Out of Orbit (5 page)

They were given one last wish of good luck. The hatch was closed. And that was it. That was the last of the lingering.

Except. Across the Atlantic Ocean, at two small towns in Spain, the weather was bad. In Morón and Zaragoza, clouds rolled in and
the winds picked up. It wasn’t an inconvenience solely for holiday-makers. Both towns are home to air force bases; both of those have been designated Transoceanic Abort Landing Sites for the shuttle. If one of the three main engines fails, or if some other critical component breaks down and makes entry into orbit impossible, the shuttle’s commander has between eight and fifteen minutes to try to return to the launch site, to slingshot his way around the globe and touch down in California, or to set his sights on the middle ground of Spain, where about sixty pilots, astronauts, technicians, and medical emergency personnel had gathered alongside an otherwise empty runway. Just in case, they checked their watches and fired up ambulances and sent a weather balloon into the sky. On this early morning, however, they didn’t need the balloon to give them the forecast. Just as the launch window opened at the Cape, the teams at Morón and Zaragoza watched lightning flash across black skies and shook their heads.

The countdown stopped. Bowersox, Budarin, Pettit, and the rest of
Endeavour
’s crew were helped out of the cockpit.

Fate would have to wait once again. Better luck tomorrow.

·   ·   ·

After all of which—after all of the switch outs and misfires and delays—even the cold-eyed Ken Bowersox spent the following evening trying to keep his heart rate within acceptable levels. It hadn’t helped one bit, he muttered to himself, that their mission number was STS-113. The crew had whispered to one another about asking for a new designation, perhaps moving on up to STS-114, jumping the way hotel elevators skip that cursed floor. Maybe it was all that they needed to end their bad run, like a baseball player changing his socks to break out of a slump. But in the end, pride subsumed the talk of jinxes; they decided to swallow their ill feelings. If outsiders somehow caught wind of their conversations, they agreed that they would brush them off as a joke, a defense mechanism, a distraction to lighten a somber mood. And yet deep down, there remained an unease in them, a low, unshakable hum in the background. It wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t despair, and it wasn’t resignation. It was a creeping
anxiety, a kind of shadow. Having been suited up for the third time, a few of them wondered whether they might never leave the ground. They wondered whether this whole big, crazy thing wasn’t meant to come off. Now Bowersox stared at the lockers in front of him and tried to push aside the last of his own wonder, about whether they should have changed their mission number after all.

“Looks like we’ve got a good vehicle and good weather tonight for you,” launch director Mike Leinbach radioed the crew after they had been strapped in, the same as before, all over again. “Have a great flight and I hope you have a good turkey dinner packed for Thanksgiving.”

“Thank you very much,” Commander Wetherbee replied. “From the bridge of
Endeavour
, we’re ready to set thundering sail.” At least they were going to get to try.

And in that moment something miraculous happened, the same miracle that always happens to the insides of astronauts. In that moment they go from being the only construction on earth more complex than their vehicle to the most simple. They become stones. There is no more thinking, no more emotion, no more remembering
Challenger
, no more wonder or dread. Instead, they slip into a kind of trance, quiet, serene, their minds wiped as clean as those of the last, brave members of a cult. The calm is a by-product of their years of training. It also springs from some small, remarkable part of them that they were born with. Mailer called it iron; Tom Wolfe called it the right stuff. But there is a lie in that poetry, because it makes that special something sound more exclusive than it is. The truth is, it’s not just the dominion of astronauts. It’s in all of us. There are millions of stories of ordinary people tapping it whenever they are trapped in extraordinary situations, whenever they might have otherwise seemed done for: when an engine on their plane’s wing starts belching smoke, or when they’re standing on a beach watching a hurricane blow in. Suddenly all that’s left is their faith. Their bodies give them no other choice but to believe that everything might still work out, and, should it look like it will not—should things take a turn—next they find a way to believe that it was never meant to be. They think of everything that brought them
to this moment, every step and side road in the history of their lives, and they see reason; they see, looking back at that long, crooked course, an artful conspiracy. Each of them comes to accept that in some profound way, we’re all just passengers, and in the end, it’s the universe that lives in us, not the other way around.

Like those millions of ordinary people, seven astronauts switched over to their own automatic pilots, leaving the worry for someone or something else to shoulder. All of the things that might have gone wrong or been mistaken—all of those parts, all of those hands—became remote, abstract, almost hypertheoretical. There were too many layers to sift through. There was too much for them to take in. And so they took in none of it. They settled back in their chairs, and they looked at their checklists, and they smiled to themselves. In the way that all of us will come to understand the facts of it, each of them already had: sometimes, our fates are no longer ours to decide, and we can only grip our fists until our knuckles turn white and hang on for the rest of the ride.

·   ·   ·

There was not a lot of conversation. The laughter and joking had stopped. The men of Expedition Six could follow along with their scripts, but they weren’t to interrupt the rigid, technical dialogue flowing between upstairs and control. The only one of them with any sort of role was Bowersox, who, in the leftmost mid-deck seat, could reach the buttons that would allow him, in case of dire emergency, to open the hatch and deploy the wire-basket slide that would carry the crew, two at a time, down to the armored tank. If his services were required, more than likely they were seconds away from becoming corpses. Pettit, meditating beside him, and Budarin, at the far right, staring at his bee, tried not to lose their cool by thinking about that. But if only for an instant, all of them had needed to swallow their doubts, the bilious flutter of overwhelmed senses. How could they not?

On the one occasion when a shuttle crew had tried to subsume their nerves with idle chatter—the launch of STS-44—only one man
had refused to take part in the charade. Story Musgrave, a four-time veteran of liftoff, had been tight-lipped in the middle of the dull roar. “Story, how come you’re so quiet over there?” Tom Henricks, the pilot, had asked.

“Because I’m scared to death,” Musgrave had replied.

The cabin had been nearly silent after that, like
Endeavour
’s was now, come the start of the aptly named terminal count, nine minutes from ignition. The main countdown had stopped cold there, the way it always does. The pause gives the test director time to call out a long list of acronyms, each representing one of the technicians sitting at a console dedicated to some small component of the shuttle and its launch. Each of them must respond to the roll call, but they have a limited selection of answers: one word (GO!) is good; two words (NO GO!) is bad. This time around, every one of them said a single word. Now only two of them could change their minds and stop the count. The supervisor of range operations continued monitoring whether any planes or ships had strayed into range of the splashdown. And the weatherman, fed data from around the world—the weatherman who had relayed the gloomy reports from Spain the night before—could still put the quit on things. But tonight he was as quiet as the crew, and the countdown was begun again, left to continue apace.

Seven minutes distant, hydraulic systems activated, and the White Room began to swing away from the shuttle, pulling back like a bomber creeping away from the charge he’s just set.

Two minutes later, Wetherbee was given the order: “Go to start the APUs.” The auxiliary power units provide the shuttle’s hydraulic juice, and when they fired up, the crew knew that they were likely leaving. They were finally burning fuel, and burning fuel meant that only some very bad luck could stop them now.

After what felt like forever, counted down second by second—until they were just three minutes from launch—the shuttle’s three main engines began gimbeling, testing their directional thrust. As they shifted up and down, left and right, throwing off a little push with each pull of the trigger, the astronauts could feel the shuttle
swinging, like a skyscraper in a strong wind. It might have been unnerving were it not expected. They had waited so long for this moment, had imagined it so many times, now there were no surprises.

Thirty seconds later, they shut their helmet visors, and their oxygen came on. Each of them was now in his own universe. Each of them was under glass.

The flight data recorders switched on.

A little more than thirty seconds from liftoff, the shuttle’s computers took over from the ground’s. With each passing moment, another knot was untied, another set of handcuffs slipped. Bit by bit, they were being cut loose. Countdown, they had come to understand, is one long letting go. It’s a goodbye filled with lingering until finally it’s too late to turn back.

Ten seconds before launch, they heard the rumble of the water deluge system pouring out below them. The wall of water splashed into trenches carved out of the swamps, ready to catch their fire and dampen their acoustic shock. They blamed whatever trembling they felt in their hearts on the sudden burst. Everything around them had caught a bad case of the shakes.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six seconds from launch, the three main engines ignited. The cabin really began vibrating, the straps on the storage lockers swinging wildly. The shuttle’s computers ran through a series of final checks, and every last one of them came back okay. Inside the crew cabin, Pettit strained to look out of the mid-deck’s single porthole, a solitary five-inch-wide window back and to his left. All he could see was night, lit up with a glow.

Their headsets filled with noise, like static.

They could sense the shuttle pulling the stack toward its belly. It felt as though the beast was being held back, which it was, by those eight giant bolts, until it had built up the necessary thrust. It seemed like a long time for the crew to have to grit their teeth.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

The solid rocket boosters kicked in. The bolts exploded.

One.

Now there was no going back. Liftoff.

Almost instantaneously, they were pushed back into their seats by the force. Now they could decide how well the simulators had prepared them for the feeling. It has been likened to being strapped to the front of a freight train, or surfing the Loma Prieta earthquake and its aftershocks. Bowersox remembered it well. Budarin, accustomed to the bucking of the Russian
Soyuz
rocket, thought it was a relatively gentle shove. Pettit decided there wasn’t any call for metaphors. To him, it felt exactly how he imagined it might. It felt like he was riding a rocket.

“GO WITH THROTTLE!”

And up they went.

Seven seconds into their flight, they cleared the tower, and the technicians in Texas took over from those in Florida.

More than thirty seconds later, the sound of their engines finally washed over the crowds gathered ten miles away in Titusville. Until then, hushed spectators had followed a silent light.

But inside
Endeavour
, it was loud. Engines roared. Equipment rattled. Everything shook. In the middle of chaos, there was nothing to do but wait, the idle members of the crew reminding themselves that every second that passed was one second less for something to go wrong.

After a little more than two minutes, they had reached an altitude of twenty-seven miles, and
Endeavour
’s solid rocket boosters were jettisoned, blown clear by explosives and eight small rocket motors. The crew let loose their first sigh of relief. They had out-raced the ghosts of
Challenger
. Now if something went wrong, there were options: first Florida, then Spain, then California. Until then, there had been only go or no go, life or death.

It helped that their ride began to smooth out, even as their altitude and speed steadily increased. It felt less like they were in a rocket, and more like they were in the lead car of a very fast train.

Everything was normal. Everything was good.

Outside of their porthole was just more black.

Six minutes later, just eight and a half minutes into the flight, the main engines shut down, making the ride quieter still—until a loud clang signaled that the external fuel tank had been blown loose and begun to come apart, left to splash down, in pieces, in the Indian Ocean. The lost tank was like a penny thrown into a gorge from a bridge. It gave some gauge of the distance that the crew had covered, reminding them that they were a long, long fall from earth.

The reaction control system took over, tiny rockets that fired for short bursts, pushing the shuttle away from its fuel tank and making sure that it would eventually find its proper attitude, top down, belly up. Finally the shuttle slipped into orbit, at a speed of 17,489 miles per hour. Then, it was quiet. Then, the crew could breathe. They listened to the fans venting around them and the chatter of instruments and the best wishes and congratulations crackling up from the ground.

They felt lighter suddenly, as though they were lifting against their straps.

They could feel their shoulders relaxing.

Their jaws loosened.

And then, blinking away the sweat, Don Pettit caught something out of the corner of his eye. There, hovering in front of him, was Nikolai Budarin’s bee. It was floating, weightless, tied down only by its string and looking as massive as a billboard: YOU ARE IN SPACE, it announced. That’s when Pettit knew, despite everything that had happened, despite all that he had gone through—including his three heartbreaking rejections—that along with the others, he had finally made it. In eight spine-jarring minutes, he had become a real live astronaut. Along with six men, some New Mexican green chiles, and a toy bee, he had arrived.