Out of Orbit (31 page)

After making their last goodbyes, they ducked their way into the airlock and shut the door behind them. It felt as though they had come into the warmth from a blizzard without having to brush the snow from their shoulders.

Safely locked away, they came down. Their adrenaline supplies were tapped out, and they felt heavy with exhaustion, as if it was all they could do to strip off their gear. But in the hours it took them to undress and adjust their bodies back to life’s normal pressures, Pettit was kept awake by a puzzle, by hints of a smell that he couldn’t quite place. It had come inside with them, embedded itself in the white fabric of their suits. And now something about it had latched inside of him.

It was metallic, but it was more than that. It was sweet and pleasant. It was the smell of space.

If something had gone wrong out there, had one of those rubber seals split open or a 1-in-496 long shot come through, that smell would have been the last piece of data left for his brain to collect. Now he breathed it in again, then again. For some reason, the smell reminded him of summer.

And there it was.

During college, when Pettit had spent his vacations repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit in Oregon, he’d fired up an arc-welding torch to do it, and that torch had given off a sweet, pleasant, metallic smell.

Here was that smell all over again. And just as suddenly, space smelled for him like summer, the same summer whose arrival he’d watched through his window, greening earth’s landscape without him.

In their prophetic novel,
The Return
, Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes sketch out a scenario that is one part nightmare and one part dream.

During another one of their bust-ups over Kashmir, Pakistan and India take their war to the skies. Hoping to knock out India’s network of spy satellites, Pakistan launches a patched-together proton bomb into space. Too bad they overshoot their mark and manage to irradiate every scrap of hardware in orbit, including the International Space Station. On board, alarms sound, and radiation levels spike so high that they threaten to kill the three resident astronauts within hours. They are ordered by the ground to evacuate in the
Soyuz
capsule glued to their hull, the lifeboat that, in reality, makes like an escape pod straight out of hammy science fiction, the bucket of bolts that somehow reaches hyperspace. But when the astronauts power up the capsule by remote control, its thrusters inadvertently fire, burning off its fuel stores. Before the crew even has the chance to wedge themselves inside, they are flat out of gas. And because of an earlier fatal accident—on
Columbia
no less—the shuttle fleet is grounded. Besides, even if a shuttle could be readied in time for an emergency launch, the radiation levels in space remain too high for safe rescue. All of which leaves Mission Control with a dilemma it hasn’t faced down since
Apollo 13
nearly self-destructed en route to the moon: How do we get our folks back home?

Good thing for the glowing, fictional astronauts—and not coincidentally, perhaps, given Aldrin’s real-life entrepreneurial interests—private companies have begun developing their own rockets and are standing by. One, in particular, is primed and ready for its
first flight: the
StarRescue
. Not only can it be readied faster than the outdated shuttle but it can also be lined inside with giant bags of water to prevent its crack crew from turning into mutants on their return.

Out of options, NASA’s embattled honchos reluctantly agree to subcontract this life-and-death mission, and the
StarRescue
rockets into the black. Its crew approaches station, lassos the sparkless
Soyuz
, yanks it out of the way, and docks in its place. Once inside, they find the ailing astronauts hanging on to their last traces of life. Their hair is falling out. Blood runs out of the open sores that pock-mark their emaciated bodies. There are gaps in their smiles where they once had teeth. Not a moment too soon, they are zipped into pressure suits and floated into
StarRescue
, which undocks, drops out of orbit, and finally makes a flawless landing on the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base. First ambulances and next the president pull up beside the spaceship, shining white in the desert sun. It’s a triumphant scene. Everybody is safe. Everybody makes it home.

·   ·   ·

No such luck for Sean O’Keefe and company. The whispered conversations that Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit had imagined taking place back home did, in fact, start taking place throughout NASA’s sprawling complexes. With no
StarRescue
in wait, O’Keefe instead called to order a series of brainstorming sessions, trying to find a solution for his dilemma. But even the wildest imaginations were of little help. Today, when it comes to getting men from earth to space and back again, there remain only so many options.

For Americans, of course, the space shuttle is it. Starting the day after
Columbia
broke apart, there were conversations at NASA about how quickly the fleet might return to flight. Perhaps it was worth the risks presented by lifting off on short notice—and before anyone could begin to fathom why
Columbia
had failed so terribly—to retrieve Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit. But that scenario raised two questions, the second more awful to contemplate than the first. Would Expedition Seven still replace Expedition Six, embarking on their own open-ended mission? And what would happen
if the shuttle and crew that were hustled up in a hurry were vaporized, too?

Long before he sat down to listen to the grim forecasts of his advisers, O’Keefe had the last question answered. Already,
NASA
was taking hits. In the February 10, 2003, edition of
Time
—the issue that carried a cover photograph of fire and smoke over the headline
THE
C
OLUMBIA IS LOST
—the agency’s manned space program came under attack. In an article titled “The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped,” Gregg Easterbrook wrote: “The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration … This simply must be the end of the program.” While he was at it, Easterbrook also took aim at the International Space Station. “There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes,” he wrote. “The only space-station research that does require crew is ‘life sciences,’ or studying the human body’s response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another’s pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.”

Easterbrook was not alone in his assertions. Across the country, there were calls for NASA to receive its termination notice, for its budgets to be slashed, for its dicky shuttle never to touch space again. Now, if another shuttle blew up—if, however heroically, NASA saw consecutive crews buried in flag-draped coffins—the agency would almost certainly lose its license to fly. For years, for decades, perhaps even forever, Americans would be grounded. There would be no more fire, no more experiments, no more giants. There would be only a more permanent gravity.

·   ·   ·

With so much at stake, the idea of sparking a shuttle was dismissed almost as soon as it was raised. Next, a kind of Avdeyev Option was bandied about, although not in the way that Bowersox and Pettit had imagined it might have been. Because no one knew whether there could be an Expedition Seven, because Expedition Six remained physically fit and psychologically sound, and because, most
of all, the three men had seemed so sincerely happy to stay, perhaps it was best to hold steady. Perhaps the trio could remain stashed away, safe so long as they didn’t try to come or go, until the remaining shuttles had been checked out and the wounds left by
Columbia
had been allowed to heal. Perhaps it was best if everybody just laid low.

But like every answer, this one, too, raised only more questions. What if Expedition Six suddenly ran into trouble? What if some illness lurked in them that hadn’t yet surfaced? What if the remaining shuttles were kept in hangars for as long as they had been after the
Challenger
disaster? How likely was another two-year-long hiatus? Could their bodies resist breakdown for such an epic stretch? Was it too much to ask for three husbands and fathers (and their wives and children) to remain apart for as long as Pettit’s boys had even been alive? Who would call Micki and Annie and tell them that their men might miss two more birthdays, two more anniversaries, two more New Year’s Eves? Or might they miss three? Or four?

Extending a mission was one thing. Extending it without end was another.

Sean O’Keefe shook his head.

He still didn’t know the how of it. He still had no magic at his disposal, no potions or beans. There was no phone call he could make, no snap of his fingers, no name or face that he might recall that would make everything better. And yet his gut remained unmoved. Expedition Six needed to come home.

·   ·   ·

Soyuz
. It was all that NASA had left. Once Americans had feared the tiny green capsule because of what it might one day do. Now they were left worrying about what it might not.

Unlike most rockets,
Soyuz
was born almost entirely of one man’s inspiration: Sergei Korolev, the previously anonymous so-called “chief designer” of the entire Soviet space program.

Korolev was an engineer who flew homemade gliders and helped design military aircraft until 1938, when, at age thirty-two, he was swept up in one of Stalin’s paranoid purges. He spent
months packed into a boxcar on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, shuffled into a prison ship, pushed off at the Siberian port of Magadan, and sent down into the infamous Kolyma gold mines.

Later, his genius missed, he was transferred to a special prison outside Moscow where he was put to work on the war machine, mostly designing rockets for airplanes and missiles. After the war, he tore apart a few of Germany’s V2 rockets until he was imprisoned again—although why and where remains in doubt. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Korolev was “rehabilitated” and elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Always with his eyes and mind turned toward the skies, he poured his pirated knowledge and years of cell-bound imagination into the R-7 rocket, which was meant to carry a nuclear warhead far enough to reach New York City. The rocket proved poorly equipped for that unkind purpose, but following several explosive failures, it did prove a first-rate space booster. After Korolev convinced an embattled Nikita Khrushchev of the political value of launching an artificial satellite, he personally oversaw the development and delivery of
Sputnik
into space in 1957. (He lived in a small house in a grove of trees just a ten-minute walk from the Kazakh launch site.) Next came the launching of larger satellites, including the first one with a heartbeat, a dog named Laika, and in May 1960, a crash test dummy.

Despite his success, Korolev remained as invisible to the outside world as Tyuratam, erased from photographs the way the city had been from maps. Khrushchev wanted the Soviet success in space to remain one of the people, of the nation, and not that of a single brilliant man. Korolev was forbidden to travel or communicate with rocket scientists outside the Soviet Union. Even behind the Iron Curtain, he became a sort of omnipotent apparition, almost godlike in his status but equally unseen.

He was also fallible. A little more than four months after he had successfully launched his mannequin, his program met with an almost unimaginable disaster, the so-called Nedelin Catastrophe. In October 1960, an unmanned moon-shot rocket exploded on the launchpad. Among the casualties that night was Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the top Soviet missile general. Under political
pressure and time constraints, he had ordered an inspection of the rocket—which had failed to ignite moments earlier—without first removing its payload of fuel or waiting for morning. Appearing out of the dark, as many as three hundred scientists, engineers, and technicians began crawling on and around the monster, looking for a cure to what ailed it, when its engines ignited and exploded. Everyone on the pad—including Nedelin, but not the normally hands-on Korolev—was killed, some by sonic shock but more by the fireball that lit up the flats.

It took six months for Korolev and his program to recover, but it did so in spectacular fashion: on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, poised to become the first man in space, lifted off in the rocket
Vostok
. It was not beautiful but it did the job, and it did it first. It also bore certain attributes that would later become part of the mainstay
Soyuz
. Gagarin was strapped into a capsule that touched down on land (unlike the American splashdowns), under parachutes. Also in contrast to its American counterparts,
Vostok
’s function was almost entirely automated; there were fears that even the best cosmonauts would be rendered incapacitated by weightlessness and stress. Although those fears proved unfounded, the Soviets elected to remain faithful to their totalitarian machines. Each of their subsequent successes—longer-duration flights, twin launches on parallel orbits, and the safe return of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space—was built on the premise that the fewer buttons the pilots had to push, the less chance they had of blowing themselves up.

The Vostok program ended in the spring of 1963; next came the cobbled together
Voskhod
, a stopgap to fill the wait until the new
Soyuz
was ready. Nikita Khrushchev had demanded that Korolev counter the American Gemini program and its two-man crews (until then, rockets on both sides had been designed to carry a single passenger) with a vehicle that could host three. And while
Soyuz
was already deep into its planning stages, so many dreams turned into sketches and blueprints, it would never be hatched in time. Instead,
Vostok
was stripped down and emptied out, and enough room was found for three cramped men, with only enough supplies for single-day missions.