Out of Orbit (21 page)

At last, they were complete … Until Don Thomas was found to have absorbed too much radiation, and Don Pettit—the outsider who had finally begun working his way in—had just three months to say goodbye to the home life he had so long wanted and exchange it for another.

·   ·   ·

On the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center, past the swamps and ragged shoreline made foul by red tides, there is a house on the ocean near Cocoa Beach. When its shutters were first opened, it was designated a party palace, a homespun gin joint in which hell-raising astronauts could kick back. During those early, ribald days, kicking back meant keggers that lasted till dawn, bonfires built high enough to light up the night sky, ashtrays filled to overflowing, and wives (and those girlfriends the wives did or didn’t know about) being led by their hands to the bedrooms downstairs. It was the literal
last resort, a sort of hedonistic Eden for all of those Adams who figured that their cradle on a rocket was as good as a deathbed. In between assignment and liftoff, whenever they weren’t in training or put on public display, they made sure to live life as hard and as well as they could. They were like college students whose summer was coming to a close, only with the risk that they might never again see winter turn into another spring.

Today that feeling still hangs over the place, but it’s reserved for gentler goodbyes. Crew members are bunked in private quarters, under semipermeable quarantine, for weeks before launch. But in the waiting, they are allowed to escape and come here to spend some time with their wives and husbands (in the case of STS-113, of course, there were only wives). Catered dinners are delivered, and fourteen distracted people sit down in the dining hall and, if only for as long as it takes to finish their dessert, they make small talk, trying to avoid thinking about what’s coming down the chute. After the last of the food is polished off, the group breaks up into couples. Some sit on the balcony, watching the sea roll in. Others might still head for those bedrooms downstairs. Don and Micki decided to take a long walk on the beach, to find a little fold just for themselves in the dunes.

They had sweaters and jackets on to ward off November’s chill. Through the dark of night, they could still see the white foam left behind by the waves running up the beach. The light from the moon and the stars helped, shining off the water. Even when a thin fog started creeping in, the sky stayed clear. It was a night built for bad love songs, but really, it was just one of those beautiful nights.

Hand in hand, they talked. They had already made formal plans, just in case: like Ken and Annie Bowersox, they had made sure that Don’s will was in order, that their insurance was paid up, that Micki and the boys would be looked after if things went very wrong. But on this night, they talked about what Don’s leaving forever might really mean—not on paper or in bank accounts but in clothes still hanging in the closet and shoes gathering dust by the door. They talked about what Micki would do, where she would live, what she would keep of Don and what she would have to
throw away. They talked about the boys and what Don wished for them. They talked about how, no matter what happened, they were glad to have met that night in a kitchen outside of Los Alamos. Their lives had been shaped by that moment, that hangover, just as they knew that their lives might be shaped this time by an O-ring or a loose ceramic tile. They left nothing held in reserve. They kept no secrets. They said every last thing that needed to be said, and then they turned around, their feet pushing into the white sand, and together they were led back to the beach house by the lights and the noise. Finally prepared that their marriage might continue from that moment on only in memories, they hugged and kissed and said goodbye, their breath turning solid and joining the fog, lifting into that beautiful night.

On the ride back to her nearby hotel, Micki sat next to Robin Wetherbee, the trembling wife of Commander Jim Wetherbee, heading into space for the sixth time, one short of the American record. Micki had been watching her all night, thinking about how anxious she seemed, this veteran of farewells—while other, younger couples, including the Bowersoxes, had breezed through their goodbyes by treating it like any other, as though their loved ones were leaving for a weekend conference in Sacramento rather than blasting off into orbit.

“Doesn’t it get any easier?” Micki asked finally.

“No,” Robin said after a long while. “It only gets worse.”

·   ·   ·

Whatever internal drama
Endeavour
’s crew went through during their on-again, off-again launch schedule, their wives went through it sevenfold. Since
Challenger
, there is a private rooftop, several miles from the launchpad, from which the families watch the shuttle lift off. If, seconds later, the sky is lit up by an explosion, the isolation ensures that shattered husbands, wives, and children won’t have their hysterical blindness worsened by flashbulbs.

In the hours before—alone or with their kids—they gathered their nerves in their cheap, frayed hotel rooms in Cocoa Beach, until there was a knock on the door. Then they headed downstairs and
boarded a bus that took them to their rooftop, dropping them off into their own private worry pit. There they waited, watching a clock that counted down to ignition. Sometimes it seemed to take forever for it to reach zero.

Micki had brought her toddler twins to Florida with her. They were each a handful, and caring for them had helped distract her during the waiting for launch. The first time Don and the rest of
Endeavour
’s crew had climbed through the hatch—the time that saw them climb out again ten minutes later, thanks to that ill-timed oxygen leak—she learned of the scrub while she was still getting the boys ready to head outside.

Together, along with their husbands,
Endeavour
’s wives and children returned to Houston after the Canadarm was bruised; the eight-day respite that their men enjoyed only prolonged their own agony. That first single night together had felt like a gift, a second chance to make certain that everything that needed to be said had been said, but after that, it had been impossible for them to live out their usual lives, to get through their usual routines without their stomachs clenching or lumps rising in their throats. No matter how busy they had tried to keep themselves, they had noticed the emptiness in their homes. Even Annie Bowersox, who had been so calm in the face of the stress of saying her goodbye, had moments when her heart stopped in the quiet. Her husband had defied the odds so many times already, on aircraft carriers and above the desert flats and four times in these beautiful rockets. And like Robin Wetherbee, some small part of Annie wondered whether his good luck was destined to run out. She had also decided that she would have felt better if her man was in the driver’s seat. He had always done everything he could do to bring himself home. This time, if he didn’t come back through their front door, she didn’t much like the idea of having somebody else to blame.

But like their husbands, the wives had their destinies taken out of their hands. Back in Florida, they had just boarded the bus when liftoff was canceled again, this time because of bad weather over those two podunk towns in Spain. They began to feel like racehorses who had been led out of the paddock and into their gates,
left keyed up and waiting for the starter’s pistol that never seemed to fire. They returned to their hotel rooms, and they tried to get some shut-eye, but most of them didn’t. Most of them, even though their hopes had been carried only partway up, found it impossible to come down enough to sleep. Those who did woke up with starts and in cold sweats. Daylight couldn’t come fast enough.

·   ·   ·

Mercifully, they made it to the rooftop. Annie Bowersox breathed easily, her children by her side. Robin Wetherbee trembled, blaming the cold. Micki Pettit held Evan in her arms; someone else held Garrett. She pointed to the big rocket in front of them. “Daddy’s in there,” she said. All of them could see the shuttle, an almost impossibly bright white under such hot lights, and they could see the clock, ticking down. With their gaze bouncing between the shuttle and the clock, as though they were watching a tennis match, they waited for a hitch that never came.

With nine minutes left on it, the clock stopped on its temporary hold, but after a few minutes it started up again. Terminal count had come and gone. All systems were go.

With seven minutes remaining, they could see the White Room pulling away from the shuttle. Now their husbands were locked in good and tight. Maybe, someone joked, this stupid thing was going to lift off after all. Maybe, someone else answered, and they shared a nervous laugh.

When their clock had ticked down past three minutes, the wives could hear the main engines gimbeling. If they squinted, they could see the shuttle swinging against the tower, bucking like a bull waiting to be cut loose.

The next minute was just long enough for Micki to decide she needed to throw up.

The clock ticked down to ten, nine, eight …

And finally, down to zero.

Jets of orange fire were spit out of the back of the shuttle—mostly out of the solid rocket boosters that had been strapped to the sides of the external tank, but also out of the shuttle’s three main engines.
Five bursts of fire became one, corralled by the trenches that had been dug for it. It ran into the walls of water that had been released along with it, creating two thick, enormous clouds of steam on either side of the launchpad, almost framing the shuttle in that instant when it lifted free of the tower.

It took a few seconds for the sound to carry as far as the sight. It rumbled in low and next turned into a roar, a sound that could be felt more than it could be heard, first in the feet and then in the stomach and then in the throat.

The shuttle continued its long, loud climb. It had left in its wake a spreading cloud on the ground, reaching its fingers out into the dark, and a fat vapor trail, lit up by the fire that still blew out of its ass.

On their rooftop, the wives watched with their hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes. Annie Bowersox looked as though she was staring at the flag while the anthem played. Robin Wetherbee bit into her bottom lip. Micki Pettit, whispering under her breath so that Evan, still in her arms, couldn’t hear, began pulling profanely for the shuttle to keep lifting into the night sky.

“Go, you fucker,” she said. “Go, go, go.”

The fucker obliged.

And in that moment, just when it seemed as though their men would make it safely into space after all, something switched over in the wives. Suddenly the spectacle outweighed the sensation, and their worry was replaced with a kind of wonder. By the time the shuttle had traveled twenty-seven miles straight up, twisting ever so gently on its way to finding its orbit, and its solid rocket boosters had been jettisoned on the heels of a telltale flare, the wives gasped not out of fear but from awe. They were no longer seven women standing on a rooftop watching their husbands ride fire. Instead, they had joined the tens of thousands collected along Florida’s coast that big starry night, standing on hotel balconies and beaches and the gravel by the side of the road, feeling subsumed, insignificant, as though there was no greater cause than to follow this beautiful light with their wet eyes on its way to the end of the earth.

Along with their husbands, they had made the turn.

·   ·   ·

They watched the rest of the journey via satellite, packed around monitors that had been set up on their rooftop. After
Endeavour
’s crew had become weightless, having cut the last of their strings, their wives did, too. An incredible burden had been lifted from them, and now they hugged, relieved and happy but also wrung out and left unsteady by their own journeys. They climbed back on board their bus, quiet and coming down, were dropped off at their hotels, and fell into bed, ready to wake up early the next morning and catch their flights back to Houston, ready to return to the new version of their old lives, however incomplete.

·   ·   ·

Unlike their husbands, it was a long while before they were able to settle into anything that resembled a routine. First they came home to Thanksgiving, to preparing dinners and visiting friends. Micki and the boys were guests in the home of another astronaut, Duane “Digger” Carey, and his wife, Cheryl. Like Annie Bowersox, however, Micki was distracted by the work going on at the International Space Station. The truss installation was broadcast on NASA TV, and Micki excused herself from the table to watch it. The cameras were never on Don, who was inside helping to operate the robotic arms, but occasionally she heard his voice. It was filtered through static and fatigue, but even when the tenor of it was nearly washed out, she could still tell it was him. For most of his time away, their voices were all that would carry across the divide between them.

Nikolai Budarin usually held dominion over the space station’s Internet phone (Ken Bowersox was proficient in Russian, but if Budarin wanted to have a real, rapid-fire conversation in his native tongue, he was dependent on the friends and family he had left behind), but for a few minutes each week, Bowersox and Pettit could call home. Their conversations were surprisingly ordinary, dominated by updates on their growing children, snippets of front-page news, and whatever mail had arrived.

Things were more interesting on Saturdays. Shortly after the wives had returned to Houston, Annie and Micki watched technicians
tramp through their living rooms, installing videoconference units. Once a week, early on Saturday morning, on a supposedly private channel, they would have between fifteen minutes and an hour to see and talk to their husbands. (Micki found out that the conversations weren’t as private as she thought after she gave Don a playful flash. The following morning, she received word from the technicians that she should probably keep her bathrobe done up.) The videoconferences were especially good for Bowersox and Pettit to catch a glimpse of their kids.