Out of Orbit (28 page)

John Glenn.
Apollo 11. Columbia
’s first flight and
Challenger
’s last. As always, but perhaps more than ever, we are obsessed with beginnings and endings. Looking at that failing platform in the desert or at those empty trailers in Houston, we’ve learned that the middle, we can do without. And Expedition Six—adrift, trapped in their own middle, lost behind thousands of other headlines and movie openings and battles and football games—learned that an astronaut’s universe has never been so small.

By March, approaching the start of month five in orbit, Don Pettit began filling one of those rare, beautiful times in his life—when he had nowhere else to be—by spending more time staring through his window.

Because of what he knew about the planet’s architecture and construction, he could see more of it than most of us might. He could see all of the geological features that mapmakers struggle to express: braided channels, alluvial fans, glaciers, crater lakes, fissures, slumps, and volcanic plumes.

He could watch clouds of every shape and combination. He took note that clouds over cold water looked different from clouds over warm water. He could see firsthand that storms really do spin in different directions depending on their hemisphere. He delighted in lightning flashes, bands of dark clouds illuminated by fingers of spark, reaching out to each other across the miles.

He could see brown rivers spilling into the blue ocean. (They always made him think of hot chocolate.) He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.

He watched light scattering and corona haloes. He saw how
well jungles absorb the sun’s rays, dark even in daytime, and how farmland looked bright, as reflective as a mirror.

He saw meteors falling below him, a topsy-turvy sight that he never managed to adjust to. Each time his intuition complained bitterly.

He looked at the stars, suddenly seeming close enough to touch.

But most of all, he liked looking at earth in the wee hours, after dusk’s waves had washed over it. Unlike on the ground, where darkness serves only to obscure, night makes the human landscape clearer from space. In daylight, even the biggest cities look like gray, indistinct smudges, like the fingerprints on the glass in front of him. At night, however, Pettit could spend hours hunting for his life’s landmarks in the power grids and black, bottomless river bends until he finally became obsessed with documenting his view. He aimed his over-the-counter Nikon down at us and began taking pictures. He built a collection of more than 25,000 in all.

At first, because the speed at which he was traveling was so much faster than the snap of his camera’s shutter, Pettit’s pictures turned night cities into streaks of white light, like the headlights in a time-lapse photo of a busy street. His pictures became crisper when he learned to hold open the shutter and shift his shoulders in the opposite direction of his orbit, but even then his best efforts turned out blurry. He knew that he was looking at New York City, but he couldn’t quite make out the shadow of a lightless Central Park or the single bulb in the harbor that he knew was the Statue of Liberty.

Not good enough. Pettit being Pettit, he put the finishing touches on a gyroscope that he’d made out of three portable compact disc players (he used it to hold his flashlight for him), and next he built a makeshift, rotating tripod for his camera. He culled an old IMAX mount, a spare bolt, and a cordless Makita drill from the clutter, and he found eureka, too: gently squeezing the drill’s trigger lent his camera the perfect rotation to take pictures sharp enough to make the miles meaningless all over again.

Looking at the electric webs of Montreal and Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., he could pick out the airports he’d flown
into and the street corners he knew and the hotels he’d stayed in, and he could remember if the showers were hot or if he’d enjoyed a good meal there. He could make out football stadiums, docklands, and interstates, and he could make out the rest of those big, little places that we run our lives through. In the end, if he closed his eyes, he could even see his driveway, and he could feel himself easing into it, throwing his junky pickup into park and walking up to the front door, his shoes scuffling on the asphalt, his hand guided to the door by the warm light spilling out from the windows.

In those dreaming times, it felt as though all that separated home from away was a very thin thread, so thin that Pettit could snap it just by breaking open the hatch. A loosened bolt, a turned latch, a cracked seal, and he could find himself wherever he wished to.

·   ·   ·

He had opened the hatch once before. Back in January, he and Bowersox had performed an extravehicular activity, or EVA, which is a fancy way of saying that they had put on their boots and headed outside.

Originally, Bowersox and Budarin—the veteran of eight EVAs while he was on board Mir—had been given the assignment, with Pettit expected to stay inside, manning the station’s robotic arm. But in the lead-up toward exit, routine tests found that the forty-nine-year-old Budarin’s heart was not entirely up to snuff. While he pedaled away on the station’s exercise bike, the machines whispered into the ears of NASA’s flight surgeons, snitching on what they later called “cardiac peculiarities.” The Russians explained that Budarin’s heart had always had a bit of a flicker, and that the flicker had always been dismissed as benign and had never caused a problem, including during his more than forty-six hours spent at the end of Mir’s tether. But because this particular space walk was an American exercise—being conducted in American spacesuits and using the American hatch—the final decision rested with NASA. Despite Pettit’s lack of experience and his training only once in the pool with Bowersox (although that had gone well), he was ticketed for out-bound
passage. The Russians staged a minor protest, but Houston remained unmoved, and now Pettit found himself twice drafted from the second team to the first.

This time around, Bowersox didn’t much care about the switch. It might not even have registered through the thrill of his anticipation. He had never been outside either, able only to watch others take the dips of their lives, and for all of this time, the dark had sung out to him.

Like the call of the waters that saw heartsick sailors pitch themselves off the backs of ships to be swallowed by Mother Ocean, deepest, blackest, emptiest space has always drawn astronauts. The same desire that makes people step off cliffs with only a parachute strapped to their backs, or sink into underwater caves or under blue ice with only a coil of rope to guide them back to the surface, also fills the men and women who have touched space with their gloved hands. The adrenaline rush that comes with suiting up, opening a hatch, floating outside, and relying on a cloth tether or a length of steel cable to keep from drifting into oblivion is just about strong enough to overwhelm spacewalkers. So, too, are the more beautiful rewards of such a short, long journey—unparalleled views and a feeling of nearly perfect isolation, as though they have been placed on pedestals that no one else on earth can dream to reach. It’s no wonder some have nearly stayed forever on their perch.

Most famously, before their record stay on Salyut 6, rookie cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko came within a whisper of meeting his end during Georgi Grechko’s experimental space walk on December 20, 1977. While Grechko bounced around outside, Romanenko was to stay inside the airlock and monitor incoming medical data. But his curiosity won out, and he decided to steal a peek. Romanenko poked out his head, became consumed by the view, and was lulled into drift, his safety line floating slack behind him, unattached. This, he realized too late. Fortunately, Grechko saw his crewmate’s desperate thrashing and leaned over just in time to grab the end of his line and reel him in.

At the last possible moment, Romanenko had been rescued from himself and the almost inexplicable pull that space holds over
us. It’s an attraction so powerful that America’s first spacewalker, Ed White, had to be dragged back inside
Gemini 4
, finding himself the object of frantic orders first from Houston and then from his powerless commander, James McDivitt. The star-crossed White, who would later die in the
Apollo 1
fire, finally relented and returned to the capsule, but not before announcing to the world: “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”

Now, along with Pettit, it was Bowersox’s turn for happiness. They had been carried through the monotony of their preparations by a giddiness usually reserved for children. They had topped up their batteries and made certain that their nitrogen-thrust backpacks would fire if they needed to move in a hurry, their one shot at returning to station if their tether snapped; they triple-checked every rubber seal that separated them from the front pages and changed out their carbon filters; they layered their gold-plated polycarbonate visors with antifog solution, but not so much that it might make their eyes raw. (During an earlier assembly mission, Chris Hadfield was left with tears in his eyes after they were stung by excess juice. It was a lesson that every other astronaut had learned along with him.)

Bowersox and Pettit were just as diligent in preparing their bodies for the trip. As it is for deep-sea divers, nitrogen had become their enemy as well as their friend. While it would power those emergency backpacks of theirs—called SAFER, appropriately enough—their body’s own natural stores of it threatened to turn into bubbles when they opened the door. Those bubbles would course through their bloodstreams until they became snagged in their joints and bronchial tubes and frontal lobes, leaving them incapacitated with a good old-fashioned case of the bends. That potential for crippling agony was perhaps the only link between East River tunnel workers and astronauts, between those who scrape out their livings under the earth’s surface and those who fly above it.

To reduce the chance of locking up their knees and elbows and turning their lungs into a hacking pink soup, Bowersox and Pettit each took turns riding the station’s exercise bike for ten minutes, while sucking back as much pure oxygen—via the masks that they
had donned—as they could take in. Then they beat a hasty retreat to the airlock and spent forty more minutes behind those masks, breathing deeply. After they had completed the prescribed course of inhalation, Bowersox and Pettit slowly reduced the pressure in the airlock over the next thirty minutes. They brought it down to 10.2 pounds per square inch—the same atmosphere that they would experience on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, about 9,200 feet above sea level. Only then could they begin wrestling into their diapers, water-cooled long underwear, and 300-pound spacesuits.

Pettit inserted metal sizing rings into the legs to stretch his suit out a little, while Bowersox made sure the membranes were wrapped tightly around his headset, which were prone to shorting out if sweat leaked into them. Each man also installed a drink bag against his chest, careful to burp out whatever air was trapped in the water. (Otherwise, their faces might have been showered with drink, with no way to wipe them clean.) They checked and rechecked the flood- and spotlights that were attached to the sides of their domes before they slipped them on and locked them at their necks. (They checked that seal more than once.) At last, they pulled on their white gloves, which made a comforting click when they had been attached properly at the wrist.

The long process made Pettit think of knights heading into battle, wrapping themselves up in chain mail and sharpening their swords. But these modern suits were made of no ordinary armor. Even something as innocuous-seeming as those white gloves were the products of years of advanced materials engineering and dream work.

On the ground, in fact, there was an entire team dedicated to making gloves that would offer sufficient protection from intense heat, cold, and cuts, while also giving the astronauts enough flexibility to complete the delicate tasks that they had been assigned. Beneath a slick outer layer of unscuffable Teflon, there were five layers of aluminum-coated Mylar, as well as a comfort layer that Bowersox and Pettit cozied their hands into. If their digits got cold—shivering was a more likely problem than a good case of the sweats—there were even individual heaters tucked into the end of
each fingertip. Those heaters could be fired up at will, leaving Bowersox and Pettit with warm and toasty hands when, without the luxury of those gloves, their mitts might have shattered like hoarfrosted glass.

It was that sort of attention to detail that filled nearly six hours of their busy morning. Finally, they made certain that their safety line, a shared cloth tether, was strung between them, and that Pettit, who would follow Bowersox outside, was tied to the inside of the airlock. Once they were certain of the integrity of both lines, they nodded at each other, watched their pressure gauge needle drop to zero, and moved to push open the hatch. “I hope I don’t wake up and find out this is a dream,” Pettit said.

And the goddamned bastard thing was stuck.

So close to what felt like destiny, Bowersox began banging on the beast, pushing it, pulling it, cajoling it, and finally swearing at it, none of which had any effect. Pettit, worried that Bowersox was going to turn their home into a vacuum, asked whether he might take a swing at it. The hatch resisted him the way the driver-side door on that junky pickup of his had always dug in, and he remembered, and he found his touch, and the hatch opened to a wash of the sun’s bright light. It had been snagged on a loop of white fabric that had come out of place just outside, the sort of thing that could be pulled away like lint on earth but in space can turn men into satellites. Shaking his head, Bowersox resolved to cut that loop and every other one like it before he came back inside.