Out of Orbit (19 page)

Australian-born Andy Thomas, despite his limited Russian, was chosen to make the final trip. His 130-day stay would prove NASA’s third-longest, after Lucid’s and Foale’s. Among the Russians who shared his company was a smiling, stocky cosmonaut named Nikolai Budarin.

·   ·   ·

A husband and the father of two boys, Budarin had begun his career in 1976 as an engineer for ENERGIA, Russia’s massive space technology contractor. After spending more than a decade designing and building space stations and rockets, Budarin, like a sports writer who’s grown tired of watching other people play the game, had decided that he’d like to try his own hand at living in one of his creations. Between 1989 and 1991, he attended classes at Star City’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and, after passing the state examination, was qualified as a test cosmonaut. It took two more years of training before he was qualified to fly
Soyuz
. He also prepared for a visit to Mir.

His first stay was a relatively short one, from June until September 1995, but long enough for him to complete three successful space walks and enjoy a luxurious flight on the space shuttle, the
first time a Russian cosmonaut had hitched a ride on it to Mir. (After Budarin was safely delivered by
Atlantis
, Norman Thagard took his seat on the return to earth.) His second stay, the one that he shared with Andy Thomas, was even more notable. He spent the first seven months of 1998 in space and, during that time, completed six space walks, helping to repair Spektr’s damaged solar panels and earning high enough praise from the ground to become a Hero of Russia.

He had also become a favorite of the Americans. In the halls of Star City, he was quiet and serene, if a little serious; he liked to fish and to ski, and when he was asked to name his favorite hobby, “picking mushrooms” was his usual answer. Happily, a man who can get along picking mushrooms had the perfect temperament for coping with the monotony of living in space. Whenever he was in orbit, Budarin was quick to laugh, the proverbial teddy bear, warm and gentle. It took a lot to ignite his temper, even when he was forced to spend most of his days on Mir repairing the tender machines that he had helped to build. He was the sort of man who whistled when he worked.

As a result, despite his poor command of English—he spoke it like Tarzan, mostly in two- or three-word sentences composed entirely of nouns and verbs—Budarin made for pleasant company.

Charles Precourt, the pilot of Budarin’s first shuttle mission, recalled a preflight drive from Houston to Galveston, Texas, when the two men spent forty-five minutes passing a Russian-English dictionary between them. Muddling through a halting conversation, he and Budarin still forged something like a friendship on their way to the Gulf Coast. During that otherwise unremarkable drive, over causeways and through swamps, Budarin, especially, discovered the joys of communicating by means other than words. Contrary to what he had been taught as a child growing up in stone-faced Russia, he learned the power of a smile. He came to understand that so long as he said whatever he was trying to say with a light in his eyes, he had no fear of his message being lost in translation.

He and Andy Thomas (whose Russian was only slightly better than Budarin’s English) didn’t often “speak” to each other during
their months together in space. But along with Mir’s amiable commander, Talgat Musabayev, the two men made a habit of eating dinner together and taking comfort in each other’s company, even if it was only in a calming silence. When something really needed to be said, wild gesturing became the official language of Mir, usually punctuated with laughter after the men realized how ridiculous they sometimes looked.

Fortunately, because they both spoke German, Musabayev and Thomas were able to have real conversations, most often away from Budarin, so that he wouldn’t feel left out. Over Thomas’s litany of scientific experiments, they would tell each other war stories, and, in time, they found plenty of common ground talking about music and art and what they missed about home. Those bonds proved important over the course of the coming weeks, when Mir struggled through a few more of its mishaps, including sweltering temperatures and a small, contained fire that pushed carbon dioxide levels dangerously high. Almost laughably, the first of Budarin’s and Musabayev’s planned space walks to repair Spektr was scrubbed when they couldn’t open the airlock’s hatch, one problem compounding another.

Budarin had bent or broken three wrenches trying to crack the hatch’s code before he gave up. That kind of persistence, coupled with his surprising lightheartedness throughout the episode—after heading back inside, he had looked at Thomas with a smile and a shrug as if to say, “Shit happens”—was what most impressed the Australian about him. Here was this man who boasted a Russian’s stoic calm coupled with the backslapping familiarity of an American. It was a rare combination, especially for a cosmonaut, and especially on the troublesome Mir. Nikolai Budarin was, in a lot of ways, the perfect space sidekick. He was the best of both worlds.

·   ·   ·

At first, the International Space Station appeared to be built out of the worst of them. The newly forged relationship between Russia and the United States got off to a rocky start when the Americans put pressure on their new colleagues to de-orbit Mir. Trying to keep
it aloft, well past its expected drop-dead date, was proving a distraction in getting the new station off the ground. But for the Russians, losing Mir was like losing a limb. There would be a phantom itch when it was gone.

Though they were cash-strapped and knew, in their sheltered hearts, that it was time to say goodbye, they resisted letting go until December 1999. The announcement was made with the solemnity of a eulogy. Deaf to that farewell, a new consortium, MirCorp, tried to find a way to rescue the station with private money. There were also last-ditch political fights to save it, with the Communists desperate to keep this last great Red Star in the sky.

But inevitably, an unmanned
Progress
was dispatched to Mir in the winter of 2001, more than fifteen years after the station’s first module had been launched. The
Progress
docked, and like a tugboat, its rockets were used to push Mir closer and closer to the earth’s unwelcoming atmosphere. Its time in orbit finally ended on March 23, 2001, when the station lit up like a funeral pyre before its surviving fragments splashed down into the South Pacific. There were tears in Moscow and among the 107 men and women who had lost one of their more memorable homes.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that having been born during Mir’s controversial demise, the International Space Station sometimes seemed a bad seed.

Almost from the beginning, the Russians had fallen behind on their funding commitments and, more important, on their module construction. Although Mir had given them the inspiration for a host of design improvements—they sought to add lights and sensors to aid in docking, provide quick disconnects for the cables that ran through open hatches, and reroute cooling lines and electrical cables to prevent moisture buildups and leaks—they seemed to lack the will to turn their lessons into hardware.

Zarya, the station’s first building block, was launched late, in November 1998, not long after Budarin had returned from Mir, as though in some cosmic way he had become the weight on a pulley. Two weeks later, the shuttle
Endeavour
launched with the first American module—tiny, coral-colored Unity—on board. Ground
control tried to plaster over the cracks that had formed in the new partnership, pouring out good feeling while watching the shuttle climb into the sky: “We have booster ignition and liftoff! The space shuttle
Endeavour
with the first American element of the International Space Station, uniting our efforts in space to achieve our common goals.”

The shuttle’s crew captured the still-unmanned Zarya with the Canadarm and, with relative ease, brought it together with Unity; the two modules were permanently connected over the course of three space walks. It was a birthing-room moment. At last, station was the object of hope and not just hand-wringing. Like Forrest Gump, omnipresent Russian Sergei Krikalev—there he is again!—and American astronaut Bob Cabana were the first men on board, swimming together through the hatch that had been opened between the two modules, a symbolic shared step over the threshold. Their kicks provided a much-needed injection of optimism to the project, all but forgotten when station entered its troublesome middle life.

By February 2000, more than a year had passed since Zarya and Unity had been brought together. But they had remained empty, because construction delays in the station’s third and most critical component—Zvezda, with its propulsion and life support systems—had left it uninhabitable. (Not coincidentally, the module was the first that the Russians were to finance on their own.) Worse, Zvezda’s absence had left the embryonic station unable to keep itself in orbit; the two modules had lost nearly a mile in altitude each week. Twice shuttles had to be sent up to push them into a higher orbit.

The irony was that the Russians had been brought on board to speed up construction, to tap their experience, to make things go more smoothly. The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic chaos conspired only to slow it down, adding billions to the cost of building the International Space Station and leaving its foundation on shaky ground. Rather than proving the largest construction project since the Great Pyramids, it was starting to look more like the failed Tacoma Narrows Bridge, twisting in the wind.

Finally, however, in July 2000, Zvezda was launched and locked into place. Hopes for a smoother, brighter future were almost immediately scuttled when the first human elements were about to be introduced to station: the veteran Russian cosmonaut Anatoli Solovyov quit Expedition One when American Bill Shepherd was named commander over him. Fortunately, the trio that eventually became the first to call the International Space Station home—Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Krikalev (one more time!)—helped heal the program’s early bruises.

On November 2, 2000, they kicked off what would be a continuous and surprisingly harmonious manned presence in space, remarkable not only for its endless scope but also for the composition of the crews that made it possible. Until station became large enough to host more than three visitors at a time, the plan called for each expedition to consist of two Russians and an American, followed by two Americans and a Russian, until the two countries had sent enough of their pilots and scientists together into space for them to blur into one great string of names and faces, the citizen soldiers of a new country. By the time Expedition Six arrived on its doorstep, station had already hosted fifteen men and women who together had lived for more than two years on board. The stories and memories of their work and play had eclipsed the early fights and troubles. They had taken what had looked destined to become a battleground and made it into a shelter. They had taken what had been given to them and built it into something larger.

·   ·   ·

Expedition Six, having just started to emerge from their private grieving chambers in the days following
Columbia
’s loss, would see the International Space Station become more for them than it had been for anybody else. Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit would see it as more than a brightly lit place to grow protein crystals and drink their coffee through straws and run on a zero-gravity treadmill. Instead, they would come to see in it a comfort, the makings of a sanctuary. For them, station would become a home, and they would soon become a family built on love and trust
and experience, like the one each man had left behind on earth. This new family would be captured in photographs and written about in letters. And somewhere along the way, having been battered by so much time and distance, the lines between Russian and American, man and machine, and even earth and space would begin to disappear. They would break up and vanish, like that finger of white smoke over Texas.

Every so often, one of their orbits followed
Columbia
’s last flight, right over Houston. For days beforehand, Ken Bowersox’s three boys would track station on their computers, and because they were old enough to understand a little of what he knew about the universe, they could calculate almost to the minute when they might catch a glimpse of their dad’s second home. The timing had to be just right—it had to be dark outside, but the night had to be young enough for the sun to have dropped just below the horizon, still reflecting its rays off the space station’s solar panels. There couldn’t be a cloud in the night sky, and it couldn’t have been so hot for the city’s haze to have stayed draped over Clear Lake. Only once or twice in a very long while did everything fall into place. On those perfect nights, the boys gathered on their front lawn, their feet in the cool of the grass, and strained their necks until they spotted a small, steady white light coming up over the trees. They followed that light for as long as it took to cross their starlit sky on a smooth, predetermined path, the same path that would carry it over South Africa by the time they went to bed.

Six-year-old Luke, Bowersox’s youngest son, didn’t quite have a handle on that part of the deal. Speed and time and distance are relative things to a kid. During each of the long days he waited for station to pass overhead, he made up his mind that this would be the night he would catch his dad and bring him back down. As soon as the light came over the trees, he’d begin chasing it, taking off down the street, hoping to cover enough ground, enough of the curvature
of the earth, to earn even one more second in his dad’s line of sight. And always, the light disappeared.

·   ·   ·

On the starry night she met Don Pettit, Micki Racheff, a deejay with a taste for eclectic music and social engagements, was recovering from a hangover and had just begun work on a new one. She had gone from her home in Santa Fe to a house party outside of Los Alamos only because her friend wanted some company while she hunted for a new man. (The party was well-stocked with Beakers from the laboratory; for a woman with a ticking biological clock, it was the sort of gathering that almost guaranteed her imaginary offspring would sport giant frontal lobes.) Wandering into the kitchen—hoping to find just something to begin healing herself with, not a future husband—Micki spied her friend enjoying an animated conversation with a happy man and joined in. Pettit was in the middle of recalling his recent research on board the “Vomit Comet,” admitting that he had, in fact, been sick all over himself. But now having seen this pretty woman with dark eyes sidle up—and seeing, too, that she wasn’t in the mood for puke stories—he switched gears, explaining how the bubbles in her freshly poured glass of champagne would dance in zero gravity. The rest of their conversation that night was just as romantically dorky. Micki left thinking that this guy in the kitchen was funny and obviously really, really smart, but it wasn’t until they met again a couple of days later, alcohol-free, that she decided he was cute, too, smiling and stammering through his endearing brand of breathlessness.