Out of Orbit (29 page)

Outside the hatch was spooled a fifty-five-foot length of thin steel cable. Bowersox unhooked himself from Pettit and onto it. Next, he took a breath. Some astronauts throw themselves out of the hole like bomber pilots, but Bowersox had already decided on making a more graceful exit. Using a handrail for leverage, he tossed his legs out into the emptiness, allowed their momentum to pull the rest of his body outside, and finally looked down between his feet at the earth. For the second time in his life—for the first time since he had last landed on an aircraft carrier—a short length of steel cable was all that kept him from a good push into a black eternity. It was all that tied him to one of his worlds and, in turn, to the other.

Although it was unlike him to do so, Bowersox allowed himself to stall on that. It was so special a moment that he gave himself permission to turn off the automatic pilot, and he took the time to take it all in:

There’s my feet. There’s the earth. There’s my feet, and there’s the earth, and there’s a long way in between
.

·   ·   ·

Now, should something go wrong—a snapped tether, a hand or a foot restraint breaking free of the hull, the hatch door locking shut—there were only so many outcomes. Now, in all of that wide-open space, your range of possibility was terrifyingly narrow.

It would begin, like all knowing deaths, with panic. Probably not a screaming, thrashing panic, because your years of training wouldn’t let you accelerate the process like that—and because you wouldn’t want the voices on the radio to sense the tremors in yours—but there would be panic nonetheless. Your heart rate would rise. Your breathing, as much as you tried to keep it slow and even, would pick up, become shallower. Despite the cold water still running through your long underwear, sweat would start coming out of your forehead, but without gravity it wouldn’t fall. If any drops were somehow shaken loose, they would float around inside your helmet, like the flakes inside a snow globe, until they had gathered enough steam to splash into your visor or bounce back into your face. That’s when you would taste the salt, when you would lick your lips and begin whispering to yourself, looking for angles, for oversights, hanging on to the last living moments of your reason, trying to find a way home.

Depending on when you were cut loose, you might spend as long as seven hours staring out into your own private abyss: forever, but not long enough for any of the astronauts inside to suit up, and even if they could get themselves out in time, they would have no way to gather you in. If you were set adrift by force, bit by bit the station would become another star in the night sky. More likely, you’d be stranded maybe a hundred feet outside the hatch, just out of reach, the nitrogen in your backpack lost in a misfire, and you
would hang there, locked into a new orbit running alongside your old one, without ever having the chance for them to meet. All of this you would come to understand. The panic would yield to resignation, the resignation to grief. You might pass along some last wishes. You might ask the ground to play your favorite songs. You might just turn the radio off. When the air began to sit too heavily to ignore the weight of it any longer, the most strong-willed astronauts might open up the two emergency oxygen canisters strapped to the bottoms of their packs. That would give them another hour to say goodbye. But like most of them, you wouldn’t. You would just tell everybody you loved them and choke back the tears and let inevitability wash over you.

Suddenly the life would really start draining out of your blood. You would start to tire, as if you were on the final leg of a long flight. It would be hard for you to know it, but your lips would start turning blue. Your fingernails, too. Then your vision would start to fail. It might become fuzzy, or you might see two suns in the sunset, or you might find yourself unable to focus on anything outside of a single point in the distance, near or far: one of those drops of sweat set loose inside your helmet, the light reflected off a solar array, a white cloud on its way from Cuba to Puerto Rico. And then the first waves of headaches would come, your brain calling out its last orders for oxygen, cramping like a muscle that’s been pushed too far. That might give way to dizziness or to light-headedness or to sickness, but all of that unpleasantness would eventually pass. In time, you would forget why you had been sweating. It would all begin to seem like a movie, as though you were watching someone else’s nightmare, as though the distance between you and the station wasn’t anything at all, as though you could swim on over and climb inside and crawl into your sleeping bag, if only you wanted to, if only you weren’t so tired. If only you cared …

Your training might kick in again, one last gasp, and you would try to shake off the dreaming, but your fight would wane along with your ability to concentrate. The brain has a built-in kindness, a genetic predisposition toward self-mercy: it goes first. It might still fire enough to register the tingling in your hands and your feet, the dryness
in your throat, the little earthquakes that seized random muscles in your arms and legs and chest, but mostly it would be occupied with snuffing out awareness and replacing reality with good feeling. Close to dying, your brain would fill with euphoria, one final, blissful push into the ether.

The hallucinations would pile one on top of another, the whole of your life, real enough for you to see and hear and touch, burning up the very last of your oxygen. And then all of it at once would fade into black. Your eyes would remain open, your body stiff, but your brain would have finished signing off, catatonic, waiting only for the rest of your organs to follow. One by one they’d pack up and join the parade out of town: kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, lungs, and, finally, your heart. That would be the end of it. That would be the death of an astronaut, like drowning without the struggle, a man left empty instead of filled up.

That is, if you’re one of the lucky ones.

·   ·   ·

If you’re unlucky, you would come out on the short end of the 1-in-496 odds that you’re on the flight path of something moving really, really fast. There are a million things it might be: a micrometeor, a hailstone, a piece of trash that slipped out of Mir and never burned away, even something from station. It might be a dropped tool, a bolt, the good luck charm that somehow slipped out of your pocket forty-five minutes ago. Then you would know the true meaning of orbital karma, first documented by John Glenn, who passed through his own exhaust every time he circled the earth in
Friendship 7
and wondered whether he was cutting through fireflies. That’s when it was discovered that in space, what comes around really does go around, and too bad for you if you are in its way.

If it hit you somewhere that counted, in the head or the chest, you would die instantly, as if struck by a bullet going ten times faster than a gun could fire it on earth. If it was a large bullet, it might tear your head clean off, and the technicians in Houston would be left scrambling, wondering why your vital signs went from near-perfect to nil in the time it takes to sneeze.

But if it was something small, if it was the
MADE IN JAPAN
label that had peeled off some tin-can satellite or a wayward rock the size of a raspberry, and if it hit you somewhere other than your head or chest—if it caught you in the arm, say—well, then, that would represent some stone-cold misfortune. Because your brain wouldn’t have nearly enough time to work its magic. Against the impending sensory overload, your life wouldn’t have the chance to flash before your eyes. Instead of a seven-hour-long farewell, you would have nine horrific seconds to make your peace.

First you’d feel your skin break at the point of impact, and your bones shatter into chalk, and the rush of white blood cells to the hole that had been carved out of you. The pain of it would have pushed you into shutdown if the terror wasn’t steaming in so close behind, because now, suddenly, the worst thing of all is that only the instant before, you had felt more alive than you ever had. You would know only too well what was happening, and what was about to happen, and that the hole in your suit was graver than the one in you. You would recall instantly the cold language of the space medical experts whose research you had read, like that of the American College of Surgeons describing the effects of and countermeasures to explosive decompression: “These insults are likely to be lethal, precluding the requirement for medical care.”

Those insults would include, first and foremost, pulmonary barotrauma: the vacuum of space would empty out your lungs with a loud pop. Some of the air would come out of your nose and mouth with enough force to blow out your sinuses or dislodge your teeth. More of it would tear through the walls of your lungs, left flapping against the outward rush like tissue paper, and fill your thoracic cage. The rest of it would be pushed into your bloodstream, great bubbles of air suddenly choking your body to death. Those bubbles would enter your joints and paralyze you stiff, like the bends that you had worked so hard to avoid. They would also clog your veins shut, which would stop the flow of blood through your arteries, which would cause your heart to quit. Never mind, then, that every drop of water in every last one of your cells would still be turning into vapor, expanding your body to twice its normal size, squeezing
your eyes out of their sockets, stretching your skin to its splitting point, and turning your ear canals into oceans. Never mind that all of that water, depending on whether you were in the sun or the shade, would begin either to boil or freeze almost instantly. Never mind that the gases trapped in your stomach would explode it, blasting your diaphragm upward and crushing the last scraps of your lungs, or that your large and small intestines would have been left in better shape had you swallowed a hand grenade. And never mind that all of the galactic radiation in the universe would pour into your body’s new openings, cooking you from the inside out, if only your insides weren’t already outside and your outside hadn’t been blown to bits. Never mind all that.

Only those first nine horrific seconds would really matter.

One Mississippi … two Mississippi … three …

·   ·   ·

Jump.

Having clamped shut the worst parts of their imaginations, Pettit and Bowersox made the leap outside, each hooked on to his own length of steel cable. They were careful not to cross each other’s paths or tie their lifelines in knots. They were also careful not to look down as much as they might have liked. There was work to be done.

All told, astronauts will perform 160 space walks to finish building their home, during which more than a hundred separate components will be fitted, wired, plumbed, and bolted together. On this walk, only the second American space walk to originate entirely from within station instead of the shuttle (called a “staged EVA”), Bowersox and Pettit were to put the last touches on the P1 truss, the massive girder assembly that
Endeavour
’s crew had delivered along with Expedition Six.

Because it would eventually help funnel the juice generated by the station’s football-field-size collection of solar arrays, the truss was wisely equipped with a radiator. For every watt of power it generated, a watt of heat would need to be released, which the hostility of space would help along by providing some mighty chilly
shade. (There’s a 400 degree difference between light and dark up there, which helps explain why galactic radiators have ammonia running through their veins instead of water.) But for all of its importance, the truss’s radiator seemed a fragile bit of hardware. To protect it during the shuttle’s launch and the truss’s installation, it had been folded safely away and locked down tight. Now Bowersox and Pettit headed out to pick those locks.

Hanging on to the truss—while traveling 17,000 miles an hour—and watching the earth spinning so quickly beneath them, each of them was reminded of those vintage black-and-white photographs of New York City ironworkers balanced on girders fifty stories up, lunch boxes on their laps, downtown opening under their asses. For Bowersox and Pettit, the bottoms of their drops were less concrete, but every so often, they shared the sensation—the same sensation shared by just about every spacewalker, high-wire daredevil, and riveter—that they were already on their way down, trapped in the middle of a long fall. Only when they zeroed in on their work or on some star in the distance, the way seasick passengers are instructed to stare at the horizon, did the feeling pass, left to percolate just under the surface.

It took them a while, in fact, to push through it fully, and by the time they had unlocked the radiator and prepared it for its slow release, Bowersox, Pettit, and their perch were about to pass through the day-night terminator. Because they needed to watch the radiator unfurl in daylight, they were told by the ground just to sit tight for the forty minutes it would take for the sun to shine on them again.

Pettit was more than pleased with the assignment. He delicately picked his way to the front side of the truss, which was still without power and unlit. There, the rest of the station’s exterior lights were also blocked from view. Finally, he turned off his helmet’s spot- and floodlights, and he was cast in nearly perfect darkness. He stayed there, hunkered down, and rode the leading edge of the night, looking up at the stars. He had never seen them so clearly. Without light pollution, atmosphere, or the distortion of a multipaned window, he saw colors that made him wonder if he had been dreaming after all. Not only did the stars not twinkle, but only a few of them gleamed
white. Instead, they were intense reds, greens, and yellows, this great beautiful collection of pristine starlight, unfiltered and unhurried.

All too soon, however, the sun broke over the horizon, the stars were washed away, and Pettit had to get back to work. He and Bowersox set the radiator loose, and everything went just as the engineers on the ground had hoped it might.

Next, the two spacewalkers bounced their way toward the earth-facing docking port on Unity, which had a small amount of grit smeared along its edge. Houston’s technicians feared that the dirt might eventually erode the port’s seal and cost NASA a small fortune in oxygen loss, and they asked Bowersox and Pettit if they wouldn’t mind cleaning things up.