by Tom Abrahams
Clayton was venting as he tried to distract himself from the fear that washed over him when he stepped to the airlock. Fear didn’t fit him. He wasn’t sure what to do with it.
He unhooked the suit from an umbilical and flipped on the Orlan’s internal battery before checking the computer at his chest and adjusting the flow of oxygen into the helmet. His body was warm, but he didn’t adapt the temperature of the LCG. He knew once he stepped out into space, “translating” along the handrail outside the airlock, he’d get cold.
“This is what I call a major pucker factor,” he said. “No doubt.”
It was time.
Clayton’s pulse quickened, thumping against his neck as he lowered the airlock pressure to near zero. He depressed the airlock, maneuvered the lever as he’d been taught in training, and exited the hatch.
He found himself on the verge of hyperventilating, like the first time he’d scuba dived in Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Key Largo. Gliding through the lock, he reminded himself to breathe in and out slowly and evenly. The breathing kept him calm and conserved air.
He floated from the lock to the station’s exterior without taking in the remarkable view in front of him, then turned to close the hatch and affix his dual straps to the handrails along the outside of the Russian module.
Once connected, Clayton took one final deep breath and exhaled. His eyes widened and sweat bloomed on his brow. The seriousness of his task mixed with the excitement and anxiety of his first spacewalk created a tingling sensation that caught him off-guard.
All of the hours of training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston hadn’t fully prepared him for a real EVA. The NBL pool was two hundred feet long, one hundred feet wide, and forty feet deep. It held more than six million gallons of water designed to mimic weightlessness by providing the neutrality between floating and sinking in water. In the NBL Clayton had felt the weight of his suit, felt the drag as he moved. In space, he felt the weight of the mission.
It pressed on him like gravity.
Clayton shuddered, a tingle running along his spine. He’d taken the DRINK ME potion without realizing it, but he could taste it on his lips.
“What a curious feeling! I must be shutting up like a telescope.” Louis Carroll’s famous, prescient words from Adventures in Wonderland hung in his mind.
The vastness of space washed over him and he instantly felt infinitesimal. The station, the moon, and the Earth were tiny. Their place in the universe shrank as he scanned the overwhelming depth of blackness surrounding him. The sun was on the other side of the planet. It was darker than he’d imagined darkness could be.
He was at once hot and cold. In space there was no up or down. Everything was relative. He felt twisted inside. He looked down at his feet and saw the Earth below him. Or was it above him? Regardless, it hung there away from him, speeding and spinning through space. A true spaceship on an endless voyage.
Clayton looked away from Earth and outward toward the stars. They were brighter than he imagined, more crystalline even than they appeared from the Cupola, sparkling and strobing light years away. He thought about that light, the energy released from those stars. It was the same energy that tore away from the Sun and churned through the ISS and Earth.
He recalled Astronaut Rick Mastracchio’s words. He finally understood them. Mastracchio, a veteran of three shuttle missions and one ISS expedition, once said, “Seeing Earth from inside the spacecraft is great, but it is nothing compared to seeing it through the large visor of the helmet. Imagine looking at the ocean from the deck of a boat versus jumping in the ocean and splashing around. Everyone wants to splash around, even in space.”
Clayton was in the ocean, all right. He was in the deep end without a life vest.
He listened to the sound of his own breathing and refocused on the task at hand. He moved carefully along the rails and then gently pushed away from the relative security of the station’s exterior hull. It didn’t take much until he was floating free.
As he drifted from the ISS, he held on to the twin tethers at his waist, not ready to let go. They extended to their full length, stretching the fabric when Clayton’s body jerked, his pelvis pulled forward as he swam helplessly back toward the station.
He quickly let go of the tethers and held his hands out, preparing for the impact against the Russian module. It was coming at him faster than he expected. He managed to raise his hands at the right moment and stop himself. He grabbed onto the railing with one hand and gripped his glove tight around the bar as his momentum carried him away from the station again. He strained and pulled in with his arm, steadying himself at the side of the station.
Clayton evened his breathing and found the dial on the left side of his chest. He spun it to lower the temperature of the cooling liquid. He blinked away the sweat in his eyes and licked it from his upper lip.
Enjoying the cool rush across his arms and legs, he regrouped. He had to get to his crewmates.
“Get it together, Shepard,” he told himself. Then he whispered the secret astronaut prayer frequently muttered by the few men and women in the history of the planet who’d ventured beyond the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Lord,” he prayed, “please don’t let me F this up.”
Clayton looked down at his feet again and saw the familiar outline of the Baltic Sea. It was morning there.
The ISS was over Russia.
He spoke, activating the hot mic in his suit. “Korolyov, this is station on space-to-ground one. Comm check.” He spoke so quickly his words slurred together.
He tried in butchered Russian. “Korolyov, eto stant-siya- na zem-ly-u o-din,” he said. “Test sv-yazi.”
No response. Frustrated, he manually keyed the mic. Nothing.
He switched channels and tried again in both languages. Nothing. He reached out to Roscosmos Headquarters in Moscow, Russian Launch Control in Baikonur, and GCTC in Star City. Either nobody could hear him, or his radio wasn’t transmitting. His breath and the pulse thumping blood through his head were the only sounds he could hear.
Clayton clenched his jaw. “Der’mo,” he muttered. It was one of three curse words Boris Voin had successfully taught him during their meals together on board the station. The ISS had hosted more than two hundred spacewalks in its twenty-year life. None of them, Clayton was sure, were like his.
He gripped both gloves around the railing on the edge of the Russian module and worked his way toward the port photovoltaic arrays. The station generated power with the help of eight solar arrays, four on either side. Together, they produced eighty-four kilowatts of power to what was effectively the size of a six-bedroom house. The arrays spanned wider than the wings of a Boeing 777. If laid side by side, they’d cover an acre of land.
Voin and Greenwood had quickly maneuvered their way, more skillfully than Clayton, to the port one truss segment. It was effectively the joint that connected the central components of the ISS with the interior port array.
In addition to the debris, or space dirt, they’d found underneath the cover of the malfunctioning joint, they’d discovered cell damage. They’d concluded that much in the first ninety minutes of the EVA. That damage had further reduced the array’s output, compounding the potential danger. Once they’d cleaned the debris from under the joint cover, they were painstakingly trying to repair the damaged cells.
The irony wasn’t lost on Clayton. The very power they harnessed to operate their modest orbiting outpost was the same that was killing it.
Greenwood’s tethers were affixed to port trusses three and four. Voin was connected on the opposite side of the array at port truss five.
The station fit together like Legos from different kits. Over the course of nearly two decades, the station grew exponentially from the single forty-two-foot-long Russian Zarya control module launched in 1998.
That same year, the United States added another eighteen feet with Unity. Gradually, the ISS expanded piece by piece. The trusses held
the variety of nodes and modules in place and were the mounts for unpressurized components. There were eleven of them and they were what engineers called the “bus structure” for the ISS. They were named for their planned positions on the station. Z for Zenith, P for port, S for starboard.
The S0 truss was none of the above. It was essentially at the effective center of the station. Officially designated the Center Integrated Truss Assembly Starboard 0 Truss, S0 was the backbone of the station. All of the external utilities for the habitable ISS modules and nodes ran through S0. Power, data, video, and ammonia for the automatic thermal control system connected from the S0 across the station. It also housed four GPS antennas. Running along its length was a track that provided a path for a robotic arm to move along the truss. That arm was also known as the Canadarm2.
Clayton floated smoothly across the forty-foot-long truss on the side opposite the arm. Methodically he crept along the rails, focusing on each movement. He felt the urgency boiling up within him the closer he got to the array and fought the urge to speed up. His attention was focused fully on the truss in front of him. He worked it as if he were walking the thin ledge of a skyscraper. He looked straight ahead at the truss. Not down. Not up. Not to either side.
As he inched closer to the port edge of the large gray structure, he swung around to look directly ahead at where he was going. His heart sank.
“I’m an idiot.” The words bounced around inside his helmet. “A total freaking idiot.” He clenched his jaw and bit the inside of his lip.
Straight ahead, blocking his movement to the arrays and his crewmates, was the P1 truss segment. He was on the wrong side of it, the side from which a long radiator extended, blocking his path. There was no way around it.
Not all astronauts were created equal. They came from different backgrounds and had different mentalities. Together they made complete mission teams. Separately they each had their strengths and weaknesses.
If instructed to flip a light switch, an astronaut who was militarily trained would do it without pause. A scientist serving as a payload or mission specialist would ask why. He or she would question the order, the reasoning behind it. They would ask not only about the switch but the need for light. What color light? Did the task even need light?
An engineer, though, would play with the switch, remove its housing, understand how it functioned, and then after making sure a switch was the best way to engage the mechanism and initiate said task, he or she would flip it. Or, alternatively, the engineer would replace it with a dial, a knob, or a lever.
At that moment, Clayton was glad he was an engineer. He was a problem solver who could think quickly and remove obstacles blocking the completion of any task.
That was why NASA had chosen him from among the thousands of astronaut applicants in his class. He saw a problem; he mentally and physically parsed it into its essential pieces; he fixed it.
Clayton stared at the radiator. It was a problem. He’d solve it.
First, though, he lowered the temperature of the liquid snaking through his suit. A chill spreading over him forced an involuntary shiver.
Clayton turned as would a man with a stiff neck to look back at where he’d already translated. It would take too long to move all the way back to where he started and then maneuver to the opposite side of the truss. His friends’ lives might depend on his speed.
He spun back to the radiator and then faced the truss. He looked down.
“All right,” he said. “That’s the answer.”
Clayton accessed the rough blueprint of the station’s exterior in his mind. Why he had ignored it when first exiting the ISS was a question he couldn’t answer. He hoped it hadn’t ruined the mission.
He closed his eyes and mentally traversed the underside of the truss. He would clip and unclip the tethers as he moved, like a rock climber would edge up the sheer face of a peak. He’d then maneuver to the opposite side of the truss, beyond the Candaarm2 and at the beginning of the P1 truss. That would allow him to find the rails on that side of the ISS and move outward toward the array, Voin, and Greenwood.
“You can do this,” he assured himself. He took a deep breath and unhooked the first tether.
From a distance, the S0 truss looked vaguely like the underside of an Imperial Class Star Destroyer. Up close it was a series of beams and connectors that provided plenty of spots to attach the tethers.
Clayton worked along the truss with ease. Like a child on monkey bars, he unhooked one tether, pulled himself in the right direction, hooked the tether, and unhooked the other before repeating the process.
A confident smile spread across his face as he moved. He felt it in his cheeks as the plan he envisioned propelled him to the underside of the truss.
Once underneath the large structure, he pulled his legs even with his torso. Lying on his back, parallel to the underside of the truss, he slowed his momentum. Unhook. Pull. Hook. Unhook. Pull. Hook. Unhook.
He neared the edge of the underside and stopped, using his arms and hips to lower his legs beneath him. He was close to the Canadarm2 and was on the correct side of it. He unhooked the longer tether and hung there for a moment before turning back to look at how far he’d moved. As he did, he lost his grip. Worse, he’d gotten out of his rhythm when he stopped and didn’t retether the smaller cord.
Clayton was suddenly floating free.
It happened slowly and yet impossibly fast. It didn’t take much of a movement to create tremendous momentum given his mass.
He reached with both arms, stretching as far as he could. He grabbed nothing. In space it was more difficult to judge distance. The relativity of things was off. How could it not be when he floated above a planet with a four-thousand-mile radius?
To make his predicament more dire, he was in an Orlan and not an EMU.
Despite all of the advantages of the Orlan suit Clayton wore, there was one major disadvantage. It was not equipped with SAFER.
SAFER—Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue—was an emergency jet-propulsion pack on the back of NASA’s EMU. It was specifically designed for a moment like this.
In an emergency, astronauts who became untethered from the ISS could use the system to guide themselves to safety. It was a smaller version of the MMU used regularly on EVAs. He was wearing an emergency Orlan. This eagle, the English translation of the Russian suit’s namesake, had no wings. Clayton floated free of the structure. He was moving, untethered, away from S0 truss.
The suit suddenly felt hot. He reached out with both hands, sweat dripping into his eyes. He flailed as the vacuum of low Earth orbit carried him away in its unending current. He twisted, trying to turn around and grab something. Anything.
Flashes of his family flickered in his mind; Jackie’s trembling hand as he slipped the ring onto her finger, the bright blue of Marie’s eyes staring into his the first time he held her in the minutes after she was born, Chris splashing in the water at Dinosaur Valley State Park, convinced he could attract a T. rex if he made enough noise. The bright flashes turned dark.
He saw his father’s cancer-ravaged body holding his mother’s hand as they walked along the Seawall in Galveston. His steps were fragile as he looked out at the waves crashing against the jetties. Her weight held up his; her balance was his.
He saw his twin’s open casket and the white makeup that caked her young face. The injuries that killed her were hidden beneath the new satin dress their mother had purchased for a middle school dance. She’d been the smart one. She’d been the achiever. She’d been the one not wearing a seatbelt even though he’d reminded her when they’d climbed into the backseat of their family sedan.
There was Jackie again, closed off and distant. He’d chosen his own needs and wants over that of the family. He was a selfish prick, she’d told him more than once. He’d gone for the glory and the fame and the adulation instead of what really mattered. He’d placed love of self above love of family. Jackie had warned him the children were drifting from him. Now he wa
s the one drifting.
Clayton’s stomach lurched. His pulse pounded against his temples and neck. He fought against the panic spreading through his core like a virus.
“Think,” he said aloud in his helmet. “Damn it. Think, Shepard. Do something.”
It was too late. He was free of the truss. He was floating away from it. There was no jetpack to help him. There was nobody to save him. Clayton Shepard was drifting to a certain silent death.
He didn’t feel it through the panic coursing through him like a numbing agent. But when the Canadarm2 elbow hit the back of his own, he instinctively reached behind his back and grabbed.
His gloved hand slid along the robotic arm for several feet, his fingers unable to grasp anything. Clayton tried spinning to face the arm but couldn’t. He blindly grabbed and prodded at the arm, watching the truss and the body of the ISS drift farther away. He was easily thirty or forty feet from the structure. Momentum shifted his body as he floated, the action of his hand grappling at the arm rotating him enough that as he inched toward the end of the arm he caught one of three wrist joints with a clawed glove.
He grabbed it, hanging on against the invisible force tugging at him, urging him deeper into space. Clayton’s muscles tensed and he gnashed his teeth.
His fingers slipped but held on as the momentum slowed and dissipated. His feet floated back toward the ISS. He was upright, or what felt like it, and he pulled himself toward the arm. With his right hand he found one of the tethers and connected it to the other. He took the elongated tether and looped it around the arm like a lumberjack might attach himself to a tree. He latched the large loop at his waist and exhaled deeply.
He turned to face away from the ISS. He was at the very end of the fifty-seven-foot-long arm. Had he missed the wrist joint…
No. He didn’t want to think about it.
He pushed himself back to face the ISS. From the end of the Canadarm2, he could see much of the station. He scanned the structure, and to the right of it, for the first time since exiting the airlock, he saw his crewmates.
