Out of Orbit (10 page)

Bowersox, however, humbly admitted that it looked more like
the number 1, which it did. “Our number-one Christmas in space,” he said a little sheepishly, and with that, the three of them began digging in with knives, using them like shovels.

“Not bad,” Pettit said, wiping icing from the corners of his mouth.

That cake tasted like home.

·   ·   ·

Another month passed, the days and nights lost in an endless string of orbits. During one of them, Expedition Six reached the halfway mark of their mission. They were deep enough into their journey to make it harder and harder for them to remember its beginnings. Instead, their minds had become preoccupied with its end—not that they wished for it, or that they even looked forward to it, but for the first time they were mindful of its coming. Now, whenever they stared through their windows, what once had seemed so far away looked as close as it had ever been.

On February 1, 2003, Don Pettit began his day as he always did, by fogging glass with his breath. Below him, in a small corner of Florida, the last of the mist had burned away to reveal a perfect morning, cool but comfortable, with just a few clouds stretched across the opening sky. The bleachers that had been set up about halfway down the Kennedy Space Center’s three-mile-long runway caught the sun and began to fill. Reporters, dignitaries, and the husbands, wives, and children of the seven astronauts on board the space shuttle
Columbia
gathered to watch its gliderlike return after a successful sixteen-day mission. In front of the bleachers, a large digital clock ticked down toward the crew’s scheduled arrival time. Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown, and Ilan Ramon were only minutes away.

Aside from their shared inexperience—Husband, Chawla, and Anderson had each flown into space just once before; the rest were rookies—the crew assembled for STS-107 was as diverse as any NASA had put together.

Husband, the mission’s commander, was a forty-five-year-old
air force colonel, a devout Christian, and a graduate of the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. The native of Amarillo, Texas, was also the married father of two.

Sitting next to him in the pilot’s seat was McCool, a Naval Academy graduate (he finished second in his class) and aircraft carrier flier. Born in San Diego, the forty-one-year-old had been raised in Lubbock, Texas. In his youth, he had been a top long-distance runner. Along with Husband—along with every member of the crew except for the bachelor Brown—McCool was married, as well as the father of three boys.

Behind Husband and McCool sat Chawla and Clark. Chawla, acting as the shuttle’s flight engineer, was an aerospace engineer and an accomplished pilot, fond of stunt flying. A native of Karnal, India, the forty-one-year-old was a hero to some in her homeland, where many women couldn’t dream of one day reading a book, let alone strapping in for a flight into space.

Clark, also forty-one, wasn’t quite so removed from her Racine, Wisconsin, home. A navy commander, diver, and physician, she had become the mission’s self-styled documentarian, with plans to film the entire descent. She hoped the upbeat footage might help her earn the forgiveness of her eight-year-old son, Iain, who had begged her not to make the trip. The family had recently survived a small plane crash unscathed, at least physically. But deeper down, Iain had scars.

Below deck, where Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had been locked away for their launch, the three remaining crew members stared at the same rows of storage lockers.

Anderson, the mission’s forty-three-year-old payload commander, called Spokane, Washington, home. He was one of the few African American astronauts in NASA’s pool. He, his wife, and their two children attended the same church as Husband. Anderson believed in Heaven.

Brown was the only former circus acrobat on board. The forty-six-year-old native of Arlington, Virginia, was, like so many of his crewmates, a product of the navy, an aviator, and a flight surgeon. Unlike the rest of them, he had gone into space certain that he
would not return. In the weeks and months before launch, he had been plagued with premonitions that his first flight would be his last. He had gone so far as to tell his friends, if not his crewmates, that he would not be coming home.

And last there was Ramon. He was the oldest member of the crew, forty-eight, and he had the most children, four. The son of German and Polish refugees (his mother had survived Auschwitz), Ramon was born in Tel Aviv to a new world. He held a degree in electrical and computer engineering and had been an ace fighter pilot, leading bombing runs into Iraq and Lebanon. He preferred not to talk about them. He was more open about his becoming Israel’s first astronaut. His surprise selection—he hadn’t even applied for the honor; it was offered to him in a phone call out of the blue—had left him humbled and thankful. “I think I was in the right place at the right time,” Ramon said.

He wasn’t content simply to hitch a ride, however, the way some foreign astronauts had been (namely the Saudi prince stowed in the bowels of
Discovery
in 1985). He had asked to perform an experiment that meant something to his country and his people. After much debate, it was decided that he would study how the dust picked up by winds across the Sahara affected weather in the Mediterranean.

The dust analysis was one of more than eighty experiments that had been scheduled for the mission, most of which took place in a double-wide Spacehab module dropped into
Columbia
’s cargo bay. They included the usual investigations into bone loss and the physiological effects of weightlessness. There was the latest episode in the seemingly endless survey of zero-gravity protein crystal growth. New technology in space navigation, satellite communication, and thermal control systems was tested. The amount of solar radiation reaching the earth and what was left of the planet’s ozone layer were measured. A sample of xenon was carried into space to watch how it behaved in low temperatures. A small zoo was also carefully tended—the proverbial guinea pigs, albeit in the shape of thirteen rats, eight spiders, five silkworms, three carpenter bees, fifteen harvester ants, and a school of fish.

It was a full load, partly because
Columbia
’s flight would be the last devoted exclusively to scientific research. Until the fleet was finally scuttled in a few short years, every other shuttle mission would visit the International Space Station to help finish its assembly. That distinction left STS-107 subject to intense prelaunch criticism; some felt that the flight’s $500 million price tag was too high given the expected returns. NASA officials argued otherwise, but their protests began to ring hollow when the mission was repeatedly bumped, from July 2001 to July 2002, until, finally, to January 16, 2003. The discovery of cracked fuel lines and frayed wiring in the notoriously prickly
Columbia
contributed to the delays, but so, too, did two favored missions to the Hubble telescope and the continued treks to station. That’s how STS-107 came to lift off nearly two months after Expedition Six had on STS-113. Rick Husband and company had been repeatedly tapped on their shoulders and pointed toward the back of the line.

The crew had tried to make the best of their sometimes torturous dragging out. For more than nine hundred days, Husband, McCool, Chawla, Clark, Anderson, Brown, and Ramon had worked toward their shared goal of finally reaching space. They even found the time to lift themselves at least part of the way there, scaling 13,000 feet to the top of Wyoming’s Wind River Peak. They had hoped that the climb would boost their spirits, and it did. On top of that mountain, they were reminded of all that they were waiting for.

·   ·   ·

Liftoff had been seemingly flawless, as had been the mission. Over the course of 255 orbits around the earth, the only snag had come when one of the Spacehab’s air-conditioning units sprang a leak and, to avoid the risk of condensation building up in the module, the unit was shut down. Given their previous hurdles, the crew wasn’t about to complain about a slight spike in temperature.

During their busy time aloft, they had stopped only once, on January 27 at 12:34 p.m., to call up Pettit, Bowersox, and Budarin. (“We’re really excited to be able to talk to you guys, one space lab to another big old space lab on that beautiful station of yours,”
Husband said.) Pettit was probably the closest to the shuttle crew; McCool, Clark, and Brown were classmates of his. The rest knew one another only casually. But over the preceding days, they had forged a deeper bond. Six billion people were on the planet. Only ten were in space, and they knew that together, they were virtually alone, united in their isolation. Ramon had promised to hug Bowersox’s three children for him after his return. Pettit, looking down at the Black Sea, and McCool, orbiting over Brazil, had been involved in a longer dialogue.

In his waiting for his own mission to get off the ground, Pettit had designed a chessboard (patent pending) made of the soft half of a square of Velcro. He had then cut out white and black pieces from swatches of the sticky half. By e-mail and over their radio, Pettit and McCool had announced their next moves, each prying their pieces from their respective boards and pressing them back into place. The game was made one for the record books by the distance between them. All that was going on, and they could still trade pawns.

During the single conversation between the shuttle and station crews, McCool had been scheduled for sleep. Before lights-out, however, he had asked Husband to relay his move to Pettit, and Husband had obliged: E2 to E4.

Before hitting the sack himself, Pettit moved the piece and stared at his makeshift board, reflecting on McCool’s latest play. He went to sleep thinking about his next move.

·   ·   ·

Five days and four nights later, when Pettit woke up again to his life’s beautiful sameness and fogged over his window, he and the rest of Expedition Six knew in the backs of their minds that
Columbia
was to return to earth, but traveling in a vessel that was eight times faster than a rifle bullet didn’t hold the same awe for him as it did for the crowds gathering on the ground. Across the southwestern United States, shuttle watchers switched off their alarms, stepped outside into the chill, and turned their cameras and telescopes to the sky, waiting for a white light to streak across it.

In Florida, the bleachers were now nearly full. A few of the children played behind them. The husbands and wives talked about their plans for welcome-home meals, maybe a drink or two, and some overdue time together on the couch, hearing stories of magic and impossibility.

In
Columbia
’s cockpit, Husband and McCool monitored the instrument panels. The shuttle’s descent is automated, its safe return one of the marvels of physics. The friction from the atmosphere conspires to slow it and drop it, bit by bit, toward home. McCool had been looking forward to reentry; he had heard so much about the accompanying fireworks, and now he would finally get a chance to see them with his own eyes.

Northwest of Hawaii,
Columbia
dropped below 400,000 feet, pushing through the first molecules of the upper atmosphere. The few early sparks didn’t impress McCool as much as he had hoped. He felt let down. But as the shuttle continued its descent, the fire outside its windows continued to build.

“It’s going pretty good now, Ilan,” McCool said, trying his best to describe the view for his friend below decks. “It’s really neat, just a bright orange-yellow out over the nose, all around the nose.”

In time, the bright orange-yellow turned into a full-blown inferno.

“You definitely wouldn’t want to be outside now,” Husband said.

“What, like we did before?” Clark joked, distracted for the moment from her filming. She returned her focus to the camera’s viewfinder, capturing the smiles of her crewmates while they charted their course over Hawaii, across the last patches of the Pacific Ocean, into the airspace over northern California …

Mission Control noticed abnormal readings from four temperature sensors in the shuttle’s left wing.

 … over Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico …

Husband called down: “And, uh, Hou—” His transmission was cut off.

Mission Control saw then that more sensors had tripped, indicating a loss of tire pressure in the left landing gear.

Husband tried to talk to the ground again. He had seen the lights go off in front of him: “Roger, uh, buh—”

 … on into Texas …

When, just sixteen minutes before touchdown, all of those shuttle watchers on the ground saw that heartbreaking flare, and that one streak of white light becoming several.

But Mission Control couldn’t see what those sky-turned eyes had seen.

They knew only that on liftoff, just eighty-one seconds into
Columbia
’s flight, a chunk of the external tank’s insulating foam had broken off, striking the underside of the left wing. Over the course of the crew’s sixteen days in orbit, film of the foam strike was watched again and again by engineers on the ground, just to make sure that no serious damage had been done. They decided that it wasn’t cause for concern. Wayward foam had struck every shuttle during launch. Always, it had bounced away harmlessly, like a bug off a windshield.

This time, however, it had not been harmless. The foam had punched a ten-inch hole into something called RCC panel 8, one of the black, heat-resistant, reinforced carbon-carbon panels that cover the shuttle’s nose and the leading edges of its wings. The same superheated plasma that had enraptured
Columbia
’s crew poured through that hole like mercury, burning away the sensors that first raced hearts at Mission Control. While the shuttle continued its journey home at eighteen times the speed of sound, thirty-seven miles up, that plasma melted the wing’s aluminum skin from the inside out. Without it,
Columbia
first began to shake, and then to tumble, and finally it broke apart.

“
Columbia
, Houston, comm check …”