by Chris Jones
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When the space shuttle hits the runway, that’s it. It’s all over. There is the air, and there is the ground, and for the past twenty-five years, American astronauts have never had the chance to enjoy the space in between. But for the men who used to be Expedition Six, they basked in this more graceful transition. As if to remind them of what they once were and where they had once been, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were soon back in the air. It’s one of the joys of returning by capsule—as it was with Apollo, so it is with Soyuz. Always, touchdown is followed by another liftoff, this time to a military installation in gloomy Astana, and then in the Aeroflot jet that would take them to Star City. They were no longer spacemen, and that truth struck them hard, but they remained fliers. Through their windows, they could still look down on the Kazakh steppes, the way they had looked down on them through their windows back on station, thinking they were beautiful then and thinking they were beautiful now.
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A few hundred people—although only a few that mattered most—were waiting for Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit when their plane finally touched down. The reception committee had filled the hours with more vodka and a little sleep, and Micki had also given herself time for a good long cry on her cottage step. It was the same cottage in which she had been singing with friends when the phone had rung so many months ago, calling her husband away. After she had cleaned herself up, she and Annie were packed onto a bus and given red roses and told to watch for their men through the windows.
The plane made a slow turn and taxied toward the crowd. There were cameramen and dignitaries and soldiers, the bunch of them getting damp in the mist that continued to fall out of a thin gray sky.
Whether it was for nostalgia’s sake or because of budget constraints, the Russians wheeled up one of those old-fashioned staircases. Perhaps it was because the setup made for such terrific pictures. Reporters and photographers stood poised for what seemed like forever, waiting for the plane’s engines to stop and the door to open. Finally, it was cracked like a hatch.
So, too, was the door of the bus, and Micki and Annie stepped out into the rain and the bright white of camera flashes. They strained their necks above the crowd to try to catch sight of their husbands, although Micki had already been told that she would likely need to come to Don rather than the other way around.
As commander, Bowersox had the honor of being the first out, smiling and raising his fists in the air. Boosted by a last-second charge of adrenaline, he ran down the stairs and launched himself into the arms of the surging crowd. Sean O’Keefe had grabbed hold of Annie Bowersox’s hand, but now they nearly lost each other in the crush. It was like a rock concert after the lead singer takes a dive from the stage.
Budarin was next. He came down a little more slowly, a little more proudly, but waving and smiling, too.
After the commotion had died down, after the bottom of the stairs had been cleared, Micki made her way up. She ducked into the plane and saw Don, curled up in a corner under a blanket. He looked at her as though he had wanted to see no one else, and she put her hand to her mouth, not quite believing.
They had time only for a kiss. Pettit, having refused the offer of a stretcher or a chair, was helped out of the plane and down the stairs by two men. His jelly legs belied his good feeling.
The three men were wrestled through the throng and guided back to the bus, still idling in the near distance. O’Keefe pushed through the crowd, towing Annie Bowersox in his wake, and the two of them knocked together on the glass door. Bill Readdy had taken Micki Pettit by the arm, and they, too, made it through the celebration and into the relative sanctuary of the bus. Through the rain-streaked windows, they watched the crowd continue to cheer and applaud, but now, inside, there was only the hush of relief broken by short outbursts of joy. Best of all, there were long hugs between husbands and wives who had thought in their weaker moments that another touch might never come. They kissed and put their heads on each other’s shoulders, and they swayed with the lurching of the bus.
It was the sort of poignant scene that films usually close on, fading out on a New York City sidewalk or at the bow of a ship at sunset or in the arrivals terminal of a busy airport. Music swells up, and the camera pulls back, revealing two people locked in a tight embrace, perfectly still amidst the chaos that swirls around them, together, alone against the universe. That’s exactly what it looked like when that bus threaded its way through the crowd and made for open range. The only things missing were the names of the key grips, best boys, and set designers projected against the wet windows.
But that’s not how these stories end in real life. The finish is never quite so neat. There are always footnotes.
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Over the rumble of the diesel engine, Sean O’Keefe pulled out his cell phone and called up Washington, D.C., where Vice President Cheney had been waiting for word of his former employee’s success. (He even put Bowersox on the line to say hello.)
Nikolai Budarin looked forward to seeing his own wife, Marina, who was also waiting, but with an infusion of love, cigarettes, and vodka.
Waiting for them, too, was a gang of scrubbed-down flight surgeons cloistered inside the Prophy, the Russian postflight checkout building, a kind of one-stop hotel and hospital for returning spacemen. The doctors were poised to get their gloved hands on three exhausted men who had made the transition from astronauts to experiments and now, finally, to fresh specimens, ripe for dissection. The bus stopped at their open front doors. With the hiss of brakes, reunion was interrupted.
Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were escorted inside. They were treated gently by the Russians, who have learned over the years how tender their subjects can be, but the three men were put under the microscope all the same. Like every astronaut and every cosmonaut, from the first to the last, they were seen as something alien and wonderful, these ordinary assemblies of skin and tissue that had been turned into artifacts by virtue of the places they had been. Spending nearly six months in space had made them worthy of a fine-eyed examination, and now they were looked upon if not as heroes, then at least as monuments.
However subtle the adulation was, it made Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit feel vaguely uncomfortable. They were still adjusting to gravity’s weight and the taste of earth’s air. The whiff of something as ordinary as muscle rub hit them like smelling salts. Ringing phones sounded like fire alarms. A change in temperature of just a few degrees left them either shivering or burning up. And on top of all of that, now here they were, after having spent so much time alone, stuck in the center of a clutch of curious physicians, measuring their fat stores and shining lights into their eyes.
The most painful invasion was saved for last, nearly thirty-six hours after Expedition Six had blinked awake for their final morning in space. The surgeons took liberal biopsies of their calf muscles, leaving three divots in each of the men. The open sores were reminders for Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit that it would take months and perhaps even years for them to earn back the calluses that they had lost; their skin was still fresh and pink. In the meantime, they tried to separate themselves from the noise and commotion—they tried to look inside themselves for places to hide, to insulate themselves from their new surroundings. They were only partly successful. They felt as though they had been set upon, as though these bizarre masked crusaders had broken through their best defenses, intent on shaking them out of their comas.
And worse, they knew, too, that this was just the first of it.
They began steeling themselves for the chaos to come. By the time they emerged from the examination rooms, they had already grown harder. Already, they had begun patching the workaday glaze that had taken them so very long to shed.
They were placed in quarantine, as much for their benefit as for anybody else’s. First, though, Budarin had time to sneak out to see his wife and collect his smokes. O’Keefe and Annie sat down with Bowersox for a short, filmed chat about their extraordinary ret
urn to earth. (“Nikolai was like a cheerleader up there!” Bowersox said.) And Micki was given a few minutes to visit with Don, who had been laid out in bed. He was drifting in and out of sleep.
She made sure he was tucked in, his blanket pulled up, and she planted another gentle kiss on his forehead. She wished him good night. “Get some rest,” she whispered. She said she would try to see him in the morning if they would let her, and with that, she stepped out into the hallway.
Looking back through her husband’s door, she felt as though she had said good night to a man she had never seen before but also to a man who had never gone away.
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While Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit remained locked down, their friends and family drowned themselves in more vodka. There was a sweet spread waiting outside of the Star City cottages that had been reserved for them. Chairs and tables were scattered on the grass. There were baskets of bread and bowls of salad. Meat was crackling over coals and under skies that had just started to clear. Everybody filled their plates and grabbed a drink and sat down heavily into their seats or stood together in clusters, basking in one another’s glow. It was like a long-overdue family reunion, except that three of the most honored guests were absent, sixteen dawns and dusks a shift having given way to one. The sun set. And with it, the gathering outside the cottages broke up. Bleary and wrung out, the partygoers drifted off into the night, one by one, two by two.
Sean O’Keefe, Bill Readdy, Paul Pastorek, and a few other NASA officials weren’t quite ready for sleep, however. They were still coming down from a long day, swings of jet lag and adrenaline that had made like a speedball. They voted to retreat to the basement of one of the cottages, to a small room that had been dubbed Shep’s Bar.
It was named in honor of Bill Shepherd, U.S. Navy SEAL and commander of Expedition One. To quell his homesickness during his years of training—and to quench his thirst for something other than another shot of Russian vodka—he had set up this makeshift hole-in-the-wall, a kind of speakeasy for the young astronaut set. It wasn’t much, a few chairs and tables in the dark and dank, but it harbored perhaps the most valuable piece of hardware in all of Star City: this great, shining, magnificent machine that turned ice and alcohol into frozen daiquiris.
It had been rustled up by a man named John McBrine, one of NASA’s longest-serving staff members in Russia. He had found the monster for sale on the Internet, but after he had unpacked it, McBrine was crushed to find that the drinks it spewed out were warm. Fortunately, an American reserve astronaut named Don Pettit, ignorant to the adventures that awaited him, had a knack for fixing just about anything that had been broken. He also had some time on his hands. The way Pettit would later repair a certain Microgravity Glovebox on the International Space Station, he repaired McBrine’s daiquiri machine.
Now that machine was fired up, shaking on the counter, rumbling like one of that afternoon’s helicopters, and out of it poured an endless stream of boozy froth. Loud and happy men gathered it up and pushed it back, in between still more hugging and hollering, blowing off the last traces of steam that had been generated over the past hours, days, weeks, and months. For most of the men packed inside that bar on that night, it was the first grand good time they had enjoyed since Columbia had cast them in shadows. The weight of the world had been lifted off their shoulders just as Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had assumed it. For the first time since February, they felt free, and they would have liked the feeling and the night to last forever.
Eventually, though, morning came, and with it short naps and trips to the airport, where flights waited to carry the men on their long rides home. On one of them, O’Keefe and Pastorek sat side by side, grinning through hangovers and fatigue. There were no more notes to take, no more decisions to make, and best of all, there was no more sleeplessness. Before their plane was even wheels up, they had closed their eyes and drifted off into a sleep so deep, they needed only to give a little kick, and they, too, would know how it felt to fly over mountaintops and look down on skyscrapers.
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The rest of them—Bowersox and Annie, Pettit and Micki and their kids—woke up in separate beds, in separate rooms, to three more weeks in Russia. They enjoyed the occasional visit together, but each was short, twenty minutes one afternoon, a ten-spot the following morning. The astronauts spent the rest of their days being examined by doctors and interviewed by experts about their experience, most energetically about their Soyuz flight. The engineers charged with figuring out why it had gone ballistic believed, openly, that the crew was at fault. Again and again, the three men denied any wrongdoing. They had been crew members on a ship and in a universe each with a mind of its own. They had been at the mercy of something outside of themselves.
And now they were again. They were back on earth, back to all of its pressures, back to all of its demands on their time and their bodies. They sometimes felt like wrestlers who had been pinned, helpless, to the mat, their fates no longer their own.
From the moment they had pulled up to the gates at Star City, their days had stopped unfolding exactly as they wanted them to. For the first time in nearly six months, they had to alter their routine to make room for dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of others in it.
Soon they would be caught in traffic and the rain, bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the subway, tied to a desk for hours each day. They would catch colds. They would have appointments to keep, and the grass would need cutting.
They would be rushed. They would be late.
And in the quiet in between, they would wonder at what they had done, and they would wonder at what’s next.
EPILOGUE
Mars.
In January 2004, a little less than nine months after Expedition Six’s dramatic fall to earth, President Bush outlined a brave new vision for NASA. (He was introduced from station by Expedition Eight’s Mike Foale, the Soyuz taxi missions having worked perfectly since Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit had their brush with death by gravity.) To surprisingly little fanfare, the president called for the completion of a scaled-down International Space Station by 2010, a return to the moon as early as 2015, and a manned mission to the red planet sometime after 2020.
While the rest of the country tried to a stifle a collective yawn, a large pocket of Houston seemed grateful for the spark. Still struggling to fix the external tank’s insulating foam—the same foam that had doomed Columbia—the agency’s technicians and engineers were suddenly presented with a grander challenge, exactly the sort of rock-solid objective that they had been itchy for.
The announcement awakened something within the men of Expedition Six, too. In the months that followed their bumpy ride home, they were cleared of any wrongdoing in their capsule’s malfunction. Budarin had been adamant all along that the crew was not at fault; Bowersox was less certain. (“One thing I’ve learned in flying airplanes over the years is never say for sure that you didn’t make a mistake,” he said. “It’s always best to be humble.”) After the investigation was complete, it was found that a run-of-the-mill software glitch had been the root of so much drama.
It was a shock to learn that their lives had been at the mercy of some tired computer programmer’s typo. But Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit also saw something fortuitous in their misadventure, especially given the president’s proclamation—the perfect finishing note for an expedition that had been built on the science of accident.
As though by design, their extended mission and eventful return mirrored the long trip to Mars as closely as any journey into space ever had. The gutsy astronauts chosen to make that incredible voyage would need to lift off in a rocket, live in weightlessness for six lonely months, burn down through the planet’s atmosphere in a capsule, dig into its rocky surface, and finally tap their innermost strength, cracking open their hatch and setting up camp.
Mission Control would never have taken the risk of purposely leaving Expedition Six to fend for themselves on the Kazakh st
eppes. But that inadvertent cold shoulder had proved that perhaps the hardest part of a Martian landing was, in fact, possible. Even if little green men attacked the newly landed crew, Budarin had demonstrated that the astronauts would have it in them to pump their double-barreled shotguns and blast buckshot into the shadows. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had shown that, if nothing else, our astronauts possess the necessary fight.
They were rewarded for their groundbreaking troubles. Not long after Bowersox had settled back into Houston’s routine, he was named director of NASA’s Flight Crew Operations Directorate. His new job, among the most powerful positions in the astronaut office, includes selecting which men and women will occupy which seats on which flights.
Budarin was promoted to the position of flight director. In his new role, he jets between Houston and Moscow, helping to manage the American and Russian spaceflight programs. He is happy for spending so much time stateside. In Russian culture, friendship is especially meaningful, and he delights in keeping Expedition Six nearly as close on the ground as they were in space. Whenever Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit sit together around a restaurant table, laughing and remembering, they never try to shake the sensation that the rest of the room might fade into black and they will be left feeling like three men sitting in a bucket, alone against the universe once again.
Still, the feeling needs constant nurturing: given their new roles, it is unlikely that Bowersox and Budarin will ever fly again. Only Pettit remains in the active astronaut pool, filling his time served on the ground by working on the shuttle’s foam problem and helping design the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV, the ship that is expected to replace the space shuttle when the fleet is retired in 2010.
