Out of Orbit (32 page)

Necessity gave birth to an invention that the Russians have trusted ever since: because there wasn’t room inside the capsule for ejection seats or reserve parachutes (
Vostok
’s pilots ejected minutes before the capsule landed and floated down to earth separately), a small solid-fuel impact rocket was added to the design. It was fused to fire just seconds before touchdown to make the dry landings feel less like the crew’s space elevator had hit the bottom of the shaft. In the end, there were just two touch-and-go
Voskhod
flights, allowing the Soviets to record two more space firsts—the first multi-man crew and the first space walk—but it wasn’t well-designed or safe enough, even by the Soviet definition of the word, to keep flying. Development of
Soyuz
and its accompanying proton booster was picked up again, but not soon enough for Korolev to see it fly. As a final indignity, he died on the operating table in 1966, moments after a hatchet job on a bad case of hemorrhoids.

Two unmanned
Soyuz
capsules were launched successfully the following winter. And then, on April 23, 1967, came
Soyuz 1
, piloted by Colonel Vladimir Komarov, the first cosmonaut to visit space twice. He had survived
Voskhod
’s inaugural manned flight, but he did not live through a second maiden voyage. During his descent, his parachute lines tangled, and his capsule crashed into the Kazakh steppes. Although the reasons for the tangle have never been made public, its terrible effects were: Komarov was killed instantly, having broken his hips, back, and neck, and rupturing virtually all of his organs.

Still, the Soviets remained wedded to Korolev’s original design, and over the coming years—after several successful launches, albeit marred by the occasional nonfatal malfunction
—Soyuz
proved a simple, if inelegant, workhorse. It wasn’t until the loss of the Salyut 1 crew in 1971, when three heroic space-station celebrities were suffocated and laid out in the grass, that the first in a series of redesigns was undertaken.

The Salyut 1 tragedy had revealed a fundamental flaw in the
Soyuz
’s original design, one that had plagued it since Khrushchev had made his demand for a capsule that could fit three men instead of the usual one or two. For Korolev to make that possible, he had
been denied the room for even the most rudimentary safety systems or, as incredible as it might seem today, for the cosmonauts inside to wear spacesuits. In the sad case of Salyut 1’s lost crew, the faulty valve that did them in could have been closed manually (and there was evidence that the crew had tried to shut it in their desperate last seconds), but the process took at least two minutes. It took half that time for
Soyuz
to empty itself of air. To have given the three doomed men any chance of survival, they would have needed their own supplies of oxygen, pumped into helmets. In the year of modifications that followed, it was decided that two-man crews were the better bet, and room for oxygen tanks and spacesuits was found.

Still,
Soyuz
was not perfect by any stretch. Since its first tangled parachute, there has been a weirdness in the machine, an almost natural predisposition toward glitches and snafus—most of them harmless and perhaps even endearing, but downright demonic every now and then. Although
Soyuz
hasn’t carried corpses since 1971, it has come uncomfortably close to reaching the status of tomb several times. In one instance—
Soyuz 23
, which flew in October 1976—it landed off course and splashed down in near-freezing Lake Tengiz. The capsule’s inside temperature plummeted, and its occupants were forced to wait several hours until recovery crews could connect a line and drag the vessel and the numb men inside to shore and safety.

But that experience was benign compared to the almost comically bad-luck flight that would have been
Soyuz 18
.

On April 5, 1975, Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov first ran into trouble some ninety miles up, when their rocket’s spent third stage held on longer than it should have—probably because the exploding bolts meant to help jettison it didn’t fire—pushing them into a violent tumble. (The tumble rate was so far off the scale that technicians on the ground didn’t believe the data; they ignored the problem until they heard the crew swearing loudly over their radio.) After their rocket’s fat ass was finally ditched, Lazarev and Makarov’s emergency reentry exposed them to g-forces that
Soyuz
had never been designed to handle. The spacecraft’s theoretical limit was 15.0. When the weight rocketed past 18.0, the meter broke,
and the cosmonauts each topped out at a ton and a half, snapping their ribs. Thankfully their parachutes opened and broke that hard drop, and their capsule made a relatively gentle landing on a snow-covered mountainside. But like a sled, it began speeding down the slope before the crew had managed to clamber out—narrowly avoiding falling over a cliff, like a barrel dropping over Niagara Falls, when its lines snagged on some pine trees.

The last remaining concern for the cosmonauts was that, after traveling 2,000 miles in just fifteen minutes, they might have landed themselves in China and thus, likely, in a Peking prison. Fortunately, they had landed just short of the border. They learned as much when their rescue team showed up, in the form of a band of Russian villagers who had watched in wonder when these spacemen fell out of the dusk.

·   ·   ·

Since that harrowing night,
Soyuz
has been tinkered with, usually without enthusiasm, with the exception of one significant overhaul, which saw its capacity increase from two men back to three. Still, its fundamental architecture has stayed the same: it is a child of the 1960s and a flying tank, ugly and hard-edged.

Like the
Apollo
capsules of old, it is launched on top of a booster rocket that dwarfs it in size. After it has reached space, the
Soyuz
capsule separates from the rocket and takes on a more manageable scope, leaving its crew with just nine cubic meters of living space spread across three small modules. The first, the orbital module, is vaguely spherical, capped with the docking mechanism that allows it to mate with its designated port after reaching the International Space Station. (For launch, it is usually filled with cargo.) The bell-shaped second module, called the descent module, contains the crew’s three canvas cradles as well as banks of monitors and control panels, filled with rectangular plastic buttons marked in Cyrillic, like an Aeroflot cockpit. The third module—called the propulsion module, cylindrical in shape—houses the main engine, fuel supplies, and electrical systems, powered by two winglike solar panels.

Like every Russian rocket in history, it remains grimly functional
and largely automated (although its crew has plenty of monitoring and switch-throwing to do). And upon its return to earth, during which the orbital and propulsion modules are ditched, it is reduced to that single bell-shaped descent module, saved from gravity by wind resistance alone. It is a barebones solution to the problem of launching men into space and returning them to earth. It resembles, in a lot of ways, those inventions that budding engineers come up with when they’re asked to insure an egg that’s thrown from a campus rooftop. Usually, the student engineers come up with a padded box attached to a parachute. What the Russians had come up with is
Soyuz
.

And now, it was all that NASA had come up with, too. For Sean O’Keefe, Bill Readdy, and the rest of the agency’s upper management, it was not the happiest remedy. If Expedition Six really did drop into the
Soyuz
that was latched to the side of the International Space Station, Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit stood to become the first Americans ever to return to earth on a foreign vessel, the first Americans to stake their lives on another country’s unhandsome technology. They would also become the first Americans since 1975 to come home in a capsule. It had been nearly thirty years since the last
Apollo
had splashed down into the South Pacific. All American astronauts since had glided back to earth, as in their dreams. Now it looked as though Bowersox and Pettit were about to be asked to fall.

More alarmingly, perhaps, the particular
Soyuz
capsule locked to station—
Soyuz TMA-1
—was the first in a new production run, replacing the archaic-seeming TM. Responding to the urging of the Americans, the Russians had included new instrumentation, monitors, and computer systems in their most recent effort. To their partner’s chagrin, however, the Russians had never bothered to test-fly the new capsule. Its launch to station, in October 2002, had been its inaugural flight; its return would be its first descent, and there was always a chance that bugs had hatched in the meantime.

·   ·   ·

But aside from their bruised pride and a burgeoning case of the gulps, O’Keefe and company had a larger ill to contend with. Their
first priority had to remain the safe return of Expedition Six. A close second was keeping the International Space Station operational, but they all knew that in rescuing the men, they now risked scuttling the machine.

Without the shuttle, the hopes of sending up an Expedition Seven had waned in the weeks after
Columbia
’s loss. It was assumed that, like the last crew of Skylab, Expedition Six would probably have to push station into a state of hibernation, dimming the lights and closing the doors, one step short of abandoning ship. Even that simple scenario presented its problems, however.

There was always the risk that the next crew to arrive on station’s doorstep—not until the shuttle fleet was back up and running, not for two or three years at least—would fail to find their destination in the blackness of space. They might even push station out of orbit in their repeated stabs at it, and a multibillion-dollar enterprise would be lost, either cast adrift toward Pluto or burned into ash that would settle across an enormous blue sea.

More to the point, and contrary to the opinion of their critics, the International Space Station’s crews did more than live out idle days in space, checking one another’s pulse. They cleaned and maintained the place, unclogging filters and replacing booties, and without its live-aboard troubleshooters, station risked falling out of the sky long before the next men up would be able to shock its heart back to life. Experience showed that Mir’s long tenure was made possible only by the creative and sometimes patchwork repairs undertaken by its crews. And although most of the new station’s operating systems were controlled from the ground, there was no substitute for having someone like Don Pettit on board, merrily fixing a broken part or tightening some loose bolt. Leaving station empty also meant leaving it untended, and like a lakeside cottage locked up for winter, there was always the danger of a fire sparking, the roof sagging under snow, or a break-in by bears. In short, bringing home Expedition Six without first sending up Expedition Seven represented the sort of gamble that NASA’s actuaries couldn’t abide.

Not surprisingly, those same men still didn’t care much for the idea of relying on
Soyuz
and
Soyuz
alone.

Sean O’Keefe had learned in his first days with NASA that within its walls, redundancy has never been a four-letter word. He learned that the agency’s engineers and technicians liked to prepare for every imaginable contingency, mapping out giant decision trees on dry-erase boards—if
x
then
y
, and if
y
then
z
. But they also preferred it when there was more than one
y
and more than one
z
. Truth be told, they liked it best when they had the entire alphabet at their disposal. They liked their backup systems to have backup systems, and they were among the few paranoid people on earth who knew what came after tertiary in the sequence of orders. (Quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary … The most pessimistic among them really weren’t happy until they’d reached something like duodenary, and even then, they slept with one eye open.)

No wonder, then, that whenever O’Keefe sat down with his advisers and their advisers and the advisers who were waiting in the wings after them, trying to come up with a fix, he was never left thinking that tonight was the night that he might get some sleep. With flowcharts and bullet points, the downbeats outlined every last thing that might go wrong with
Soyuz TMA-1
. It was a long list.

Perhaps in the months that it had been latched to station, the capsule had been struck by a piece of space junk, compromising its hull or its operating system. The new software that had been loaded into the
Soyuz TMA-1
’s main computer shortly before its launch might contain a glitch that had not yet been discovered. Perhaps all of its gas had leaked out into space in a fine, unseen mist, leaving its tank dry and its engines lifeless. The latches that had kept it tied to station might refuse to unlock. The shield designed to protect the descent capsule and its astronauts from the heat of reentry might have sustained a hairline crack during its flight up, which would turn it into a blast furnace on its way back down. The rockets meant to push the capsule into the earth’s atmosphere might fire too early (dropping it into the Caspian Sea) or too late (dropping it into the Siberian winter) or not at all (dropping its three passengers into memorial books). Like the space shuttle, a sheared bolt, a loose electrical connection, an imperfect seal, a jammed valve, a ribbon of fatigued metal, or a faulty weld could turn the capsule into a death-trap.
Unlike the shuttle, a hole in its parachute or another set of tangled lines could, too.

It always took the advisers much less time to run down the vaccinations they had should any of these nasty scenarios come to pass: none. Best among the worst case scenarios, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit might bundle into the ship, press the big black button that sparked its automatic reentry, and … nothing. That would leave them stranded—and then what?—but at least alive. Worst of the worst, something would go catastrophically wrong somewhere between up there and down here. That would mean the certain end of Expedition Six, and the probable end of everything else that was meant to come after.