men were shot, blown up by grenades, electrocuted, paralyzed, tortured, run over by trucks, pierced with arrows, and torn apart by a mutant race of kangaroos called Rippers. Even a friendly, lumbering ox took a bullet in the head. Combined, it was enough to make their fresh pink skin crawl.
And if that wasn’t enough overstimulation, there was a long, drawn-out scene in a futuristic strip joint called Liquid Silver. Beautiful women in platinum-blond wigs and silver G-strings danced on the stage; Tank Girl and her sidekick, Jet Girl, made likewise, dressing up in outfits as revealing as bikinis. So many girls—luminous girls with lips and breath and falling hair. And then our heroes lifted their guns back to their shoulders and continued blasting away.
Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin looked down at their hands, and they were shaking. Their mouths had gone dry. Their hearts galloped. Every biological stress indicator had kicked into overdrive. None of them made it to the end of the movie for fear of system failure. Together, they agreed to turn it off, to talk to one another in whispers, and to take a little longer than usual to come down before going to bed. But even after they’d tried to unwind and pulled themselves into their sleeping bags, they still trembled, like wide-eyed kids who’ve been told ghost stories around a campfire before lights-out.
Come morning, they had each drawn the same conclusion: despite their gut wishes, maybe they had been gone for long enough. Maybe they needed to start thinking about going home. Maybe they needed to answer the questions of when and where and how. Maybe it was time.
Because the earth had been spinning on its axis, and they had been spinning on theirs, but now they knew that they’d been traveling in opposite directions for all of this time, and they felt as though they had never been so far away.
7 EARTHSHINE
Down there it’s a relic, gone to tumble, waiting to be felled like a tree. On the western edge of the great dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, a square, timber-framed platform rises high above the cracked ground. Up a creaky flight of stairs and over a railing that wouldn’t withstand more than a good push, there’s still a commanding view of the desert flats, with runways marked out in oil. Beyond the slicks, mountains rise in the distance set against a pale sky.
Underfoot, scraps of outdoor carpet remain pinned down by rusted staples, and a phone line, long since dead, hangs loose nearby. Once there was a red phone plugged into one end of it, in anticipation of President Ronald Reagan’s probable visit, just in case he ran out of jelly beans or decided that he needed to drop a few bombs. That was only twenty-five years ago, when this platform stood at the center of the universe, and STS-001, Columbia’s first flight, prepared to touch down in front of it. But for a visitor standing there today in the teeth of the wind, it’s hard to imagine this place was ever anything more than the easy metaphor it’s become.
Until Columbia’s liftoff—until the morning of April 12, 1981—space had been the exclusive property of the Soviets for six long years. Closer to home, America was trapped in an even longer losing streak. Vietnam was still a too-fresh nightmare; rescue helicopters had buried themselves into the Iranian desert; Three Mile Island was a horror story nearly come true. Even iron-hard Detroit had been forced into retreat, pinned down by an unstoppable influx of cheap, reliable cars with strange names from Japan. For the first time since the Great Depres
sion, “Buy American” had more pleading than pride in it.
Until that lit-up morning, the space program had only added to the feeling that another one of history’s great empires had run its course, the last days of the latest Rome. The new shuttle was two years late, bogged down by technological failure and a flawed design and the malaise that had gripped the rest of the nation. But under cloudless blue skies, in front of an audience of thousands in Florida and millions more in classrooms and taverns and basement dens, John Young and Robert Crippen helped pull off the miracle comeback. They successfully guided Columbia into the first of a long string of orbits, and it felt, in that instant, as if everything might be put in its proper order once again. All that remained was the long wait for the shuttle’s arrival in California. Young and Crippen had each taken out life insurance policies worth $800,000. No one was ready to celebrate until those papers had been made worthless.
A little more than fifty-four hours of national breath-holding later, that wood platform was filled, as was the wide viewing area marked out more than three miles from the landing site, as were the mountains. (The president was not among those in attendance after all; having taken John Hinckley’s bullet to the chest only two weeks earlier, he was forced to watch from the Lincoln Bedroom.) Ignoring warnings of rattlesnakes and traffic snarls, more than 200,000 bird-watchers congregated. They stuck American flags into the dry ground, pulled on their EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, RUSSIANS! T-shirts, and turned their eyes to the sky.
