Out of Orbit (3 page)

To fill the hours until he made the jump from reserve to prime, he hosted loud parties in his cottage, especially when his wife, Micki, and their tiny twin boys made the flight over for a spell. She was a singer, and along with some of Pettit’s astronaut colleagues—including Chris Hadfield, the amiable Canadian guitarist—had formed a band. Late one night in August 2002, they had taken seats wherever they could find them, on the floor and the couch, and they had played and sung and laughed until they were interrupted by the phone ringing, not long before midnight. The noise in the room stopped. Pettit answered, and after he had listened to the calm but serious voice on the other end of the line, he hung up the phone, shot Micki a look, and rushed out the door.

He had been told a few days earlier that there were “anomalies” in Don Thomas’s medical evaluation, but nothing more specific. The news had been passed along as a courtesy more than anything else. Hiccups were not unusual, and Pettit had never thought, at least not for more than a moment, that this minor tremor might become an earthquake. But by the time he had returned to his cottage—by the time Micki had the chance to lay her eyes on him again—she knew what he knew: in three months, both of their hearts would thump through their chests, counting down the seconds to liftoff and a long time away.

·   ·   ·

Ken Bowersox’s decision was not clean in its consequences; one dilemma begot a dozen others. First, Thomas’s clothes and food had been shipped ahead to station. His set of embroidered blue golf
shirts had the right first name stitched on their pockets, but the taller Pettit would need to pack along his own pants and sneakers. More troublesome from Pettit’s perspective, Thomas—like Bowersox and Budarin—had forgone coffee in his food allowance, a hand-picked menu served on an eight-day cycle. Pettit, who liked to kick-start his day with a jolt of caffeine, begged for permission to carry up some coffee. After threatening tears, he was allotted about one hundred bags of freeze-dried instant; because the cost of shipping cargo into space runs about $10,000 a pound, he was lucky to get that much. (A fan of spicy food, Pettit was also permitted a dozen cans of New Mexican green chiles to dress up Thomas’s humdrum choices.)

Pettit’s more immediate concern was Thomas’s emotional health. His grounding had left him gutted. Thomas had fought the findings as soon as they were announced; the scientist in him had always loathed the “red line” that ultimately did him in, railing against it as so much hokum theory. He believed in
evidence
, in hard arithmetic and indisputable sums, and now, in his mind, all of the time and hope that he had invested in this mission had been wiped away by calculations fraught with doubt. In the weeks that followed, after he had returned to Houston and sat alone with the lights out, his mood had continued to swing from anger to upset, the spaces in between occupied by a kind of disbelief, those sad moments when he tried to convince himself that he could change his fate and win his return to space.

Switch-outs for still-living crew are rare, much rarer than replacing the recently deceased—a grim reminder that pushing the limits of astronautics is usually an all-or-nothing proposition. Their scarcity had made them the ultimate bad omen, even in a profession routinely beset by metaphorical broken mirrors and black cats. Over the course of space travel’s voodoo history, the next man in line had replaced Elliot See, Charles Bassett, David Griggs, and Sonny Carter after each had been killed in an air crash before his scheduled launch. But before Thomas and Loria had lost their spots, bad news had been delivered to an astronaut rather than to his wife only twice. Deke Slayton’s irregular heartbeat bumped him from
Mercury
’s flight order in 1962. And more famously—thanks to the blockbuster film—Tom Mattingly was replaced by Jack Swigert after he had been exposed to the measles before the ill-fated flight of
Apollo 13
in 1970. Bowersox had seen flashes of the movie in his head when he had dropped the bomb on Thomas. He marveled at how much harder real life played out than it did on film, all the while trying not to fixate on the fate of the last crew broken up so close to launch.

Swigert had joined Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, and they had been none too happy for his company. Unfortunately, he also happened to be the man who flicked the switch to stir the oxygen tanks in
Apollo 13
’s service module on its way to the moon. Because of an earlier, long-forgotten mishandling of the No. 2 tank—it had been dropped and replaced during
Apollo
10’s kitting out—exposed electrical wires shorted and lit the tank’s Teflon insulation on fire. The oxygen was slow-boiled, the fire spread along the wires to an electrical conduit, and the tank blew up. The explosion damaged another oxygen tank and the inside of the service module, and it ejected the bay No. 4 cover into space: in terrible sum, it put a hole in the machine. Although the crew of
Apollo 13
somehow managed to limp their way home on courage, they were destined to become part of astronaut lore for different, darker reasons. Their preflight drama, coupled with their mission number, meant that their lessons were the kind passed on in whispers. When it came to catapulting yourself into space, there was no such thing as superstition. There were only signs.

·   ·   ·

For Expedition Six, the signs continued to suggest that they might be better off staying home. On October 7, their sister shuttle
Atlantis
had a close call when a set of explosives—designed to blow apart the eight giant bolts that pin down the vessel until launch—failed to detonate.
Atlantis
still lifted off because another set of explosives had done its job, but the misfire raised alarms and caused onboard computers to seize up, forcing controllers on the ground to override automatic systems. More worrisome, no one could figure
out in the aftermath why the charges hadn’t tripped. Workers went to the trouble of replacing wiring harnesses and electrical connectors on the launchpad, but in a lot of ways, that work was helpless. It was a blind stab at solving an unknown problem. When it came time to let loose
Endeavour
, no one could guarantee that the right kind of blast was about to take place.

A little more than a week later on the other side of the world, the wrong kind happened. At the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, an unmanned
Soyuz-U
booster became a fireball about twenty seconds after liftoff, killing a soldier on the ground and injuring eight others. An investigation found that metal contamination in the rocket’s hydrogen peroxide system had triggered the disaster. Russian officials wondered openly whether the fatal flaw had been the work of terrorists. At the least, the accident delayed the launch of a
Soyuz
taxi mission to the International Space Station, which pushed off the ferrying of Expedition Six from the early morning of November 10, 2002, until shortly after midnight on November 11.

Then and there, cast in spotlights,
Endeavour
would be waiting for them, looking from a distance like a monument to miracles and up close like a bottle rocket.

Always, it had been a little bit of both.

·   ·   ·

The space shuttle is a complex jumble of bones and arteries, but at its heart, it’s a gas tank. The majority of its juice is bottled up inside the massive rust-colored external tank strapped to the shuttle’s underbelly. At 153.8 feet long and with a diameter of 27.5 feet—the size of a Boeing 747, the plane that the shuttle sometimes hitches a ride on—the tank dwarfs the vehicle it fuels. A car’s gas tank is about 5 percent of its total mass; a fighter jet’s is about 30. The shuttle, including the two solid-rocket boosters locked to its sides, is 85 percent propellant. It’s 1,107,000 pounds of powdered aluminum mixed with oxygen off-gassed by ammonium perchlorate, and, in the external tank, it’s another 143,060 gallons of liquid oxygen and 383,066 gallons of liquid hydrogen, good for an additional
1,585,379 pounds of spark. Upon ignition, they combine in dual pre-burners to produce high-pressure gas that drives turbopumps in the shuttle’s three engines. The rest of it is torched in the main combustion chamber, which reaches a temperature of 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the anxious hours before that last button is pushed, the hydrogen and oxygen will have been supercooled and pumped, very carefully, into the tank. Exhaust vents work at preventing rupture, but even with every precaution and an inch of insulating foam at work, the tank’s aluminum housing creaks and groans under the pressure, sounding like an icebound lake breaking up in spring, like whale music.

·   ·   ·

On November 10, at 9:35 p.m.,
Endeavour
’s seven-man crew answered that call.

Wetherbee and Lockhart had readied themselves to fly. For Wetherbee, the first American to command five space missions—by the end of this voyage, he was scheduled to have logged more than 1,500 hours in space—the preparation for launch felt close to routine, or as close to routine as rocketing into space ever could. It helped that he had completed a nearly identical mission in March 2001, having ferried Expedition Two to the International Space Station and brought Expedition One back to earth.

Despite Lockhart’s late substitution, he had also found comfort in his unexpected mission, and not just because of his custom-fit chair: his single previous shuttle flight had exchanged Expeditions Four and Five.

In addition to helping Wetherbee guide the shuttle toward station, Lockhart was charged with coordinating the space walks planned for the two men seated immediately behind him. Mission specialists Mike Lopez-Alegria (the third Naval Academy graduate on board) and John Herrington (the first tribally registered Native American tapped to fly into space) would need to head outside three times after docking, continuing the construction of the still-expanding station. Along with his tools, Herrington carried with
him six eagle feathers, a braid of sweet grass, two arrowheads, and the Chickasaw Nation’s flag. A native of Madrid, Spain, Lopez-Alegria—“Mike LA” to his crewmates—also had the hopes of an entire people resting on his shoulders. Like Wetherbee and Lockhart, he had visited station once before, becoming something like a celebrity after his appearance in
Space Station 3D
, an IMAX documentary narrated by Tom Cruise.

Meanwhile, Expedition Six—Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit—had finished resigning themselves to disappearing mid-deck, hiding out like stowaways, like kids sneaking into a drive-in by getting locked in the trunk of a car.

Assigned seating aside, the seven men remained equals in the most important respects. All of them shared the burden of foreboding during the traditional prelaunch supper that had been prepared for them, one last meal off plates. The heroes of
Mercury
and
Gemini
and
Apollo
would tuck into something suitably stout, steak with liquid centers and eggs over hard, but on that day, not everyone had an appetite. The less that went in, the less that could come out, and no one wanted to be the first to throw up.

Next they returned to their private quarters. Outside of their rooms, a flight diaper and what looked like long underwear—a full-body garment strung with hoses that would be filled with cold water to wash away the heat of the moment—were waiting for them, and they put them on. Then they each walked to a room lined with burgundy recliners.

There they were helped into eighty-six pounds of spacesuit, not including their helmets and gloves. All of it was designed to improve their chances of survival, with or without an accident, and it was hard to escape the feeling that they were dressing for danger. Their armor and shields included an integrated exposure suit, a parachute harness, and flotation devices; the big pockets on their legs were stuffed with survival gear; even the bright orange color of the suits was a nod to safety, because it would make the astronauts (or their bodies) easier to spot if they were ditched into the ocean.

The spacesuits were relatively new inventions, changed up and bolstered after
Challenger
had come apart seventy-three seconds
into its flight on January 28, 1986—and after Joseph Kerwin, a former Skylab astronaut and a biomedical specialist in Houston, determined that the crew might have survived the initial explosion. “The forces to which the crew were exposed during Orbiter breakup were probably not sufficient to cause death or serious injury,” he wrote in his final report. He did leave the hopeful opening that the crew might have been unconscious had the cabin lost pressure, “but not certainly.” He regretted to note that there were several troubling signs that they were, in fact, aware of their fate, including the activation of three personal egress air packs connected to the crew’s helmets, which had to have been turned on manually. That raised the specter of the seven lost astronauts having been very much alive during their freefall into the Atlantic Ocean, killed only by the impact of splashdown.

Every astronaut who has followed their footsteps to the launchpad has imagined the two minutes and forty-five seconds it took for them to hit the water. Every astronaut has taken the time to wonder how they would have filled it.

To help
Endeavour
’s seven-man crew overlook the horror of their imaginations, they had the option of tucking away a good-luck charm or a talisman, but few of them did. (Most of them remembered that after the hatch had popped open on his floating capsule,
Mercury
astronaut Gus Grissom had nearly been pulled to the bottom of the ocean by his pockets full of souvenir dimes.) Instead they relied on deep breathing to get them through. Bowersox and Budarin, both experienced fliers, were pictures of calm. After he was dressed, Pettit tried to emulate them, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, closing his eyes, exhaling slowly. He tried to look as though he was at home, bunking down for a nap on the couch, but there were wake-up calls everywhere he looked. Closest, a plastic band snapped around his wrist reminded him of his blood type and what medications he was allergic to. He hoped that no one else would need to know.