Out of Orbit (11 page)

There was no reply.

There was only quiet. In their desperation, technicians willed Husband’s voice to crackle across the radio, for streams of data to begin pouring out of the heavens, for a blip to appear on a screen so that everybody could breathe again.

Outside, in the bleachers at the start of this seemingly perfect
day, the adults waited for the two sonic booms that would signal
Columbia
’s arrival, one after the other, two minutes before touchdown. The countdown clock ticked past that deadline, and still there was no sound. In a growing silence that was broken only by the sounds of the children playing, the crowd watched the clock continue its countdown, second by second. Before they could watch the clock reach zero, the families were taken by their hands and loaded into vans and smothered in hugs.

In a family video conference during
Columbia
’s final flight, Laurel Clark’s doom-fearing son, Iain, had asked the question that even those who knew intimately the answer now found themselves asking:

“Why did you go?”

·   ·   ·

Still warm in his sleeping bag, Pettit found himself thinking about coffee. As it had for the Russians before him, it was becoming a concern. He didn’t have anything like one hundred pouches anymore. But looking out through his window at another orbital sunrise, he decided to hell with it: this was the sort of morning that coffee was made for. He put on his glasses, pulled himself out of his sleeping bag, pushed his way out of his private quarters, and found his center of gravity. With it, he propelled himself in clean, practiced movements, like a swimmer who’s found his stroke, past a sleeping Bowersox, toward the far end of station. There, Budarin remained zipped away. Pettit opened the metal drawer that held his fixes and took out a pouch, a silver bag with powder packed hard into the bottom of it. He filled it with hot water and began hunting for a straw. He found one, as well as a little Russian
tvorog
to eat, and headed back for his sleeping bag. Pettit tucked himself in, savoring another breakfast in bed, and turned his mind toward the day ahead. It was a lazy Saturday. He’d finish his coffee, check his e-mail, and then spend the rest of his weekend cleaning house—scrubbing fingerprints from windows, wiping down handrails with antiseptic solution, even mopping up the occasional coffee splatter.
But there wasn’t any hurry. Although he had sometimes felt like it was flying, he knew that time was the single thing he wasn’t really running out of. He was still weeks away from home.

Pettit took another sip and watched the sun rise for a second time. The rush of it still drew him to the window, the sun coming and going every forty-five minutes, good for sixteen dawns and dusks a day. Next he looked down at the vapor trails that were folding on top of the United States like a quilt, the way they always did, one by one by one, New York to Los Angeles, Boston to San Francisco. They had become his way of catching a glimpse of home even when it was shrouded in storms. But on this day, the horizon was clear and the sun was bright, so bright that he didn’t notice the finger of white smoke spreading out over Texas.

He finished his coffee. He got up and began puttering, checking his watch every so often to make sure he didn’t miss the ground conference scheduled for that afternoon. At about two o’clock, Greenwich mean time—sailors’ time, the official time zone of station—there was a conversation planned with Houston to draw up next week’s activities. Usually the voice coming out of the radio told the crew what they already knew, and they floated about, keeping their ears half open for news or drama. This time was different. This time, the voice told Expedition Six to stand by.

There are two main rooms at Mission Control, next door to each other, almost identical in design but now cast under different shadows. In the first, from which the shuttle is commanded, the silence had turned hopeless, watering eyes turned toward the end of
Columbia
’s last orbit, a line left incomplete, frozen on the giant screen at the front of the room. In the second, from which the space station is tracked, and where numb technicians sat behind consoles labeled ODIN, OSO, ECLSS, ROBO, and a dozen other things, a heated debate was unfolding. No one was sure how to tell Expedition Six that
Columbia
, the shuttle that Bowersox had twice piloted, had just disappeared in the thin blue-green envelope beneath them. No one was sure how to tell them that seven friends were probably gone, too.

Jefferson Howell, a retired marine lieutenant general and the
plainspoken director of the Johnson Space Center, ended the debate when he sat down at the radio. He considered his words for only a moment before he pressed a button that would bounce his voice off a satellite and into the space station’s tinny air.

“I have some bad news,” Howell began, and because it was Howell who was delivering it, Pettit and Bowersox knew exactly how bad before he got the rest of it out: “We’ve lost the vehicle.”

Nine words. That was all. Everything else was left unspoken, and in the quiet, the blanks were left for each of them to fill on his own. In the way the parents of missing children hang on to the smallest chance that their loved ones are just lost, not lost for good, Pettit and Bowersox wondered whether any of
Columbia
’s evacuation systems had triggered, and whether any of their friends were floating down to a cloudless earth under parachutes.

They held on to that faint hope until a battered helmet was found on the grass later in the afternoon. The flight data recorder was also found. So was Laurel Clark’s videotape.

Each grim discovery was reported to Expedition Six. Each pushed aside their faint hope to make room for more sadness.

Pettit folded away his chessboard, finally knowing that the game would remain forever unfinished.

The sadness settled itself in.

·   ·   ·

Every so often, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had been allowed to use the Internet phone on closed channels, with the tape recorders turned off. This was one of those times. Before, when no one was home—when it was time for her to get the groceries or for the kids to go to soccer practice—they had left messages on the machines: “Hey honey, it’s me, in space.” Sometimes those messages were saved and listened to in the still of the night, again and again. After the conversations of that afternoon, those messages would almost always be saved, because she never knew when they might become all she had left.

In that way, their families had finally caught up. In their time away, the men of Expedition Six had learned already that the everyday
interactions of life on earth—the messages left on machines, but also the smiles and waves from school buses and the notes left on fridges and pillows—were the things worth carrying with them up into space. They had made room for them in their memory’s permanent collection, just as they had learned to forget about the trivialities that they had once kept too close. And they had come to understand the true order of things, because they had learned how the universe works. Some astronauts become the first men to walk on the moon, and others burn to death sitting on the launchpad or seventy-three seconds after leaving it, or sixteen minutes from returning to earth.

Now they knew, too, that they were no longer weeks away from home. The next shuttle up was to take them down. But they remembered
Challenger
, lost nearly twenty years ago, and they knew that their ride wasn’t coming anytime soon. They were suddenly much farther gone, although they weren’t really sure how far, because just like that, the miles were made more meaningless than ever before. It was distance without measure. There were instants when Dallas was farther away from Houston than they were. But what mattered now, what separated them from home, was time. Suddenly they were locked in a souped-up Airstream, trapped on the other side of that single pane of glass.

They told Mission Control that they were all right, that they had trained a lifetime for this, that they could hold on to their memories for another year, maybe longer. Part of them might even have believed it.

But in the coming dark days, after
Columbia
’s memorial service was piped in from the ground—after they had heard President Bush say, “Their mission was almost complete, and we lost them so close to home”—and after they’d rung the ship’s bell in Destiny, seven times for seven astronauts, they couldn’t help thinking that their friends hadn’t been so close to home after all.

But this is how close they were:

The men and women of
Columbia
returned to earth the way they had left it, accompanied by sonic booms and vapor trails. The first debris reports were called in from the small town of Lufkin, Texas, only a three-hour drive east of the crew’s homes in Houston. Heat-scarred wreckage landed in forests, fishing holes, and parking lots. Smoke rose from front lawns. A piece crashed through the ceiling in a dentist’s office. An engine fragment weighing six-hundred pounds hit the sixth fairway at a golf course with enough velocity to break through the water table and create a small pond.

Frank Coday was sitting in his mobile home in Hemphill, Texas, smoking a cigarette, when he heard strange noises outside and pictures began falling off the walls. On the uneasy hunt for answers, he went outside, casting his eyes up at that perfect blue sky. He decided to climb into his truck and make the short drive across to his brother’s house, down their shared country road. On the way, he saw an unmistakable, lifeless shape on the gravel in front of him. He steered around it and picked up the pace.

His brother, Roger, had heard the same noises and was waiting for him. Frank told him that he’d seen something on the road, something that he didn’t want to look at alone. The two men drove back and got out of their truck. There, at their feet, were the remains of an astronaut.

There were more cradled in the oak trees around them. And more still in the corner of a nearby pasture.

Jim Wetherbee, who had volunteered to head the recovery operation,
was already on his way from Houston. Soon he would pay a visit to the Coday brothers. Over the next five days, Wetherbee’s team found the remains of all seven astronauts. With each new nightmare report, police tape went up. Reverends issued last rites. The remains were carried away in hearses driven by local funeral directors and later flown to Delaware for identification. Finally, they were returned to their families.

But in some way, those astronauts had arrived home long before, in the instant they had found rest in the East Texas hills. They had traveled millions of miles and somehow, as if by fate, they had wrapped their way around the world and into the arms of these wide-open spaces, the big sky country that astronauts usually come from and to which they inevitably return: to places like Lufkin, Hemphill, and Littlefield, all of those prideful small towns that the wind has scattered across the landscape like seeds. From space, when darkness spreads across them, they light up one by one, looking so much like stars laid against the night.

·   ·   ·

Don Pettit was born and raised in Silverton, Oregon, another one of those seeds, another one of those stars. There are farmers there and loggers and Pettit’s father, Virgil, was their doctor. He did a little bit of everything, from pulling out gallbladders that looked like bags of marbles to delivering babies, all for what his patients could afford on that particular afternoon. He would receive letters from the American Medical Association suggesting strongly that he raise his rates, but Dr. Pettit always believed that fast pennies were better than slow dollars, and besides, the way he ran things made him feel good. Don, the youngest of his three sons, would go down to the office and watch him work; he took the theory of his father’s practice to heart. He also took to pulling out the old, brown skeleton that sat jumbled in a bottom drawer and trying to piece it back together. It’s hard to know, exactly, but maybe that’s where Pettit the Younger picked up his tic for making parts into their intended whole. Later, one of his brothers gave him a two-speed transmission for his birthday, and Pettit still remembers it as the best present he’s ever received.
He spent entire afternoons taking it apart and putting it together until he could knit it through by touch.

Transmissions gave way to windup clocks, windup clocks to the logging equipment that he repaired during his summers off from school.

Not surprisingly, when it came time for Pettit to head to university and choose a course of study, he picked something that would give him puzzles to solve: chemical engineering at Oregon State University in nearby Corvallis. There he pulled apart problems instead of machines, honing his natural bent toward analytical thinking, but he was also being encouraged to tap the unconventional streak that ran through him, mostly by a professor named Dr. Octave Levenspiel. When devising a conundrum about gas molecules and entropy, Dr. Levenspiel would find a way to make it about canaries in a cage. Teaching the fine art of approximation, he would ask Pettit how many barbers plied their trade in New York City. Like a magician training an apprentice, he taught Pettit tricks. He stretched him, too, and groomed him for big dreaming—engineers had picked up from God in building the world. Suddenly all of the things that Pettit was obsessed with as a kid—airplanes, electric trains, and rockets, especially—came back into play, part of the larger equation. Nothing was out of his reach, not even space.

He had spent countless childhood nights staring through his brother’s cheap telescope, trying to pick out planets that looked more like fuzzy footballs. And he had listened again and again to John Glenn describing how earth looked from orbit, the astronaut’s voice scratching through a free floppy record that came with Pettit’s new pair of Red Ball Jets.

A throw-in with his sneakers made him want desperately to look over Glenn’s shoulder and enjoy the same view. With the help of Dr. Levenspiel, childhood fantasy seemed that much closer to coming true. The universe started to look like that old two-speed transmission, like just another machine for him to find his way through.