by Chris Jones
Asked by his managers whether he wanted to be assigned to one of the few remaining shuttle flights, Pettit declined. Instead, he asked to be considered for another long-duration mission to station. Micki wasn’t entirely thrilled with his request, but his managers smiled, nodded their heads, and put his name down on the list.
That list remains long. The shuttle didn’t return to space until Discovery launched in July 2005, two and a half years after Columbia’s final flight. (It was a good thing that Sean O’Keefe and company hadn’t settled for the Avdeyev Option; Bowersox or Pettit might have come back with gills or to empty houses.) A new camera revealed that a large piece of insulating foam had still fallen from the external tank, and the fleet was grounded again. With only two-man crews occupying the International Space Station for six months at a stretch, and with the three remaining shuttles empty and locked in their hangars, NASA’s astronaut office started to feel less like an airport lounge and more like a prison without bars.
The boxed-in feeling has been especially strong for Pettit. Bowersox and Budarin have been able to reconcile themselves to their likely permanent grounding. The American has rocketed into space five times, and the Russian has clocked three long-duration missions. They would have liked more, but each man knows that he has been given his time.
But Pettit has been up there only once, and he feels as though there is still so much for him to do. Every day he spends trapped on earth, some part of him feels denied.
Now he understands what the other flown astronauts in his class went through upon their return. They had always seemed unsettled, lost in conversation, distracted. They were always caught dreaming. They had forgotten their fear, and they had forgotten their terrible solitude. But what had been hardwired into them, seemingly for good, was their longing. In the days after they had returned, they had begun their scheming, trying to figure out how to make it back to the place where they now believed they most belonged. And they had come to know what only their fellow astronauts—from Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on—could understand: that their gold astronaut wings sometimes felt like a scarlet letter.
They were different from the rest of us now, and different, too, from the men they once were, and not just because so many of them still swallowed their toothpaste.
Before, Pettit would stare up at the sky and feel as though the stars were close enough for him to touch. Now he no longer finds comfort in that easy lie. Even when he checks his watch, sneaks through his front door late at night, sets up his telescope on his lawn, and follows the space station on its long journey through the universe, he can feel cut off from his home as if by a wall, a wall as thin as a single sheet of glass.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit, and Nikolai Budarin, the three brave men whose stories I’ve tried my best to tell in this book. I would especially like to thank Don and his terrific wife, Micki, who were particularly generous with their time.
Their cooperation began when I first wrote their story as a feature for Esquire magazine, where I’ll be delighted to work for as long as they’ll have me. I was brought on board there by Andy Ward, who has since moved on to GQ; I will forgive him for that, because none of this would have happened if he hadn’t let some dumb kid bearing a box of Krispy Kremes into his office one summer afternoon. In a cosmic way, Andy is the start of all of this, and I am hugely indebted to him.
I also owe a giant-size debt to my eternally patient editor at Esquire, Peter Griffin, who has, in his quiet way, made me a much better writer in the time that I have worked for him. He has let me see through his eyes what makes for a good story and how best to tell it, including some incredibly valuable advice when I wrote about Expedition Six for the magazine. Peter also supported my writing Out of Orbit throughout its long, tortured birth. Even if it was just a quick phone call to ask how things were coming along, he spurred me.
Of course, I must give a particularly robust thanks to David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire and my boss of bosses. Not only is he generous enough to continue employing me (at least as of this writing) but he wrote one of the kindest e-mails a writer could imagine receiving after he read my Expedition Six story. I’ve kept it and read it often in the nearly two years since.
As well, David did me the service of passing my first draft along to Bill Thomas, my Great Benefactor—publisher and editor, more officially—at Doubleday in New York. I’m not really sure what happened next. All I know is, I was covering the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, when I received an e-mail from my agent, David Black: “Your life just changed,” he wrote. “Call me.” I did, and he gave me the unexpected news that he had sold a book-length version of the story to Bill. Golf never saw so much screaming. These three men—Granger, Thomas, and Black—conspired to give me a thrill that I will never forget. They each share a permanent stamp in my great memories passport.
Shortly thereafter, the dreamy fantasy stopped and the work began. Although NASA declined to help me out—for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom—many others did, and for that, I am grateful. (Luckily, several of the people I needed most have left Houston behind.) Sean O’Keefe, now the president of Louisiana State University, was especially frank in his recollections. His friend and lawyer, Paul Pastorek, elected not to charge me by the hour, and I appreciate that. Bill Readdy, now having started up his own consulting firm, Discovery Partners International, also took breaks from his busy schedule to share his memories of bad days and good.
Among the probably dozens of others I’ve leaned on, I would also like to thank Christine Pride, Karla Eoff, Todd Doughty, and everyone else at Doubleday; Doris Lance at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, and former pilot Dick Wright; Deborah Goode at the United States Naval Academy; Dr. Tom Peterson and his assistant, Gerri Sullivan, at the University of Arizona in Tucson; John Haire at Edwards Air Force Base; Konstantin Tyurkin of RIA Novosti in Moscow; Sergei Gruzdev, my smiling and able translator; Neil Woodward, American astronaut; and the staff at the Ottawa Public Library, including my wife, Lee.
The librarians helped me find the many books that sat in piles on my desk, tall as pillars. To ignite things, I started out by reading two of the best: Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon. Really, reading them just depressed the hell out of me, but at least they got me going. Of the hundreds of other books, magazine pieces, and newspaper articles I have read and sometimes stolen from (but always with a suitable measure of shame), I would like to make particular mention of the most illuminating: Comm Check … The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia, by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood; Columbia—Final Voyage, by Philip Chien; Red Star in Orbit, by James E. Oberg; Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir, by Jerry Linenger; and Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, by Bryan Burroughs (although I suspect that Bryan’s book in part made NASA less trusting of my own intentions, so I feel like, if anything, he owes me).
I also wish to give a loud and long shout-out to the awesome resource that is Space.com, particularly the first-rate reporting of Jim Banke. His work helped me reconstruct the days before Endeavour’s belated launch with what would have been an otherwise impossible level of detail.
I’d like to thank the Weakerthans, the finest band ever to come out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and perhaps the world. Their albums served as much of the inspiration for my writing this book, and I also lifted a phrase for the title of Chapter 6 from “Left and Leaving,” which is one of their great songs.
No one has cared more about this book than my family, who have lived and died with it right along with me. My loving parents, John and Marilyn, provided a much-needed mix of encouragement, advice, and copy-editing expertise. My brother, Steffan, was an early supporter and reader, as were my parents-in-law, Jim and Alice Higginson. (My best friend, Phil Russell, also slogged through the first draft of the book; never have so many remarks in the margins include
d the salutation “dude.”) And you can never underestimate the amount of a book’s weight that is shouldered by a spouse. Perfect Lee helped float me through some trying times, and she never once made me feel bad for failing to hear her calling when I was lost in space.
Not only that, but I wrote the final few pages of Out of Orbit in the maternity ward at Ottawa’s General Hospital, sitting next to Lee, who was confined to a white-sheeted bed, heavily pregnant. She was in the hospital for three weeks before our first son, Charley, was born along with the last words on these pages. It was an exhausting, exhilarating, gut-crazy time. It was, I like to imagine, exactly like riding a rocket.
CHRIS JONES, who joined Esquire as a contributing editor and sports columnist, became a writer at large when he won the 2005 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for the story that became the basis for this book. Previously he was a sportswriter at the National Post, where he won an award as Canada’s outstanding young journalist. His work has also appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Sports Writing anthologies. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
The crew of STS-113, including Expedition Six, board the Astro-Van on their way to the launchpad. Ken Bowersox is in the foreground, flashing the victory sign. Nikolai Budarin is behind him, smiling at the camera. And Don Pettit is the last of the astronauts, waving to reporters and friends.
After a series of delays, the space shuttle Endeavour, with Expedition Six stowed mid-deck, finally lifts off into Florida’s night sky on November 23, 2002.
Expedition Six poses for a family portrait shortly after their arrival at the International Space Station on November 26, 2002: (from left) Nikolai Budarin, Don Pettit, and Ken Bowersox.
Don Pettit’s “Saturday Morning Science”: A thin film of water held in a loop of wire reacts to being shaken in weightlessness.
Don Pettit, Expedition Six’s science officer, uses his trusty Makita drill to fix the troublesome Microgravity Glovebox inside Destiny, the American lab.
Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox, nearly lost in the clutter inside Destiny. Floating above them are the supply tank and pump for the Internal Thermal Control System.
Nikolai Budarin, Expedition Six’s Russian flight engineer, is pictured inside the relatively orderly Zvezda, the heart of the International Space Station.
Don Pettit (left) and Ken Bowersox, trying on their spacesuits inside the Quest Airlock, in preparation for their first spacewalk, in January 2003.
Don Pettit snaps a photograph of the P1 truss after he and Ken Bowersox put the finishing touches on its installation.
Columbia’s lost crew: (left to right) Dave Brown, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla, Michael Anderson, Willie McCool, and Ilan Ramon.
On February 4, 2003, President George W. Bush speaks at the memorial service for Columbia’s crew: “We lost them so close to home.” Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator, is seated to the president’s immediate right.
In April 2003, inside Zvezda. Nikolai Budarin (left) and Ken Bowersox pull on their Russian SOKOL spacesuits, practicing for their return flight to earth on the Soyuz TMA-1.
A long fall down: Don Pettit slips out of the Quest Airlock at the start of his second spacewalk, in April 2003, the Earth glowing beneath his feet.
Expeditions Six and Seven, finally united, in Zvezda. Ken Bowersox and Nikolai Budarin are in the back row. Ed Lu, Don Pettit, and Yuri Malenchenko float side by side in front.
As seen through a window on the International Space Station, the Soyuz TMA-1 capsule—carrying Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit—begins its harrowing journey back to earth.
A Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station’s hull: the spherical orbital module, the bell-shaped descent module, and the cylindrical propulsion module, complete with solar panels.
The full length of the International Space Station; toward the bottom right corner of the photograph, a Soyuz capsule is attached to Destiny. The Caspian Sea provides a breathtaking backdrop.
