Out of Orbit (15 page)

Not surprisingly, neither can remember when or where they first met. Their memories of each other begin with time spent in the pool, training for weightlessness. Although their paths might have run next to each other long before that dip—somewhere out in the desert, or in the Florida panhandle—they probably first saw each other in the crowded halls of the sixth floor, Building 4 South, at the Johnson Space Center. Even then, even if they had bothered to make eye contact or perhaps nod and smile, they never would have dreamed that they would come to live together in space. It would have been harder still for them to imagine that one day they would cry together over the loss of shared friends and a space shuttle. How much would need to happen for that to happen, too?

Against very long odds, it did.

The simplest explanation is that, from childhood, Bowersox and Pettit were both drawn to space as though it were a light-filled window. That sort of yearning must spring from the same place, a place deeper than even John Glenn’s voice. Perhaps their collision was born of their heading for the same destination.

Perhaps, except that every astronaut bunked down in Houston has a different motivation. For some it’s the thrill of it. For others it’s the glory. For many of them, it’s pulling on an orange spacesuit that gives them an almost electric charge. For guys like Bowersox, it’s the flying. For the rest of them, for guys like Pettit, it’s the possibility of finding out something new about how the universe works that gives them goose bumps. For each of them, the most honest reasons for having landed here are as varied as what they like to eat or how they like to spend their Sunday afternoons. Their occupation
is not what binds them, and it’s not where they’re going that matters.

What counts are the places they’ve been and the places they’re from. The landscapes of their hometowns might seem as different as their faces, at least on the surface—the heartland and the harbors, the flats and the mountains, Indiana and Oregon. But their geography is the same: all of them are from the places that call to people who know what it means to be alone. They come from our empty places, our hidden small towns and the folds in the map, as far as you can go away and still be home.

Of course, there’s another, better reason why astronauts are born lonely. City kids don’t have the room nor any need to dream. The lights and chaos burn away their imaginations. The only decent dreaming gets done out here, in our wider landscapes, in our deserts and canola fields, those beautiful places where we don’t even have to look up to see all of the sky at daybreak and every last star at night.

There are wide-open spaces in Russia, too. Nikolai Budarin had looked up at the same stars that Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox had taken in like breath. He had imagined the same journeys, dreamed the same dreams, and now here he was with them, in space, only three decades after their two countries had raced for the moon. In the middle-aged lifetimes of Expedition Six, a seemingly impassable distance had been closed twice over.

Once, the Iron Curtain might have seemed the greater divide. The exploits of the Soviet space program were as much rumor as fact, secretive enough for officials to fail to include the Kazakh town of Tyuratam, home to 50,000 inhabitants and the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in any official census. Though already in the middle of relative nowhere, the
Soyuz
launch site had been made even more remote by the loss of its anchor: the town was even rubbed off maps, with just another uninterrupted vista left in its place. In the absence of meaningful satellites, Tyuratam was invisible to the outside world. It was the ghost at the heart of the machine.

Under the cover of that darkness, pulled back only by the periodic flashes of rocket boosters, the Soviets had recovered from their loss in the lunar race and would even begin pulling ahead. The next frontier—the turning of space from destination to colony—would become their dominion. The Americans had conquered distance and, with that, seemed satisfied by their temporary stewardship; the Soviet view of the universe looked a lot more like rent-to-own. The Soviets aimed to conquer time.

Their crusade would prove the more difficult one, perhaps because
it offered no easy finish. There was nothing finite about their goal, no endpoint looming on the horizon, no unexplored ground to stick a flag into. They could never say they’d done it, pack up, go home, and have a parade. But in the process, they learned something that the Americans wouldn’t catch on to for decades: the most important journeys and dreams are those without end.

·   ·   ·

The beginning was Salyut, the first of seven manned stations that the Soviets rushed into orbit between 1971 and 1982. It was an almost unqualified success, at least until it came time to bring home its three-man crew. Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev had become that rare combination of hero and celebrity during three fantastic weeks in June 1971. Their playful weightless exploits—including a seemingly insatiable appetite for somersaults—made for nightly viewing across the country, reality programming with an all-time great payoff. Their success helped restore Russia’s collective faith in itself after the Americans had danced across the moon. They were exactly what the Soviets needed to see in themselves. They were triumph.

But all of that good feeling was lost when a recovery team reached their blackened
Soyuz
capsule on the Kazakh steppes and found disaster. Somewhere along the way, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev had died. Early fears that their long-duration mission had weakened them past the point of safe return proved unfounded. Their deaths were the result of a more mundane misfortune. The heroes suffocated when a broken valve leaked every last drop of their atmosphere into space. There was evidence that they had lived long enough to try to reverse their fate, that they had felt the life hissing out of their spaceship and tried to plug the hole. But the harder evidence revealed that they had run out of time. One by one, their bodies were laid out in the tall grass, and plans for a celebratory national holiday were canceled for mourning.

Years of gloom followed. Salyut 2 was lost shortly after it was launched in July 1972. Never having been occupied, it fell out of the sky after it was punctured by debris when its delivery rocket exploded.
Although a truthful history has been lost in the mire of Soviet misinformation campaigns, it’s believed that two other failures followed. Finally, what came next was worst of all: the Americans prepared to send their own station into space, and in Moscow, there were fears that they would use it for more than somersaults.

·   ·   ·

In reality, the star-crossed Skylab was a halfhearted effort at a semipermanent space colony, pulled together using hardware left over from the
Apollo
missions that never were:
18, 19
, and
20
, each submerged under the rising national sentiment of been there, done that. The third stage of a mothballed
Saturn V
rocket was slung into orbit with the hope that a series of crews would occupy it, learning a little of what the Soviets already knew about bunking down in space rather than just passing through it.

The rocket’s shell was fitted out and launched unmanned on May 14, 1973; not much went smoothly after that. When Skylab reached orbit 270 miles above the earth’s surface, Mission Control discovered that the module’s meteor shield had broken off, which was bad news on a couple of fronts. First, the shield was designed to help shade Skylab’s workshop from the heat of the sun. Without it, the crew inside would slow-roast at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature twice as hot as those felt on Death Valley’s salt flats. And second, the shield took one of Skylab’s two power-generating solar panels into oblivion with it. The remaining debris had jammed Skylab’s second and only remaining panel, preventing it from deploying properly, like a bird’s broken wing.

Undeterred, NASA chased Skylab’s first crew after it, only eleven days later. Instead of conducting the full range of planned experiments, Pete Conrad (a veteran of
Apollo 12
), Paul Weitz, and Joseph Kerwin were assigned the difficult task of making the ailing station habitable. Under challenging circumstances, they did some kind of job, unfolding and attaching a makeshift tarp to replace the lost meteor shield as well as clearing the station’s lame-duck solar panel of debris and popping it into place. That gave them just enough power to head back inside and hang out for the better part
of a month—for twenty-eight days, then the record for space endurance.

By the galaxy’s two-star standards, Skylab’s crew enjoyed palatial surroundings. Unlike more modern stations, which have been modeled after factories, Skylab was a place for living, always more of a home than an office. There was a collection of sleep compartments tucked away in a quiet corner; a ward room with rows of food-storage lockers and chillers and a window for looking out on the earth; even a collapsible shower, the sort of decadence that Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin did without on the International Space Station. A big vacant attic also offered Skylab’s crews a wide-open respite, perfect for whenever they needed some elbow room or felt like honing their zero-gravity acrobatics, just for kicks.

But such luxuries also betrayed a certain cultural weakness in the Americans. The fact was, and remains, that men born and raised in austere, cramped Muscovite apartments adapt more easily to living in austere, cramped space stations. The Soviets were harder. For instance, unlike astronauts, cosmonauts have always refused to wear diapers during flight. They would rather starve themselves in the days before liftoff and flush their pipes with an ice-water enema than get caught wearing a nappy. That hairy-assed triumph of the will, combined with a societal emphasis on the needs of the community over the desires of the individual—built on that old hammer-and-sickle platform of self-control and sacrifice—has served them well in space. Don’t forget, too, that a country in which smiling is viewed as a weakness has never had trouble finding men cold-souled enough to go months without hugs. First the Soviets, and now the Russians, have almost been bred to live year-round in personal winters.

The glad-handing Yankees, it seemed, not so much. After Skylab’s first crew made their safe return and its second—Alan Bean (Conrad’s crewmate on
Apollo 12
), Jack Lousma, and scientist Owen Garriott—spent an uneventful fifty-nine days in orbit, Skylab’s third and final crew put their finger on the seeming limits of American endurance.

On November 16, 1973, Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Ed
Gibson lifted into space. They were all rookies, and the novelty of the place carried them through their first weeks. They took photographs of Comet Kohoutek, and Gibson profiled a solar flare, and they began what would eventually total more than twenty-two hours of near-perfect spacewalking.

But after the honeymoon, the breakdown began. They started to spar with the ground over a litany of complaints, from the poor quality of the towels to the awkward placement of the toilet, which too often turned morning dumps into hand-to-hand combat. The ground got cranky in turn, issuing a sharp reprimand when Pogue lost his lunch and Carr, instead of going by the book and bagging the puke for future analysis, flushed it. “We won’t mention the barf,” Carr said to Pogue, unaware that Mission Control had been listening in on the entire episode.

That rebellious streak exploded into full-blown mutiny toward the end of the crew’s sixth week in space. Complaining of overwork and a lack of cooperation from Houston—as well as those lousy goddamn towels—Carr, Pogue, and Gibson staged a distinctly un-American one-day strike. Though they eventually went back to work and spent eighty-four days in space, setting NASA’s latest endurance record, the crew’s legacy and the future of long-duration American spaceflight were left clouded. Before their return on February 8, 1974, the crew was told to boost Skylab into a higher orbit than usual. There, it would be left to hang as if from a string, powered down and dormant.

It stayed quiet for four years, until 1978, when it was revived from the ground just in time to chart its months-long fall to earth. NASA tried and failed to control its descent, and the public began taking a dim view of the nutbar scheme, nonplussed by the idea of space junk falling on their heads. Fortunately, when Skylab finally did make its fiery plunge on July 12, 1979, the only surviving fragments tore into empty patches of Australian desert.

Despite the program’s successes—a better understanding of the physical and psychological effects of calling space home, for starters—Skylab’s Chicken Little return saw it finish on a cracked note. NASA was left cornered by those memories, forced to turn its
attention to the shuttle and quick dashes into space. The American endurance record set by Carr, Pogue, and Gibson would last for more than twenty years. Even then, it would take help from the Russians to break it.

·   ·   ·

And yet, in a strange way, the Americans had first helped the Russians: by beating the scientists at Star City so plainly, in both conquering the moon and now turning their attention toward space, Houston’s technocrats had inadvertently freed their competition from the burdens of coming in first. It was as if some invisible pressure valve had been released, giving the Soviets the chance to catch their breath and redouble their efforts. They went back to work in a calm, calculated, and ultimately enviable way, without the artificial weight of deadline or the specter of shame. For the first time since
Sputnik
, they weren’t forced to race against the clock; instead, they concentrated their efforts on calendars.

The result was much-needed success, foreshadowing the greater glories that were to come. Salyut 3 and Salyut 4 were both slipped easily into orbit and visited by five different crews through 1974 and 1975. (Each did, however, experience at least one link-up failure.) With every launch came important advances. Cosmonauts became better prepared for the physical and psychological demands of long-duration flight. Their vessels were also made more ready; Soviet engineers brainstormed their way toward a kind of inventor’s immortality, their gifts still giving today. Among other things, they devised an air lock to jettison trash, a water purifier that recycled moisture collected out of the air, a zero-gravity exercise bike, and a small vegetable garden called Oasis. The developments allowed Salyut 4’s final visitors, Pyotr Klimuk and Vitali Sevastyanov, to spend sixty-three days in space—battling a green-mold epidemic and humidity high enough to fog their windows, but also nearing the endurance record set by Skylab’s rowdy last crew. They had come close enough, in fact, to pull the Soviets back to even, close enough for the gap to be bridged in the most palpable way.