Out of Orbit (2 page)

They were so close to home. But sometimes the distance between a man and his home can’t be measured in miles. What keeps him away is time, or a wall as thin as a single sheet of glass.

·   ·   ·

The astronaut-lepers were hustled into the lunar receiving laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston. It was as nice a prison as they could have asked for. They slept in genuine beds. Their showers were hot. They lined up for cafeteria-style food, and they ate together.

But they were prisoners, nonetheless. They were interrogated—they were asked what happened when, and sometimes they were asked the why of it, too—and they were poked and prodded, the way astronauts have been since they first touched space, shuffling through hallways with monitors strapped to their pale skin, eyed all the while by men hiding behind white masks as though something unearthly might burst out of their chests after any given breakfast. Fact was, no matter how much they tried to feel normal again, the rest of the world wouldn’t let them. It began to dawn on them that their quarantine would never really come to an end.

Their feeling that they had become men apart went beyond all of the questions and examinations. It ran deeper than that. There were things that only they would ever know, things that they would never really be able to share.

They knew fear: there had been an even-money chance that
Eagle
would fail to lift off the moon’s surface, leaving Armstrong and Aldrin to wait for their air to run out, as Collins watched helplessly, and that was just the start of the nightmare scenarios. They had told reporters before their trip that they had tried not to think about dying—in an explosion during the launch, or after colliding
with a meteor, or by sinking in quicksand to the center of the moon, or because of something more mundane, like an oxygen leak, a guidance system failure, an uncontrolled spin, a fuel line plug, a cracked valve, or some goddamned shark waiting open-mouthed in the South Pacific—but they were also realists, and despite their brave public faces, they had gone through their wills before they left.

They knew, too, a terrible solitude: they had been planted in the middle of a desert in the middle of a blackness that stripped them of any horizon. They were as alone as men had ever been, cast in what Aldrin called “magnificent desolation,” as if they had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean, with only the sound of their breathing for company.

Most unsettling of all, they knew longing, and for more than just their wives. From the moment they left the moon, it rose in them like a tide, minute by minute, day by day.

·   ·   ·

They thought it might subside, once they were back in their living rooms, once their long wait was over. Michael Collins, the trio’s least-famous name but most-public face, summed up the feelings of the group: “I want out,” he said.

At nine o’clock in the evening, on August 10, 1969, they got their wish. At last they hugged their wives, smiled for the cameras, and headed home. They sat on their couches, and they put up their feet. A record amount of tickertape would soon fall on them in New York City, the big-blast kickoff to the rest of their now-historic existences, lived out in the world’s memory banks and on free luxury cruises, in exchange for giving small talks. It would all be very fine.

But it would never again be enough. Worst fears had come true. They really weren’t like the rest of us anymore. Space had changed them after all, only in ways that science might not have predicted and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins might never have dreamed.

For the rest of their lives, no matter how many crowds surrounded them or how much tickertape fell on their heads—no matter how many hearts they were held in—in their own hearts they would remain three men sitting in a bucket, forever far from home.

For this one dream, men had turned chimpanzees into crash test dummies, gone through a thousand pink enema bags to make sure their own plumbing was ready to withstand the trip, and finally been launched like artillery shells—in corrugated-tin capsules held together by hardware-store screws—deep into the black. Not much later, they were balancing themselves on top of six million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it on fire. Today the insanity physics continue. Astronauts blink down the risk that a rubber O-ring on one of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters might give way, spraying a flame laced with powdered aluminum, ammonium perchlorate, and iron oxide onto the external fuel tank, igniting its cargo of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and having their cockpit turn into a coffin.

All to cross the gap between home and away, to cross a distance that, on land, any old rust bucket could fart across in a couple of hours. But the gulf between earth and space is, and always will remain, a wider divide: it’s a chasm without walls, and plenty of men, as well as a couple of women, have died trying to string their way to the other side.

·   ·   ·

Captain Kenneth Bowersox had survived the trip four times, twice as a pilot in the space shuttle’s forward right seat, twice as commander in the forward left. Now he played the unaccustomed role of cargo, staring at rows of storage lockers instead of the beckoning sky. The pilot had become the passenger, one of three men crammed
below decks like ballast, waiting to be shuttled on
Endeavour
to the International Space Station.

Despite having been shunted downstairs for launch, Bowersox had been looking forward to his fourteen-week-long mission the way the rest of us look forward to a much-needed vacation. Although he had visited space four times, none of his previous shuttle missions had lasted more than sixteen days, and he had never been to the International Space Station. He had always felt that he had been asked to come home too soon. This time, however, he would have time to linger. He and his colleagues would conduct a range of scientific experiments and busily maintain station—astronauts rarely bother to slip
the
in front of
station
, thinking of it as a place rather than a thing—but their principal assignment would be to make themselves and the men and women who would follow them content living in orbit. Even before launch, Bowersox was confident that, as far as finding happiness went, he would succeed. He might have been flying steerage, but space was still his island in the sun.

For all that Bowersox tried to focus on the destination, he couldn’t help wishing he was up above for the journey. He wished he was alongside the two men in the front-row seats—in
his
seats—able to take in the view and, more important, see the fifty control panels and nine monitors that flashed before Commander Jim Wetherbee and Paul Lockhart, the pilot. Against his life’s habit, Bowersox had ceded control, and now he shifted in his seat and fiddled with his straps. At least Wetherbee had been in space five times already, and like Bowersox, he was a Naval Academy man and okay by him; Lockhart, in contrast, was making just his second trip, and only five months after his first, back in June 2002.

Also, he came out of the air force.

Worse, Lockhart wasn’t meant to be flying today. Had everything gone to plan, Lockhart should have been in Houston, watching NASA TV, trying to get out from under the private jealousy that runs through every grounded astronaut forced to watch another man’s dreams come true.

The man stuck watching television this time around was Gus
Loria of the marines, who had thrown out his back in August and been scratched from the mission, which would have been his first. Instead, Lockhart’s vacation plans had been canceled, and he was pressed into emergency service, jammed into the same seat on the same shuttle he’d occupied just that past summer. It was still set for his height, and he settled right in.

Loria was less comfortable on his perch back in Houston, and he wasn’t alone among the unhappy spectators. Joining him was Dr. Don Thomas, a four-trip veteran and the science officer who had been expected to join Bowersox and the Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin—a former engineer who had logged nearly a year in space on Mir, the International Space Station’s burned-up predecessor—for their stay. Over two years of training, at home and in Russia, in simulators and classrooms and T-38 jets, they had become Expedition Six.

Thomas had also undergone a more sinister indoctrination. Without the apron of earth’s atmosphere to protect them, astronauts are exposed to higher-than-usual amounts of solar radiation. Because little is known about exactly how much exposure will trigger cancer, and rather than risk its astronaut corps becoming lumpy with tumors, NASA has set an arbitrary radiation “red line.” If an astronaut approaches that ceiling, he’s grounded and stuck behind a desk until his cancer-free retirement (fingers crossed). Extensive medical investigation had revealed that Thomas, for whatever reason, had come unacceptably close to NASA’s red line. Another four months in space and he would have gone over it. He would have carried too much of the universe home with him.

The flight surgeons had passed on their findings to Mission Control and, in turn, to Bowersox. As the commander of Expedition Six, he had been left facing down three possible outcomes following the unsettling news: he could choose to ignore the evidence and fight to allow Thomas to fly; he could see Thomas scratched from the mission and replaced with his designated backup, a chemical-engineer-turned-rookie-astronaut named Don Pettit; or Bowersox could ground himself, Budarin, and Thomas, and order
all three members of Expedition Six replaced by their reserves. He had taken the options to bed with him and been surprised by how much time he spent turning them over.

Through training and by nature, Bowersox had acquired a certain cool. He carried a sense of detachment with him almost always: a pilot’s life, if he wants to see the end of it, doesn’t hold a lot of room for romance, and Bowersox had mastered the hard art of bottling up his feelings. Confronted with a dilemma that would keep most men up at night, he’d hold it under the light like a clinician, pulling it apart without emotion. The walls he’d built carried clean through his eyes, which were the same hard, glacier blue that had become a trademark of the best pilots, like Chuck Yeager’s drawl or a strong chin. (Bowersox, who grew up in Indiana, owned the chin but not the accent.) Since Norman Mailer had pointed out that all but one of Apollo’s first class of sixteen astronauts boasted blue peepers, that genetic fluke had become a virtual requirement of the astronaut corps. It was as if the color of a man’s eyes revealed the tenor of his heart, cold and colder.

But here Bowersox struggled, even though the facts were plain. Thomas’s health presented a risk, and a trip into space was marbled with enough risk already. That should have been all there was to it. And yet, for one of the few times in his life, it was finally his turn to lie awake, allowing the data to be clouded by late-night sentiment. He had grown to like Thomas—a quiet, hardworking, serious-minded man, the sort whose hands never shook. Bowersox’s affection for him, when viewed through the peculiar prism of space travel, was a particular kind of love: it meant that he was both comfortable in his company and confident in his abilities. They had developed an abiding faith in each other, and now Bowersox was confronted with a decision that, in an instant, might break what had taken years to build.

He didn’t want his friend killed with kindness, however, and he began casting his mind toward switching out the entire crew. It didn’t take him long to shake off that option like a shiver. The clean sweep would have crushed Budarin and brought Thomas no closer to space. And in the honesty of his private company, Bowersox had
to admit that his own itching to fly bordered on a sickness. Through the semidarkness, he stared down the prospect of spiking what might be his last stab at it. He was forty-five years old, almost forty-six, growing long-toothed by astronaut standards; he’d lost his ginger hair a long time ago. Deep down, he knew his time was running out. He also knew there were dozens of astronauts lurking in the wings behind him, first-stringers their entire lives who’d found themselves in the unnatural position of waiting, sometimes for seven, eight, nine years, hoping that their phone would finally ring with the call that gave them the go-ahead. No part of Bowersox wanted to put a line through his own name in exchange for one of theirs; no blue-eyed pilot would ever volunteer to give up the stick.

All of which had left him with a single option: replacing Thomas with Pettit, exchanging one Don for another, and, in the process, learning how to think of a friend as though he was just another part of the machine.

·   ·   ·

At Star City, an hour north of downtown Moscow, down a road cut through a green forest, a contingent of exiled Americans had gathered in the small cottage occupied by Don Pettit. He had been in Russia for more than a year, mostly going through the motions. Although he took his training seriously, he knew that, as a reserve, his chances of getting called up to join Expedition Six were close to zero. Really, his agreeing to a semipermanent exile was part of a grander plan he had drawn up for himself. For a rookie astronaut, clocking in as a backup was viewed favorably by those few, untouchable men in Houston who put together crews. So long as Pettit performed well enough in training, and providing he didn’t do anything that might make the Russians wary of him, he would earn a better than average chance of one day making the trip to station. Until then, he would uncomplainingly do his chores, biding his time as though serving a prison sentence, pushed along by the hope that perhaps Expeditions Nine or Ten or Eleven might include him, front and center.

Pettit looked the part, at least, every inch the science guy—glasses
hiding brown eyes (not blue), curly dark hair, an affinity for cargo pants held up by a belt full of tools. He was a chemical engineer, an inventor, a veteran explorer of molecules and optics rather than of space, a man who couldn’t help wondering how engines worked, why clouds formed, what lived in the hearts of volcanoes. In his endless quest to understand more about the inner workings of the universe, he had tried and failed to become an astronaut three times; the fourth time around, he was finally given the chance to dissect the stars.