Out of Orbit (4 page)

After everybody was suited up, together they walked down a long hallway lined with technicians and staff shouting encouragement, one last charge of adrenaline that felt as though it might have
pushed them into orbit all on its own. They took an elevator down to the ground, passed through a set of metal doors, waved again to the assembled press, flashbulbs popping, and climbed into a silver bus called the Astrovan.

It was a ten-minute drive to the launchpad, almost two minutes longer than their ride into space would take. Their path was cleared by a security helicopter and armed escorts. A few of them took the time to whisper the astronaut’s prayer under the din: “God help you if you screw up.”

About a mile from the stack, with the shuttle looking huge and beautiful, lit up and calling out to them again, a security guard waved his flashlight through the gloaming, stopping the bus. He climbed on and asked the astronauts to show their security passes. Six of them pulled out laminated cards with their mug shots and authorization. Don Pettit, so close to his dream, patted himself down for a pass that wasn’t there. He hadn’t even seen one before, he thought, and besides, zipped up in his spacesuit, he was clearly supposed to be here. If his costume was a counterfeit, it was a perfect one. But with the guard working his way down the aisle, Pettit’s voice was close to cracking when he began to apologize, stammering that he’d somehow missed this step along the way. The rest of the crew turned back and stared him down, eyes rolling. After the bumps on the road to their launch, this, it felt like, was the most calamitous. The shuttle was close enough for them to run to, and here Pettit, the rookie reserve, was going to be pulled off the bus because he didn’t have this cheap piece of plastic to show some puffed-up rent-a-cop. He was stared at just long enough for him to grow frantic before Wetherbee finally cracked a smile, and then Bowersox did, and soon enough the whole bus was broken up in laughter.

Even at a time like that—perhaps especially at a time like that—there was room for a joke. Pettit, dying inside, tried to squeeze into the space under his seat until they arrived at the pad.

Once herded off the bus, they took the elevator 195 feet up the shuttle’s hull, watching all the while condensation running down the sides of the external tank, falling into the trench that would catch their fire beneath them. Finally they found themselves in the White
Room, a closed-off sanctuary in which they finished the last of their waiting. (Three miles distant, their families would find them by the bright light.) One by one, helped by six technicians in white suits and ball caps, they crawled through the hatch on their hands and knees.

Ten minutes later, they were on their way back to the ground.

Earlier in the day, a valve had been opened, allowing the oxygen that would be pumped into the crew’s helmets and cabin to flow through the ship. Now routine preflight tests had found a small amount of that oxygen in the shuttle’s cargo bay. There was no good reason for it to be there. Somewhere in the bundles of flexible hoses under the floor, there was a leak.

“Tonight’s not our night,” Steve Altemus, NASA’s launch manager, had crackled over the radio. “I know you guys are going to be disappointed, but I think we want to give you a healthy vehicle before we cut you loose from the Cape.”

“Absolutely,” Wetherbee said.

And that, for the moment, was the only absolute. As with the faulty bolt explosives, no one was sure exactly what the problem was. No one yet knew how to fix it. Here was this giant, groaning stack of metal and ceramic tiles and rocket fuel, and some virtually invisible thing in it had gone wrong. It was probably something painfully small, no bigger than a pinhole. But in space—in a vacuum without gravity—small things grow into big things, and a pinhole is plenty big enough to leave seven men trapped in a box without air.

·   ·   ·

Thousands of hands guide the shuttle on its journey to liftoff. Like the fibers of a wire, more than one hundred private aerospace contractors and subcontractors across the country conspire to muster the necessary current. The Boeing Company of Chicago and the Lockheed Martin Corporation of Bethesda are the principal circuits; through their jointly owned subsidiary, United Space Alliance of Houston, they’ve been responsible for the day-to-day operations of the shuttle since 1996. Among their suppliers are ATK Thiokol Propulsion of Brigham City, Utah, which builds the solid rocket
boosters; Spacehab, Inc., of Webster, Texas, which designs and manufactures the modules that house experiments; and United Technologies of Hartford, which, through its Pratt & Whitney engine divisions in Florida and California, forges the turbopumps. The external tank is welded in Michoud, Louisiana. The life support system comes out of Windsor Locks, Connecticut. The main engines were first brought to life in Canoga Park, California.

At each of those sites, dozens of processes combine to produce a single part of the shuttle or sometimes only a part of a part. For instance: the shuttle’s nose cap can withstand temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but it doesn’t provide much insulation for the crew looking out over it, and in its hollow core, a bundle of thirty-two heat-resistant blankets must be packed into place. Every one of them is made from scratch at NASA’s Thermal Protection System Facility. Ceramic fabric is first measured and cut and coated with sizing to prevent the fibers from coming apart; the fabric is layered between insulating batting and stitched; it’s trimmed and sewn closed around its edges; the completed blanket is finally baked twice in superhot ovens and waterproofed. The process takes a team of workers two months to complete—all to produce a single critical thing in a machine born from thousands.

By barge and plane, truck and train, the pieces are shipped to the Cape and made whole in the Vehicle Assembly Building, a leftover from the days of Apollo. Its volume is almost twice as large as the Pentagon’s. To put that sort of scale in perspective, 6,000 gallons of paint were needed just to tattoo an American flag on its flank. In it, a second army of workers picks up from the first, taking the parts and making them into a whole, a machine of almost surprising fragility.

They all remember that for STS-71—the one hundredth manned flight in American space history—a small number of Northern Flicker woodpeckers had taken roost on the shuttle
Atlantis
, knocking holes into its external tank. Since then, fake owls have been installed around the launchpad, leaving this fantastic, $2 billion spaceship guarded by a few bucks’ worth of Taiwanese plastic. Those owls serve as a constant reminder of how close failure is, how
everything and everyone here depends on everything and everyone else, the bunch of them tied together like climbers roping their way up a mountain.

And if any one of them misses a step, or if any of the thousands of others before them already has—if an O-ring gets too cold and brittle, or a detonator cable is left unattached, or a sliver of aluminum finds its way into the hydrogen peroxide system, or an oxygen tank is dropped and forgotten about and then a switch is flicked on the way into space—the shuttle and seven astronauts will be lost, probably in a ball of fire and smoke.

·   ·   ·

In the hours after the oxygen leak was discovered, workers emptied the fuel tanks as carefully as they had filled them and opened the payload doors, hoping to find the source of the oxygen leak that had sent the crew back to the ground. Bag-suited engineers climbed aboard a platform that would lift them to the front of the cargo bay to start their inspections. Just as they began to rise, a spotter on the ground was distracted, and the platform bumped into the Canadarm, the shuttle’s robotic arm. A small square of the arm’s thermal protective blanket was torn away, and now there were two problems to fix, not one.

If the arm was ruined, the
Endeavour
would need to be rolled off the launchpad, pried loose from its external tank, towed back to its hangar, have its arm replaced, and finally get fitted out for flight again. That kind of delay would likely have pushed liftoff into something called the beta-angle period, a two-week stretch in December when the sun and the earth conspire to leave Expedition Six’s ultimate destination, the International Space Station, without shade. While the station can rotate and shift position to protect itself from the heat, the shuttle can’t stay docked in the middle of those acrobatics.
Endeavour
would remain grounded until the end of the year.

For the crew, it was one more worrisome hitch. In their private quarters, still coming down from their near-launch adrenaline burst, they were called together and told that their next try would be delayed
until November 18 at the earliest, and that they might as well head back to Houston. They packed up their few belongings and flew home in their trusty two-seater T-38s, feeling disappointment and maybe just a little relief. They had been granted a reprieve from deadline’s stress, if only for a short while.

They remained largely locked down in the quarantine that they had been ordered into weeks before. Contrary to the feelings of the
Apollo
astronauts, the enforced isolation was not just for appearances. One common cold shared among them might have been enough to ruin everything. (Already, sinus congestion is the plague of most missions, because fluids that are normally drawn down by gravity suddenly start flowing up.) But even for the toughest-nut crew members, the exile was hard to stomach. These were boring, idle hours filled with last-minute busywork and the occasional outbreak of night sweats. It was as though the men had been given their destinies in gift-wrapped packages and then were told that they had to wait to open them … and wait … and wait … and wait.

For their patience, they were each rewarded with eight hours in their private bungalows and split-levels immediately after they returned to Houston. Pettit sneaked home and saw Micki, but he made the visit late at night, when he was sure his boys were asleep. He opened their bedroom door. Their faces were barely illuminated by the light in the hall. He stole a look at them, but he didn’t dare even whisper a good night or a farewell, lest he wake them up and hear their cries for a hug. Then the father and the astronaut in him would have had to fight it out, and he didn’t like to think about who might have won.

·   ·   ·

Back in Florida, there had been no such break. A flurry of work had begun, aimed at beating the beta-angle period and putting an end to Houston’s waiting. Using ultrasound equipment, sleuths found a bruise on the carbon composite material that makes up the Canadarm’s bone. Engineers in Toronto replicated the damage on a working test arm and began running a series of experiments, trying to decide how the wound affected the arm’s structural integrity.

Meanwhile, workers at the Cape found the source of the oxygen leak: a small metal part—another one of those single critical things—had worn out and cracked a hose near the cargo bay’s forward bulkhead, just behind the crew cabin. It was replaced and the rest of the hoses were tested.

There was more good news. The Canadian engineers decided that their arm was in fine working order and needed only a patch.

With that work under way, NASA decided to open a launch window. The moonlit evening of November 22 looked like a good, safe bet.

·   ·   ·

The crew spent their last, long days before launch filling the lonely hours the way astronauts always have. They had trained as though for inevitable disaster, strapped into simulators that replicated just about every physical possibility: the motion-based simulator, which swung them through every axis to prepare for the turbulence of launch; a fixed-base simulator that left them able to sketch from memory the shuttle’s flight deck on the back of a napkin; an engineering simulator to practice the fine art of rendezvous; Shuttle Training Aircraft to make rote even the most difficult approach; T-38 flights to keep up on their instrument reading; and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory for space-walk training and emergency bailout practice. They’d even exited a shuttle mock-up in wire baskets and learned how to drive the tank that sits on the launchpad, its armor thick enough (theoretically) to protect the crew in the event of catastrophe, providing they made their way to it in time. But now that make-believe was giving way to reality, all of the training in the world would fail to carry them into space. Now that they weren’t just playing pretend, it was time to plumb some deeper well.

All three members of Expedition Six were married. Bowersox had three children, the youngest of whom was six; Pettit’s twins were not yet two years old; Budarin had a pair of teenage sons. After making sure their wills were written and in place, they penned letters and cards for their kids that they hoped would never be read, outpourings of sentiment that, depending on the course of the coming
days, might become the only memory that sons had of fathers. Imagining those letters being carried in the wallets of boys grown into men, or folded up in their nightstand drawers, or hidden inside boxes of secret things … That was enough to make even the most sure-minded man feel a lot less like saying goodbye.

Not entirely by accident, leaving was no longer a choice. Once again, they flew across the Gulf from Houston to the Kennedy Space Center. Their families were waiting for them there, but behind a double yellow line that no one was permitted to cross in case germs came with them. There would be no more hugs, only smiles and waves. Sometimes there isn’t even a single pane of glass between an astronaut and home. Sometimes only an idea and some paint get in the way.

They boarded a bus that took them from the landing facility to the crew quarters to catch some rest, maybe even a little sleep. And then they went through the entire routine again, starting with an uneasy dinner and ending with a tight squeeze through the hatch.

Inside the crew cabin, one last hand-up was waiting for them, from an astronaut-turned-technician called the Caped Crusader. He helped each man into his seat. For each of them, one by one, four parachute clasps were done up. Four seat clasps were buckled. Oxygen hoses were attached, helmets were put on, communications lines were plugged in, and headsets fired to life. In the scramble, Pettit’s bag of coffee was taped under his seat, and Budarin managed to spruce things up a bit, tying a windup toy bee on a string to one of the locker doors in front of him. (It was strange for Pettit to see a barrel-chested man who looked like Charles Bronson, with his deeply lined forehead and head of thick hair, fumbling with a child’s plaything just then.) At last, the nervous work was done. Everybody was tucked away more than two hours before launch. Cold water began running over their bodies through their wired-in undergarments. It felt like jumping into a swimming pool on a hot day.