by Chris Jones
At ten o’clock in the morning, they heard a pair of sonic booms, after the shuttle had bolted across the Pacific coast, the San Joaquin valley, and the Tehachapi Mountains. (At Mission Control in Houston, flight director Don Puddy announced, “Room, get ready for exhilaration.”) The crowds and television cameras first caught sight of the light that banked off the shuttle’s cockpit windows, and then they saw its black underbelly dropping out of the blue. Across the country, factory workers shut down the assembly lines and raced into lunchrooms. Office meetings came to a halt. A fitter in a Manhattan men’s shop dashed off, leaving a customer pinned up in an unfinished suit. All of them gathered around televisions and radios to watch and hear Columbia soar over the dry lakebed, loop back, and touch down in a cloud of dust and the wash of a mirage. Finally, again, Americans had been part of something perfect.
Just six hectic hours later, Young and Crippen, still zipped up in their blue flight suits, stepped down from a plane and into a crowd 1,500-strong at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas. They were greeted as heroes.
Young, a veteran of four previous trips into space and a walk on the moon, was enthusiastic about his latest ride. “The spaceship Columbia is phenomenal,” he said. “It is an incredibly amazing piece of machinery. Anytime you can take something that big and put it into space and bring it back and land it, you have accomplished something just short of a miracle.”
Crippen, a first-time flier, had trouble finding the words to describe the experience. “For me,” he said finally, “it was the darnedest time I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
The international response was no less effusive. Congratulations came in from the Canadian parliament, Italian president Sandro Pertini, and the Polish soccer nut who had just become Pope John Paul II. The launch and the landing had also found places on a thousand front pages and led off newscasts in a hundred languages. The Guardian in London wrote: “The shuttle is Star Trek, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back in life. It is beautiful, futuristic and patriotic in an era when Americans have found little to cheer about.” The French business daily Les Echos went one step further: “The unbelievable has become reality … Man will go into space now as easily as he crosses the English Channel.”
But it was the laid-up president who had already best summed up the measure of that almost impossibly wonderful trip.
“Through you,” Reagan told the astronauts before their launch, “we feel as giants once again.”
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The feeling lasted nearly five years, until Challenger turned into pink vapor one chilly day in January 1986. Long before, the networks had each set up permanent offices in Houston, trailers anchored in the shadows of the Johnson Space Center’s big-box architecture. As in the days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, each of the shuttle’s flights had been a headline event. But after the loss of seven astronauts had been analyzed and replayed until it had been turned into a spot memory, one of those rare moments in history that can be instantly recalled by tens of millions, space had lost its luster once again. Sometime during the more than two years it took for another shuttle to slip the surly bonds of earth, Americans found different things to hold close to their hearts. Like the platform at Edwards Air Force Base, the network trailers first were shuttered, and then left to rot, and, like dreams, they were finally forgotten. Astronauts who had come of age under flashbulbs suddenly found themselves working in two vacuums, home and away.
(The greatest all-time episode of The Simpsons centered around NASA’s attempts to lure back its former audiences by sending Homer J. Simpson, American Everyman, into space. The agency was spurred to take that desperate step when its most recent launch was outdrawn by A Connie Chung Christmas.)
Even without Challenger and the wrung-out quiet that followed it, the shuttle program was probably on the verge of being shoved out of the spotlight. The national attention span is only so long, and the shuttle’s seemingly endless loop of launches and landings had started to blur into a spectacular routine. The missions in between, too, weren’t the sort of finite adventures—like walking on the moon—that grabbed people by the shoulders and dropped jaws. To ordinary Americans, it looked more and more like their astronauts had become glorified truck drivers, following the same routes, hauling the same boxed-up cargo, running the same (seemingly unimportant) errands. And the truth is, as incredible as shuttle flights remain even today—when you stop to think about the physics and chemistry and psychology behind them—it’s hard for millions of grounded mortals to get excited about the same fresh-faced few doing backflips, chasing down wonky satellites, and taking long-range photographs of oil spills. It can feel as though it’s not worth the effort to strain our necks anymore.
Part of that feeling has been by design. Since Challenger, NASA’s brass has viewed yawns and empty press conferences as good things, today’s versions of standing ovations and tickertape parades. No news is good news, everything having gone off according to boring plan. But beyond their desire for peace and quiet, they also know that if new ground is ever going to be broken, the old ground must become as well worn as donkey tracks. Moon colonies, space tourism, manned missions to Mars—none of them is possible without first making near space seem less like an ocean and more like a wading pool. That’s where the International Space Station comes in. And that’s why NASA desperately needs its rockets to seem ordinary, even though they never really have been, for the next horizon to appear within reach of them.
The bummer, however, is that in making itself look like another humdrum government bureaucracy, NASA has begun to act like one. It is impenetrable and slow to respond, tongue-tied and nearly impossible to get to know. For the few brave reporters who have chosen space as their beat, it can sometimes feel as though they would enjoy better access if they covered spies for a living. (How telling is it that a grand total of three reporters followed Columbia’s last mission from beginning to end?) Only at NASA could it seem like a good idea for members of the press office to have the acronym IMPASS stamped on their business cards, and for the press office to live up to the label.
All of which helps explain that if astronauts land on today’s front pages, it’s probably because they’ve been blown to bits.
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The day after Expedition Six rocketed toward station, the launching of seven men into space failed to earn even a brief in the New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record. Instead, that morning’s bleak front page was dominated by President Bush’s stumping for war against Iraq, including speeches at rallies in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Bucharest, Romania. “The people of Romania know that dictators must never be appeased or ignored,” the president said. “They must be opposed.” Below the fold, there was news of a New York City transit worker who was killed when he was struck by a train, and Hollywood was keeping its fingers crossed, hoping for a lucrative Christmas season.
There remained an almost institutional silence on space, in fact, until Columbia fell out of it. SHUTTLE BREAKS UP, 7 DEAD was the lead story’s hard-nut headline on February 2, 2003. There were eleven pages of comprehensive coverage inside, including an editorial that sang the following lament: “Once again we were jolted out of a sustained period of success in exploring the world outside our planet—a run of good work and good luck that ran so long we had the luxury of taking it all for granted. Most Americans were probably cheerfully unaware, over the past 16 days, that seven men and women were circling the planet.”
Now space was back in the news, as, finally, was Expedition Six, although they merited mentioning for only two days. The morning after the disaster, at the bottom of page 25, there was a low-key story that foretold of nothing of consequence. DELAYS EXPECTED IN EXPANDING ORBITING LABORATORY, AND PERHAPS IN RETRIEVING 3 ASTRONAUTS. A NASA spokesman named Pat Ryan snuffed out what might have turned into a good old-fashioned serial drama with his blunt assessment of the crew’s fate. “The reality for all the astronauts is that when you launch, the mission is over when somebody come
s to get you, and it may not always be when we planned,” he said. Russia’s Progress was already on its way to the International Space Station, he hastened to add, delivering enough food and water (and garlic paste and poetry) to keep Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin going at least through June.
Expedition Six earned a second and final mention the following day, in the middle of another twelve pages of coverage: NASA KEEPS THREE ASTRONAUTS ABOARD SPACE STATION INFORMED OF EVENTS ON GROUND. There was a stock photograph of the crew, but no words from them. Instead, Bob Cabana, now NASA’s director of flight crew operations in Houston, passed along their thoughts. “They’re grieving up there also, and they feel a little isolated. They want to get through the process, and it’s harder for them being detached from it in space.” That hardly seemed to provide a finishing note on their story, but for the time being, it did.
Stories on the investigation into the disaster continued for a little while longer, but by February 17, Columbia had lost its last grip on the front page. Challenger had occupied the nation’s consciousness for two years. Just two weeks after Columbia had come apart, the last few of its pieces were swept away and promptly forgotten. Perhaps because it was the second shuttle disaster and not the first, or perhaps because the pictures of catastrophe weren’t as dramatic this time around, or perhaps because the nation was about to go to war, the story was considered complete. All that remained was the occasional poke at the embers of a dying fire, left virtually unattended in favor of another, now just starting to throw off sparks.
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Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were left hanging in limbo, and limbo is death for a story. The opening scenes of their adventure had the makings for something dramatic, had the potential for emotional fireworks and a heart-tugging score, but by spring, it had been drawn out for too long to sustain its audience. It had lost its momentum. There was no conflict or progress or tidy resolution in sight. It was all verse and no chorus.
John Glenn. Apollo 11. Columbia’s first flight and Challenger’s last. As always, but perhaps more than ever, we are obsessed with beginnings and endings. Looking at that failing platform in the desert or at those empty trailers in Houston, we’ve learned that the middle, we can do without. And Expedition Six—adrift, trapped in their own middle, lost behind thousands of other headlines and movie openings and battles and football games—learned that an astronaut’s universe has never been so small.
8 A THIN THREAD
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
By March, approaching the start of month five in orbit, Don Pettit began filling one of those rare, beautiful times in his life—when he had nowhere else to be—by spending more time staring through his window.
Because of what he knew about the planet’s architecture and construction, he could see more of it than most of us might. He could see all of the geological features that mapmakers struggle to express: braided channels, alluvial fans, glaciers, crater lakes, fissures, slumps, and volcanic plumes.
He could watch clouds of every shape and combination. He took note that clouds over cold water looked different from clouds over warm water. He could see firsthand that storms really do spin in different directions depending on their hemisphere. He delighted in lightning flashes, bands of dark clouds illuminated by fingers of spark, reaching out to each other across the miles.
He could see brown rivers spilling into the blue ocean. (They always made him think of hot chocolate.) He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.
He watched light scattering and corona haloes. He saw how well jungles absorb the sun’s rays, dark even in daytime, and how farmland looked bright, as reflective as a mirror.
He saw meteors falling below him, a topsy-turvy sight that he never managed to adjust to. Each time his intuition complained bitterly.
He looked at the stars, suddenly seeming close enough to touch.
But most of all, he liked looking at earth in the wee hours, after dusk’s waves had washed over it. Unlike on the ground, where darkness serves only to obscure, night makes the human landscape clearer from space. In daylight, even the biggest cities look like gray, indistinct smudges, like the fingerprints on the glass in front of him. At night, however, Pettit could spend hours hunting for his life’s landmarks in the power grids and black, bottomless river bends until he finally became obsessed with documenting his view. He aimed his over-the-counter Nikon down at us and began taking pictures. He built a collection of more than 25,000 in all.
At first, because the speed at which he was traveling was so much faster than the snap of his camera’s shutter, Pettit’s pictures turned night cities into streaks of white light, like the headlights in a time-lapse photo of a busy street. His pictures became crisper when he learned to hold open the shutter and shift his shoulders in the opposite direction of his orbit, but even then his best efforts turned out blurry. He knew that he was looking at New York City, but he couldn’t quite make out the shadow of a lightless Central Park or the single bulb in the harbor that he knew was the Statue of Liberty.
Not good enough. Pettit being Pettit, he put the finishing touches on a gyroscope that he’d made out of three portable compact disc players (he used it to hold his flashlight for him), and next he built a makeshift, rotating tripod for his camera. He culled an old IMAX mount, a spare bolt, and a cordless Makita drill from the clutter, and he found eureka, too: gently squeezing the drill’s trigger lent his camera the perfect rotation to take pictures sharp enough to make the miles meaningless all over again.
Looking at the electric webs of Montreal and Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., he could pick out the airports he’d flown into and the street corners he knew and the hotels he’d stayed in, and he could remember if the showers were hot or if he’d enjoyed a good meal there. He could make out football stadiums, docklands, and interstates, and he could make out the rest of those big, little places that we run our lives through. In the end, if he closed his eyes, he could even see his driveway, and he could feel himself easing into it, throwing his junky pickup into park and walking up to the front door, his shoes scuffling on the asphalt, his hand guided to the door by the warm light spilling out from the windows.
In those dreaming times, it felt as though all that separated home from away was a very thin thread, so thin that Pettit could snap it just by breaking open the hatch. A loosened bolt, a turned latch, a cracked seal, and he could find himself wherever he wished to.
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He had opened the hatch once before. Back in January, he and Bowersox had performed an extravehicular activity, or EVA, which is a fancy way of saying that they had put on their boots and headed outside.
Originally, Bowersox and Budarin—the veteran of eight EVAs while he was on board Mir—had been given the assignment, with Pettit expected to stay inside, manning the station’s robotic arm. But in the lead-up toward exit, routine tests found that the forty-nine-year-old Budarin’s heart was not entirely up to snuff. While he pedaled away on the station’s exercise bike, the machines whispered into the ears of NASA’s flight surgeons, snitching on what they later called “cardiac peculiarities.” The Russians explained that Budarin’s heart had always had a bit of a flicker, and that the flicker had always been dismissed as benign and had never caused a problem, including during his more than forty-six hours spent at the end of Mir’s tether. But because this particular space walk was an American exercise—being conducted in American spacesuits and using the American hatch—the final decision rested with NASA. Despite Pettit’s lack of experience and his training only once in the pool with Bowersox (although that had gone well), he was ticketed for out-bound passage. The Russians staged a minor protest, but Houston remained unmo
ved, and now Pettit found himself twice drafted from the second team to the first.
This time around, Bowersox didn’t much care about the switch. It might not even have registered through the thrill of his anticipation. He had never been outside either, able only to watch others take the dips of their lives, and for all of this time, the dark had sung out to him.
Like the call of the waters that saw heartsick sailors pitch themselves off the backs of ships to be swallowed by Mother Ocean, deepest, blackest, emptiest space has always drawn astronauts. The same desire that makes people step off cliffs with only a parachute strapped to their backs, or sink into underwater caves or under blue ice with only a coil of rope to guide them back to the surface, also fills the men and women who have touched space with their gloved hands. The adrenaline rush that comes with suiting up, opening a hatch, floating outside, and relying on a cloth tether or a length of steel cable to keep from drifting into oblivion is just about strong enough to overwhelm spacewalkers. So, too, are the more beautiful rewards of such a short, long journey—unparalleled views and a feeling of nearly perfect isolation, as though they have been placed on pedestals that no one else on earth can dream to reach. It’s no wonder some have nearly stayed forever on their perch.
Most famously, before their record stay on Salyut 6, rookie cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko came within a whisper of meeting his end during Georgi Grechko’s experimental space walk on December 20, 1977. While Grechko bounced around outside, Romanenko was to stay inside the airlock and monitor incoming medical data. But his curiosity won out, and he decided to steal a peek. Romanenko poked out his head, became consumed by the view, and was lulled into drift, his safety line floating slack behind him, unattached. This, he realized too late. Fortunately, Grechko saw his crewmate’s desperate thrashing and leaned over just in time to grab the end of his line and reel him in.
