Out of Orbit (41 page)

It was named in honor of Bill Shepherd, U.S. Navy SEAL and commander of Expedition One. To quell his homesickness during his years of training—and to quench his thirst for something other than another shot of Russian vodka—he had set up this makeshift hole-in-the-wall, a kind of speakeasy for the young astronaut set. It wasn’t much, a few chairs and tables in the dark and dank, but it harbored perhaps the most valuable piece of hardware in all of Star City: this great, shining, magnificent machine that turned ice and alcohol into frozen daiquiris.

It had been rustled up by a man named John McBrine, one of NASA’s longest-serving staff members in Russia. He had found the monster for sale on the Internet, but after he had unpacked it,
McBrine was crushed to find that the drinks it spewed out were warm. Fortunately, an American reserve astronaut named Don Pettit, ignorant to the adventures that awaited him, had a knack for fixing just about anything that had been broken. He also had some time on his hands. The way Pettit would later repair a certain Microgravity Glovebox on the International Space Station, he repaired McBrine’s daiquiri machine.

Now that machine was fired up, shaking on the counter, rumbling like one of that afternoon’s helicopters, and out of it poured an endless stream of boozy froth. Loud and happy men gathered it up and pushed it back, in between still more hugging and hollering, blowing off the last traces of steam that had been generated over the past hours, days, weeks, and months. For most of the men packed inside that bar on that night, it was the first grand good time they had enjoyed since
Columbia
had cast them in shadows. The weight of the world had been lifted off their shoulders just as Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had assumed it. For the first time since February, they felt free, and they would have liked the feeling and the night to last forever.

Eventually, though, morning came, and with it short naps and trips to the airport, where flights waited to carry the men on their long rides home. On one of them, O’Keefe and Pastorek sat side by side, grinning through hangovers and fatigue. There were no more notes to take, no more decisions to make, and best of all, there was no more sleeplessness. Before their plane was even wheels up, they had closed their eyes and drifted off into a sleep so deep, they needed only to give a little kick, and they, too, would know how it felt to fly over mountaintops and look down on skyscrapers.

·   ·   ·

The rest of them—Bowersox and Annie, Pettit and Micki and their kids—woke up in separate beds, in separate rooms, to three more weeks in Russia. They enjoyed the occasional visit together, but each was short, twenty minutes one afternoon, a ten-spot the following morning. The astronauts spent the rest of their days being examined by doctors and interviewed by experts about their experience, most
energetically about their
Soyuz
flight. The engineers charged with figuring out why it had gone ballistic believed, openly, that the crew was at fault. Again and again, the three men denied any wrongdoing. They had been crew members on a ship and in a universe each with a mind of its own. They had been at the mercy of something outside of themselves.

And now they were again. They were back on earth, back to all of its pressures, back to all of its demands on their time and their bodies. They sometimes felt like wrestlers who had been pinned, helpless, to the mat, their fates no longer their own.

From the moment they had pulled up to the gates at Star City, their days had stopped unfolding exactly as they wanted them to. For the first time in nearly six months, they had to alter their routine to make room for dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of others in it.

Soon they would be caught in traffic and the rain, bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the subway, tied to a desk for hours each day. They would catch colds. They would have appointments to keep, and the grass would need cutting.

They would be rushed. They would be late.

And in the quiet in between, they would wonder at what they had done, and they would wonder at what’s next.

Mars.

In January 2004, a little less than nine months after Expedition Six’s dramatic fall to earth, President Bush outlined a brave new vision for NASA. (He was introduced from station by Expedition Eight’s Mike Foale, the
Soyuz
taxi missions having worked perfectly since Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit had their brush with death by gravity.) To surprisingly little fanfare, the president called for the completion of a scaled-down International Space Station by 2010, a return to the moon as early as 2015, and a manned mission to the red planet sometime after 2020.

While the rest of the country tried to a stifle a collective yawn, a large pocket of Houston seemed grateful for the spark. Still struggling to fix the external tank’s insulating foam—the same foam that had doomed
Columbia
—the agency’s technicians and engineers were suddenly presented with a grander challenge, exactly the sort of rock-solid objective that they had been itchy for.

The announcement awakened something within the men of Expedition Six, too. In the months that followed their bumpy ride home, they were cleared of any wrongdoing in their capsule’s malfunction. Budarin had been adamant all along that the crew was not at fault; Bowersox was less certain. (“One thing I’ve learned in flying airplanes over the years is never say for sure that you didn’t make a mistake,” he said. “It’s always best to be humble.”) After the investigation was complete, it was found that a run-of-the-mill software glitch had been the root of so much drama.

It was a shock to learn that their lives had been at the mercy of
some tired computer programmer’s typo. But Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit also saw something fortuitous in their misadventure, especially given the president’s proclamation—the perfect finishing note for an expedition that had been built on the science of accident.

As though by design, their extended mission and eventful return mirrored the long trip to Mars as closely as any journey into space ever had. The gutsy astronauts chosen to make that incredible voyage would need to lift off in a rocket, live in weightlessness for six lonely months, burn down through the planet’s atmosphere in a capsule, dig into its rocky surface, and finally tap their innermost strength, cracking open their hatch and setting up camp.

Mission Control would never have taken the risk of purposely leaving Expedition Six to fend for themselves on the Kazakh steppes. But that inadvertent cold shoulder had proved that perhaps the hardest part of a Martian landing was, in fact, possible. Even if little green men attacked the newly landed crew, Budarin had demonstrated that the astronauts would have it in them to pump their double-barreled shotguns and blast buckshot into the shadows. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had shown that, if nothing else, our astronauts possess the necessary fight.

They were rewarded for their groundbreaking troubles. Not long after Bowersox had settled back into Houston’s routine, he was named director of NASA’s Flight Crew Operations Directorate. His new job, among the most powerful positions in the astronaut office, includes selecting which men and women will occupy which seats on which flights.

Budarin was promoted to the position of flight director. In his new role, he jets between Houston and Moscow, helping to manage the American and Russian spaceflight programs. He is happy for spending so much time stateside. In Russian culture, friendship is especially meaningful, and he delights in keeping Expedition Six nearly as close on the ground as they were in space. Whenever Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit sit together around a restaurant table, laughing and remembering, they never try to shake the sensation that the rest of the room might fade into black and they will be left
feeling like three men sitting in a bucket, alone against the universe once again.

Still, the feeling needs constant nurturing: given their new roles, it is unlikely that Bowersox and Budarin will ever fly again. Only Pettit remains in the active astronaut pool, filling his time served on the ground by working on the shuttle’s foam problem and helping design the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV, the ship that is expected to replace the space shuttle when the fleet is retired in 2010.

Asked by his managers whether he wanted to be assigned to one of the few remaining shuttle flights, Pettit declined. Instead, he asked to be considered for another long-duration mission to station. Micki wasn’t entirely thrilled with his request, but his managers smiled, nodded their heads, and put his name down on the list.

That list remains long. The shuttle didn’t return to space until
Discovery
launched in July 2005, two and a half years after
Columbia
’s final flight. (It was a good thing that Sean O’Keefe and company hadn’t settled for the Avdeyev Option; Bowersox or Pettit might have come back with gills or to empty houses.) A new camera revealed that a large piece of insulating foam had still fallen from the external tank, and the fleet was grounded again. With only two-man crews occupying the International Space Station for six months at a stretch, and with the three remaining shuttles empty and locked in their hangars, NASA’s astronaut office started to feel less like an airport lounge and more like a prison without bars.

The boxed-in feeling has been especially strong for Pettit. Bowersox and Budarin have been able to reconcile themselves to their likely permanent grounding. The American has rocketed into space five times, and the Russian has clocked three long-duration missions. They would have liked more, but each man knows that he has been given his time.

But Pettit has been up there only once, and he feels as though there is still so much for him to do. Every day he spends trapped on earth, some part of him feels denied.

Now he understands what the other flown astronauts in his class went through upon their return. They had always seemed unsettled,
lost in conversation, distracted. They were always caught dreaming. They had forgotten their fear, and they had forgotten their terrible solitude. But what had been hardwired into them, seemingly for good, was their longing. In the days after they had returned, they had begun their scheming, trying to figure out how to make it back to the place where they now believed they most belonged. And they had come to know what only their fellow astronauts—from Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins on—could understand: that their gold astronaut wings sometimes felt like a scarlet letter.

They were different from the rest of us now, and different, too, from the men they once were, and not just because so many of them still swallowed their toothpaste.

Before, Pettit would stare up at the sky and feel as though the stars were close enough for him to touch. Now he no longer finds comfort in that easy lie. Even when he checks his watch, sneaks through his front door late at night, sets up his telescope on his lawn, and follows the space station on its long journey through the universe, he can feel cut off from his home as if by a wall, a wall as thin as a single sheet of glass.

First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit, and Nikolai Budarin, the three brave men whose stories I’ve tried my best to tell in this book. I would especially like to thank Don and his terrific wife, Micki, who were particularly generous with their time.

Their cooperation began when I first wrote their story as a feature for
Esquire
magazine, where I’ll be delighted to work for as long as they’ll have me. I was brought on board there by Andy Ward, who has since moved on to
GQ;
I will forgive him for that, because none of this would have happened if he hadn’t let some dumb kid bearing a box of Krispy Kremes into his office one summer afternoon. In a cosmic way, Andy is the start of all of this, and I am hugely indebted to him.

I also owe a giant-size debt to my eternally patient editor at
Esquire
, Peter Griffin, who has, in his quiet way, made me a much better writer in the time that I have worked for him. He has let me see through his eyes what makes for a good story and how best to tell it, including some incredibly valuable advice when I wrote about Expedition Six for the magazine. Peter also supported my writing
Out of Orbit
throughout its long, tortured birth. Even if it was just a quick phone call to ask how things were coming along, he spurred me.

Of course, I must give a particularly robust thanks to David Granger, the editor in chief of
Esquire
and my boss of bosses. Not only is he generous enough to continue employing me (at least as of this writing) but he wrote one of the kindest e-mails a writer could
imagine receiving after he read my Expedition Six story. I’ve kept it and read it often in the nearly two years since.

As well, David did me the service of passing my first draft along to Bill Thomas, my Great Benefactor—publisher and editor, more officially—at Doubleday in New York. I’m not really sure what happened next. All I know is, I was covering the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, when I received an e-mail from my agent, David Black: “Your life just changed,” he wrote. “Call me.” I did, and he gave me the unexpected news that he had sold a book-length version of the story to Bill. Golf never saw so much screaming. These three men—Granger, Thomas, and Black—conspired to give me a thrill that I will never forget. They each share a permanent stamp in my great memories passport.

Shortly thereafter, the dreamy fantasy stopped and the work began. Although NASA declined to help me out—for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom—many others did, and for that, I am grateful. (Luckily, several of the people I needed most have left Houston behind.) Sean O’Keefe, now the president of Louisiana State University, was especially frank in his recollections. His friend and lawyer, Paul Pastorek, elected not to charge me by the hour, and I appreciate that. Bill Readdy, now having started up his own consulting firm, Discovery Partners International, also took breaks from his busy schedule to share his memories of bad days and good.

Among the probably dozens of others I’ve leaned on, I would also like to thank Christine Pride, Karla Eoff, Todd Doughty, and everyone else at Doubleday; Doris Lance at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, and former pilot Dick Wright; Deborah Goode at the United States Naval Academy; Dr. Tom Peterson and his assistant, Gerri Sullivan, at the University of Arizona in Tucson; John Haire at Edwards Air Force Base; Konstantin Tyurkin of RIA Novosti in Moscow; Sergei Gruzdev, my smiling and able translator; Neil Woodward, American astronaut; and the staff at the Ottawa Public Library, including my wife, Lee.