Out of Orbit (14 page)

On his bravest days, he would push his flying heap higher still, sometimes high enough to catch a glimpse of the curvature of the earth. For Bowersox, moments like those were holier than he could have ever found in any one of those eighty-nine churches, his eyes still catching the last of the sun even while it got dark below, squeezing out just a few more minutes until the lights came on at the airfield and called him home. Flight after flight, he never tired of the view or the mechanics of soaring. He never tired of the solitude either, the feeling that he could just as soon keep flying over the rocky coast and out into the ocean, happy for being lost in so much blue.

·   ·   ·

Pettit pushed different envelopes, after he found work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1984. Today’s Los Alamos, New Mexico, looks like any other small mountain town; they play high-school football and drive up to buy cheeseburgers from Sonic. But
behind that anywhere façade, there lurks a darker history. During World War II, Los Alamos was a closed camp, guarded and gated, the most secure place on earth. A team of top military scientists, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, were secreted away there, and together, they learned how to split the atom. Next they learned how to turn the desert into glass and make clouds shaped like mushrooms, and the bulk of what they learned was soon dropped on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the years of peace that followed, the scientists who remained behind became part of a larger government laboratory. In it, work continued apace on making and maintaining bombs, but Los Alamos also became a larger mecca for the microscope set. More than 14,000 employees now come in from as far afield as White Rock, Santa Fe, and even Albuquerque. It has become a place where chemists and physicists and engineers are free to explore every corner of the universe. It is a lab without limits.

When Pettit first came aboard, he was assigned to the Dynamic Testing Group, which meant that he toyed with detonation physics, making conventional high explosives. But true to form, and with the encouragement of his superiors, he started to develop his own research programs on the side. He jumped from project to project as fast as he could dream them up, confined only by the number of hours in a day. Even after he was told to go home, he would work away in his garage, which, after driving through a blizzard to an otherwise unattended auction, he had filled with surplus from the lab. It came to look as though it had been pulled out of a cheap science-fiction serial or a comic book. His garage even boasted a collection of three-phase tools, which required Pettit to sneak out and tap into his neighborhood’s electrical grid to power them. He might have risked casting a good chunk of Los Alamos in darkness had he not been working since childhood on his touch.

In particular, his skill at building instruments soon earned him a spot in the Earth and Environmental Science Group. First, Pettit found a way to sample and analyze the fumarole gas spewed out by active volcanoes. He would travel to lava-born places like New Zealand and tap what bubbled up from the center of the earth. Next, he began firing up sounding rockets to probe noctilucent
clouds—eerie, electric-blue clouds that glow brightest at night, usually over polar regions, and always on the fringes of space. (They were first observed in 1885, about two years after Krakatau exploded and coated the upper atmosphere with a thin layer of ash. But the clouds have inexplicably persisted and spread in the centuryplus that’s passed since, and Pettit never could resist an unsolved mystery.) Finally, he studied materials processing in reduced gravity. That vein of exploration gave Pettit the chance to make several flights on board the KC-135, the infamous “Vomit Comet” that dives and climbs in a series of parabolas to simulate weightlessness. Its passengers know something of what astronauts know; the feeling is as close to space as most of us will ever get.

But it wasn’t close enough for Pettit. Even before he began working at the lab, he had put in an application at NASA. After more than six months in Los Alamos, he was finally flown down to Houston for an interview but was ultimately rejected—despite the fact that his father had delivered one of the nurses who had helped evaluate his fitness. He remained optimistic, however, and every year he kept his application updated. Every year he dressed up his project résumé with more lines like “solved problems in detonation physics” and “conducted atmospheric spectroscopy measurements.” He eventually won another interview in 1986, but he was again rejected. A third interview and rejection came in 1993.

By then, it started to feel as though Pettit had become an experiment all on his own, measuring how much disappointment a man could stand.

·   ·   ·

While Don Pettit contemplated throwing himself into one of his volcanoes, Ken Bowersox raced toward the edge of his dream. After only eighteen months at China Lake, Bowersox was accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps in June 1987. Despite its seeming inevitability, the moment remained a jubilant one. Every year, more than one hundred pilots—already culled from the best of the best by their superiors in the navy and air force—submit applications for an astronaut pin. No more than a dozen are interviewed, and, in a bumper
year, perhaps three will receive a phone call from the Johnson Space Center, telling them to pack up their things and head to Texas. But Bowersox’s arrival in Houston was ultimately bittersweet. NASA was still reeling from the
Challenger
disaster the year before, still deep in its long recess of reflection and self-doubt. By the following August, Bowersox had completed his training, passed every evaluation, and was ready for flight, but the shuttle fleet was not. It wasn’t until September 29, 1988, almost three years after the accident, that a short-staffed
Discovery
took an abbreviated trip into space. It was longer still before the shuttles were running at full capacity, and the astronaut backlog that had built up—new recruits are planted at the back of the flight selection line—meant that it was almost five years before Bowersox was finally weightless.

Whether by design or by fate, his abnormally long ground tenure gave way to the sort of career that seemed destined to end on station. For his first flight, in the summer of 1992, Bowersox piloted a specially equipped
Columbia
on the longest shuttle mission yet, STS-50. It had been equipped with the first United States Microgravity Laboratory and, more important, the first Extended Duration Orbiter, a collection of improvements that included additional hydrogen and oxygen tanks for power production, more tanks to pump nitrogen into the cabin’s atmosphere, and a better system for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the crew’s air. Combined, the changes allowed for shuttle flights lasting more than ten days. In this, their inaugural test, they pushed things a little further than that, spending thirteen days, nineteen hours, and thirty minutes away. (In fact, the trip was a day longer than expected because heavy rain back at Edwards Air Force Base delayed the scheduled landing.) In less than two weeks, Bowersox had gone from Houston greenhorn to the veteran of 5,716,615 miles in orbit.

A little more than a year later, in December 1993, he again piloted a high-profile mission, this time on
Endeavour
. STS-61 was devoted to repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, which, after much promise and anticipation, had delivered pictures that looked more like rain-streaked windows than anything that resembled the heavens. After a successful capture and a record five space walks lasting
more than thirty-five hours (none by Bowersox), the Hubble was saved. Solar arrays, gyroscopes, an improved planetary camera, and a system of mirrors were all installed to fix the telescope’s power, pointing systems, and focus. Aside from rescuing NASA’s reputation, the mission also boosted confidence that the shuttle and its crews could help construct and maintain the embryonic International Space Station. It was the sort of accidental first step that made crawling seem obsolete.

In the fall of 1995, Bowersox made his own graduation, this one to the rank of commander, returning to helm
Columbia
on STS-73. The mission did not start well: its launch was scrubbed six times to tie the record for prelaunch jitters set by STS-61-C. Glitches included a main fuel valve leak, hydraulic problems, a failure in the main engine controller, and a minor meteorological inconvenience called Hurricane Opal. But
Columbia
’s belated tour was a success, as well as Bowersox’s longest flight, at fifteen days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-two minutes. He also threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the World Series from space: a giant television audience watched him toss a ball that ducked out of camera range before falling out of the night sky into Cleveland’s Jacobs Field.

Most recently, Bowersox had commanded STS-82, strapping into the front seat of his third shuttle,
Discovery
, in February 1997. For the second time, he helped capture and repair the Hubble telescope. Another five space walks prolonged its life span; Bowersox demonstrated the fine touch he had acquired at the controls by boosting the telescope’s orbit, too. By the time he succumbed to gravity’s call for the fourth time, he had logged a total of fifty days in space and rocketed across more than 23 million orbital miles. Given that rookie astronauts were forced to wait years for their first flight—just as he had been—Bowersox had become the sort of man who walked down the halls in Houston trailed by stares and whispers.

·   ·   ·

Pettit also heard his name whispered, but for different reasons.

In April 1996, he was punching his version of the clock: living
on a small boat with five other scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, anchored back in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, collecting gas samples from the White Island volcano. The previous autumn, he had traveled to Houston to interview for a fourth time with NASA. In the months that had passed since, it had become harder for him to hold out hope that this time he’d clinched it. Occasionally, most often late at night, he would wonder what if, but now he was more occupied with his work and trying to beat down a sinus cold that was making his life miserable on board that tiny boat.

Things got worse when a storm began blowing in. Soon the waves were too large for the men to parry; they would need to raise anchor and head for shore. By the time they made it to the seaside town of Wakatani, almost all of the accommodations had been booked for the night. The six scientists, Pettit included, squeezed into a small cottage, rolled out their sleeping bags on the floor, and tried to shake their fevers and chills. They had just drifted off when the phone rang. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it was Houston on the other end of the line. Pettit tried not to sound as sick as he was.

“Are you still interested in becoming an astronaut?” a smiling voice asked him.

“Yep,” he said.

And that was it. Pettit had made it, fourth time lucky. He tried to get back to sleep, but the elation of the moment—not to mention his awful cold and the sound of the rain beating against the cottage windows—made shut-eye impossible. Still, it took until morning’s first light for him to realize that the conversation hadn’t been a dream and that the course of the rest of his life had changed with a single phone call. He would be leaving the lab, selling his house, packing up Micki and their three dogs, and moving to Houston. He would become an astronaut. He would fly in space.

But first, he would feel like a freshman on an unfamiliar college campus. Houston was new. He didn’t know his way around this sprawling, landmarkless city or where the nearest grocery store was or where the good restaurants were. Newer still was his job, far
from your usual office transfer. Only a few days after arriving in town, he was shipped off to Pensacola, Florida—nearly two decades after Bowersox had passed through—to complete ground survival training, just in case the T-38 he would be mentored in went down. He sat in shuttle simulators and marveled at how different it felt from sitting in an airplane. He pulled on a big white spacesuit and jumped into the world’s largest swimming pool, feeling more like a manatee than an astronaut.

Through it all, he did his best to fit in. He did his best to feel like part of the gang. In a lot of ways, however, he remained a man apart. He had begun unpacking his tools and lab surplus into his new tricked-out garage, and a curious Pettit—busy exploring his new universe—had taken it upon himself to stir up a bowl of liquid oxygen, one of the principal agents of rocket fuel. Now, sitting at the back of a crowded class during a lecture on propellants, Pettit shot up his hand when the talk turned to the very liquid oxygen that he had stored where most men kept their hedge trimmers.

“Do you know what color liquid oxygen is?” Pettit asked when called upon.

“Well, no,” the lecturer said. “It’s not really the kind of thing you can take a peek at.”

“Well, um, I know,” Pettit said. “I just made some. It’s blue.”

The rest of the class turned around in unison and stared hard at him, as though he’d just farted. It reminded him of the way his schoolmates had stared at him when he started that fire back in Tucson.

This time, Pettit stared back. “I just thought you’d be interested to know,” he said.

In that moment, his reputation in the astronaut fraternity was sealed, probably forever. Even in a class filled with extraordinary men and women, even among dozens of astronauts as accomplished as Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit stood out. It was clear from the beginning that he would chart a different course. It was clear that he was something like a satellite, on an orbit all his own.

·   ·   ·

And yet, for all their differences in personality, for all their divergent history, Pettit and Bowersox would make for a seamless team. On the surface, they looked like the oddest couple, the pilot and the scientist, the arrow and the archer, the veteran and the rookie, the first-stringer and the reserve, blue eyes and brown, short and tall. They were a bad buddy cop movie come to life. But in the end, they had enough in common to find ways to tie themselves together; in them, somewhere, was the foundation for an impossible-seeming union.