Out of Orbit

by Chris Jones

  More alarmingly, perhaps, the particular Soyuz capsule locked to station—Soyuz TMA-1—was the first in a new production run, replacing the archaic-seeming TM. Responding to the urging of the Americans, the Russians had included new instrumentation, monitors, and computer systems in their most recent effort. To their partner’s chagrin, however, the Russians had never bothered to test-fly the new capsule. Its launch to station, in October 2002, had been its inaugural flight; its return would be its first descent, and there was always a chance that bugs had hatched in the meantime.

  · · ·

  But aside from their bruised pride and a burgeoning case of the gulps, O’Keefe and company had a larger ill to contend with. Their first priority had to remain the safe return of Expedition Six. A close second was keeping the International Space Station operational, but they all knew that in rescuing the men, they now risked scuttling the machine.

  Without the shuttle, the hopes of sending up an Expedition Seven had waned in the weeks after Columbia’s loss. It was assumed that, like the last crew of Skylab, Expedition Six would probably have to push station into a state of hibernation, dimming the lights and closing the doors, one step short of abandoning ship. Even that simple scenario presented its problems, however.

  There was always the risk that the next crew to arrive on station’s doorstep—not until the shuttle fleet was back up and running, not for two or three years at least—would fail to find their destination in the blackness of space. They might even push station out of orbit in their repeated stabs at it, and a multibillion-dollar enterprise would be lost, either cast adrift toward Pluto or burned into ash that would settle across an enormous blue sea.

  More to the point, and contrary to the opinion of their critics, the International Space Station’s crews did more than live out idle days in space, checking one another’s pulse. They cleaned and maintained the place, unclogging filters and replacing booties, and without its live-aboard troubleshooters, station risked falling out of the sky long before the next men up would be able to shock its heart back to life. Experience showed that Mir’s long tenure was made possible only by the creative and sometimes patchwork repairs undertaken by its crews. And although most of the new station’s operating systems were controlled from the ground, there was no substitute for having someone like Don Pettit on board, merrily fixing a broken part or tightening some loose bolt. Leaving station empty also meant leaving it untended, and like a lakeside cottage locked up for winter, there was always the danger of a fire sparking, the roof sagging under snow, or a break-in by bears. In short, bringing home Expedition Six without first sending up Expedition Seven represented the sort of gamble that NASA’s actuaries couldn’t abide.

  Not surprisingly, those same men still didn’t care much for the idea of relying on Soyuz and Soyuz alone.

  Sean O’Keefe had learned in his first days with NASA that within its walls, redundancy has never been a four-letter word. He learned that the agency’s engineers and technicians liked to prepare for every imaginable contingency, mapping out giant decision trees on dry-erase boards—if x then y, and if y then z. But they also preferred it when there was more than one y and more than one z. Truth be told, they liked it best when they had the entire alphabet at their disposal. They liked their backup systems to have backup systems, and they were among the few paranoid people on earth who knew what came after tertiary in the sequence of orders. (Quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary … The most pessimistic among them really weren’t happy until they’d reached something like duodenary, and even then, they slept with one eye open.)

  No wonder, then, that whenever O’Keefe sat down with his advisers and their advisers and the advisers who were waiting in the wings after them, trying to come up with a fix, he was never left thinking that tonight was the night that he might get some sleep. With flowcharts and bullet points, the downbeats outlined every last thing that might go wrong with Soyuz TMA-1. It was a long list.

  Perhaps in the months that it had been latched to station, the capsule had been struck by a piece of space junk, compromising its hull or its operating system. The new software that had been loaded into the Soyuz TMA-1’s main computer shortly before its launch might contain a glitch that had not yet been discovered. Perhaps all of its gas had leaked out into space in a fine, unseen mist, leaving its tank dry and its engines lifeless. The latches that had kept it tied to station might refuse to unlock. The shield designed to protect the descent capsule and its astronauts from the heat of reentry might have sustained a hairline crack during its flight up, which would turn it into a blast furnace on its way back down. The rockets meant to push the capsule into the earth’s atmosphere might fire too early (dropping it into the Caspian Sea) or too late (dropping it into the Siberian winter) or not at all (dropping its three passengers into memorial books). Like the space shuttle, a sheared bolt, a loose electrical connection, an imperfect seal, a jammed valve, a ribbon of fatigued metal, or a faulty weld could turn the capsule into a death-trap. Unlike the shuttle, a hole in its parachute or another set of tangled lines could, too.

  It always took the advisers much less time to run down the vaccinations they had should any of these nasty scenarios come to pass: none. Best among the worst case scenarios, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit might bundle into the ship, press the big black button that sparked its automatic reentry, and … nothing. That would leave them stranded—and then what?—but at least alive. Worst of the worst, something would go catastrophically wrong somewhere between up there and down here. That would mean the certain end of Expedition Six, and the probable end of everything else that was meant to come after.

  Oh, and don’t forget, we need to get somebody on station. We can’t abandon it. We can’t leave it empty. We’ll lose it if we do.

  Invariably these meetings ended with a long silence, a few more worry lines, and O’Keefe badly needing a cigarette.

  · · ·

  And yet, trapped in their dead-end alley, NASA’s brain trust finally found inspiration—in some ways, aided by the absence of choice. The questions they faced might have been painfully complex, but they knew that their answers had to be simple. The engineers didn’t have what they needed to make themselves into architects. They knew that they had to settle for becoming machinists.

  All right, let’s start again: Soyuz.

  True enough, it was all that O’Keefe and the rest had within their reach. If they were going to bring their three men down, they would have to take that gamble.

  But it was also true that, since the beginning of station, Soyuz capsules had made the journey from earth to station and back every six months. These were the so-called taxi missions. Because Soyuz capsules were prone to a bad case of the yips when they were looked at sideways—let alone when they were bathed in the universe’s metallic exhaust for weeks on end—they were exchanged regularly, every 180 days or so. The three-man crew who had flown Soyuz TMA-1 to station not long before Expedition Six’s arrival had come home on the Soyuz TM-34, which had remained faithfully latched in place, just in case.

  Following this routine, it had been decided long before Columbia came apart that a new Soyuz—Soyuz TMA-2—would make the trip up at the end of April 2003, and the old one, TMA-1, would come down. However, instead of being manned by a courier crew, as had been custom, perhaps some sort of Expedition Seven could catch a lift up with TMA-2, and Expedition Six could ride shotgun home on TMA-1, already nearing the end of its orbital life span. The next time the Soyuz demanded switching out six months hence, another Expedition would arrive with its replacement, Eight for Seven, Nine for Eight, until the shuttles were ready to fly again.

  Now all that remained was the age-old question of supply and demand. Even with their best conservation efforts, Expedition Six had confirmed suspicions that a three-man crew could not be sustained by Progress alone. Their food and water would run out, and NASA did not wish to bear witness to the first orbital famines and droughts.

  Bowersox, Budarin, a
nd Pettit were asked to inventory every little thing that remained on board station. Next, NASA’s best math geeks calculated what patched-together crew could stretch out what patched-together grub allowance. Water was their biggest hitch. But with some prideful fanfare, the geeks announced that they could make a two-man crew work—so long as they weren’t especially big eaters. By the time they had come to the last line of their homework, they had found enough room for one little American, one little Russian, and a whole lot of space in between.

  O’Keefe took all of it in, each of the whisker-close projections and extrapolations, and realized that working at NASA had started to change him. For the first time in his budget-conscious life, he wished that he had more fat on the bone. He wished that he had more time to mull things over, to see if some magical cure might surface, and he wished that the absence of options didn’t leave him feeling so boxed in. As a boss, he would have liked to have had some kind of choice to make. But in the end, one of the biggest decisions of his professional career wasn’t much of a decision at all. Really, it didn’t even amount to accept or reject. Everybody on NASA’s food chain, starting with him, knew that there was only this one way out, and even it might be closed to them if they waited any longer to take a run at it.

  No matter how badly it sat in their stomachs—no matter how strongly they disliked the idea of ceding control of their fates to the Russians and the lives of three astronauts to the stars—everybody knew, when they looked at O’Keefe, that he would have to nod his head. There was no other move for him to make.

  · · ·

  The Russians signed off on the plan with big-chested pride. Expedition Six would come home on Soyuz TMA-1; Expedition Seven would go up on Soyuz TMA-2. Now the International Space Station was nearly as much a Russian enterprise as Mir had been. Now they would be solely responsible for shipping crews in and out and for supplying them, too; when it came to keeping station in space, the Russians were it. They would have the chance to prove, once again, their mean-edged superiority, at least when it came down to the hard work of having men locked into orbit. And right along with them, their freakish, beloved, donkey cart Soyuz was about to come out of the shadows and into the sun.

  Bill Readdy rang up Expedition Six and told them that they would be coming home, and that a scaled-down Expedition Seven would take their place, and that both crews would make their trips in Soyuz capsules. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were disappointed not to have been given permission to stay, but they were not surprised. Along with the geeks on the ground, they had done the math. (Already, just days after Columbia’s loss, Budarin had nodded at their hospital-green TMA-1 and winked.) They accepted their latest orders in the way the men on the ground had issued them—with shrugs, resignation, and a crackle of nerves. While they might have liked for their new Soyuz to have been better broken in, there was something about being asked to ride a Russian rocket that had instilled them with a Russian fatalism. This was how it was going to be.

  All that remained was the culling from the candidate ranks of the two men who would become Expedition Seven. The designated American turned out to be a brainy, easygoing flight engineer named Ed Lu. He had made the trip to space twice before, docking once with Mir and once at the International Space Station. Both stays were relatively short, but during the second, he’d had time to conduct a space walk with Yuri Malenchenko, a former commander of Mir. (The two men connected power and communications cables to the newly installed Zvezda module; they also, thankfully, installed the toilet as well as the treadmill.) The space walk had gone so smoothly, and they had seemed such a perfect match, that Malenchenko was asked whether he might join Lu. He accepted. For NASA’s managers, having had so much wrested out of their control and having become so tired of resorting to dice-rolling, the pairing of Lu and Malenchenko provided a kind of respite. In those two men, at least, there was nothing to worry about.

  · · ·

  So long as Expedition Seven made it to station, that is. Lu crammed the usual nine months of Soyuz training into a few short weeks, spending his days in simulators and classrooms and his nights hitting the books. It was a demanding, exhausting routine, broken only by the occasional photo shoot and the elaborate preflight rituals that the Russians continued to observe.

  On one cool, bright afternoon, dressed up in suits and ties for the cameras, Lu and Malenchenko visited Red Square and, with bells ringing in the distance, placed flowers along the Kremlin Wall at the plaques commemorating Yuri Gagarin and Sergei Korolev. Later they went to the Gagarin Museum in Star City and signed the cosmonaut book with a silver pen—Lu again in his suit, Malenchenko in his blue military best; they stopped for a round of pictures with their girlfriends (and Lu with his mother as well) in front of the museum exhibits; and last they conducted a final press conference the morning before their historic Soyuz launch. In their blue flight suits, the men sat outside in the shade and faced reporters.

  “I feel very good about the flight,” Lu said, adding that to help him get through it, he’d packed some family photographs that he would pin up in his private quarters on station, as well as some small, secret keepsakes. “Just some things to remind me of home,” he said.

  On April 25, 2003, Lu and Malenchenko underwent their final physical checkups and began their last preparations for flight. After being helped into their white-and-blue spacesuits—including old-fashioned pilot’s caps, leaving them looking a little like the original leatherheads, and on Lu’s upper right arm, the patch worn by Columbia’s lost crew—the two men walked through a gauntlet of applause and flashbulbs, waving awkwardly at the assembled crowd. They boarded the police-escorted bus that would take them to the Soyuz launchpad, where they ran through another crowd, stopping and turning on the ladder that climbed up toward their capsule, waving again at a gang of shouting photographers.

  Finally, they were strapped in, the engine and four boosters fired, and their Soyuz TMA-2 lifted into an overcast sky. Within seconds, they punched through the clouds. The emergency capsule on top of the rocket and its boosters were jettisoned, picking up incredible speed all the way. More than one hundred miles up, five minutes into its flight, the rocket’s second stage dropped away. After four more minutes of powered flight, the capsule separated from the rocket’s third and final stage and slipped safely into orbit. Everything had gone perfectly. A crowd of anxious Americans on the ground—including Lu’s fiancée, Christine Romero, and Jefferson Howell, who had delivered so much bad news to Expedition Six nearly three months ago—burst into applause. There were handshakes all around.

  Romero, who had received one last kiss on the launchpad, was later interviewed by NASA TV and asked about her thoughts upon watching her man launch into space. Her answer was telling in more ways than one.

  “First, when the shuttle,” she began before stopping to correct herself. “Um, excuse me. When the flight lifted off, I think I was overwhelmed by the experience. I had no idea what to expect. Everybody says it’s fabulous and it’s brilliant and it’s all those words, but it goes beyond that. I couldn’t even speak. It was just so emotional, and I never expected to feel that way.”

  In that moment, she had learned an astronaut’s hardest lesson, the same lesson that had been learned by Sean O’Keefe, Bill Readdy, Micki Pettit and Annie Bowersox, and those three men in a bucket. Between expectation and reality, between flying and falling—between earth and space, between home and away—there will forever remain some kind of gap.

  10 “I THINK WE’RE IN TROUBLE”

  In March 1965, the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov nearly died three times—first outside of his Voskhod 2 capsule, then inside of it, and then outside of it again.

  Leonov, under the watch of his crewmate, Pavel Belyayev, would be the first man to attempt a space walk. The Soviets had designed a primitive, inflatable airlock for their stripped-down capsule and a spacesuit that Leonov could fill up with air, like a deep-sea diver’s, and attach to an umbilical cord that would prevent his drifting away
. Then they ordered him to head outside.

  Tumbling without anchor, Leonov watched in horror when his umbilical cord almost immediately twisted like a rubber band. In his struggle to work out the kinks, he lost track of time and found himself with only a few minutes to return to the relative safety of the capsule. To make matters worse, his suit had filled up with too much air in the meantime, inflated taut, and Leonov couldn’t bend his legs enough to shimmy his way back through the hatch. He had become the original square peg.

  Belyayev, trapped inside instead of out, was powerless to help him, able only to listen to Leonov’s desperate voice over the radio: “I can’t …” he said, his breathing getting fast and heavy. “I can’t get in.”

  As a last resort, and at risk of suffocating himself, Leonov released most of the oxygen from his suit. That gave him the flexibility that he needed to squeeze into the airlock. It also left him with just enough air to exhale one big sigh of relief.

  The following day, the crew was scheduled to return from orbit by firing braking rockets that would drop them into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The time came to return. A button was pressed, and nothing happened. The rockets failed to light, leaving the cosmonauts trapped in orbit, where it looked as though they might stay forever, alive until they sucked away the last of their oxygen and then dead, a permanent fixture of the night sky.