Out of Orbit (6 page)

From birth we’re conditioned to accept the limitations of gravity. Only a lucky few of us can dunk a basketball; if we slip on a patch of ice, we’ll land flat on our backs; whenever we drop a glass, it’s doomed to smash into pieces. Suddenly, for the crew of
Endeavour
, none of these hard truths remained. Everything they had learned, everything they had come to expect of themselves and their environment in their time on earth, was no longer there for them to hold on to—nor did it hold on to them. One by one, they undid the straps that lassoed them to their chairs and began floating around the shuttle’s cabin. For the rookies among them, Don Pettit included, the first few moments were a little clumsy; they looked like kids who had been thrown into the deep end of a pool for the first time. It would take them days, even weeks, to relearn how to do the things that on earth had been automatic, something as simple as moving from a seat to a storage locker, without looking as if they were flailing. Their lives had been stripped of their usual anchors, their leverage, their footholds and resistance. All that was left was a kind of lightness. They could feel everything, even their insides, trying to lift.

As is the case for many astronauts, the feeling made Pettit go green. On earth, everything in his body—half-digested food, mucus, stomach acid, waste—had been perpetually drawn down and out. In space, everything seemed determined to head up and away. It was as though someone had shouted “Fire!” in the crowded theater that was his guts, and now a packed house was scrambling for the exits.

But for the more experienced crew members, the feeling bordered
on jubilation, as though they’d been cut loose somehow, unshackled and relieved of their earthly burdens. For them, weightlessness was freedom. Nikolai Budarin, who could seem hard-hearted and gruff on the ground, almost stereotypically Russian, smiled brightly and giggled, batting around his toy bee. He looked in for a nice, long high. Ken Bowersox, too, felt as though he was back where he most belonged, in a perfect, permanent state of flight. But for Pettit, the feeling was still foreign, even alien. He felt a little lost.

In a way, they all were. Buzz Aldrin, after he had bounced across the surface of the moon, talked about how much he had liked having something solid under his feet once again, even if it was only thick dust—how with the planting of that famous American flag, he had felt that he was
somewhere
. In deep space, he had felt rudderless, just another nowhere man, and he had realized that it was gravity that he had been missing. Gravity, even just a little bit of it, had given him the feeling of being home.

Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were scheduled not to know that feeling again for a little less than four months—a semester in college, football’s regular season. Only minutes into their flight, they understood that from here on in, and in everything they did—eating, working, sleeping, playing—there would be reminders that they were long gone. Now doing somersaults in the air, the first two looked ecstatic for it; the last hoped he would find his buoyancy soon enough.

Some astronauts took days to stop barfing, and did so only after injecting themselves with buckets of Phenergan; others were left chewing handfuls of aspirin, combating the aches in their legs and spines, which can begin to stretch out and lengthen as much as an inch without gravity closing the gaps. Already, Pettit felt as though he were on a rack.

Before launch, he had received counsel from a classmate who had beaten him into space. As well as offering a few salient tips on how to use the toilet—something along the lines of the best defense is a good offense—he had told Pettit that he might want to have his first ten minutes in orbit rehearsed, blocked out the way stage actors waltz through a play. Otherwise the experience and discomfort
would overwhelm the necessities of it. No time was allotted for breath-catching. There was so much work to be done.

Pettit had taken in the advice. He had memorized a short, opening to-do list down to its tiniest detail, and now he began working through it, and his upset stomach, step by step. First, he raised his visor. Next, he took off his gloves and, after losing hold of them for a split second, he pushed them under a strap that was wrapped around his knee, making sure that they couldn’t float away. Then he popped off his helmet and his headset, tucking the second inside the first. He churned his way toward the rows of storage lockers and found the bag that had been earmarked for his gear, labeled not with his name but with his mission designation: MS5. He slipped the helmet, the headset, and his gloves inside the bag, sealed it up, and put it away. As though he was following a recipe, he continued the process until he was down to a comfortable set of clothes that he might have worn to the gym. Come the end of the personal dismantling, he still felt sick, but at least he had made it through the opening act without a stumble.

The rest of the crew had also freed themselves from their bulk, and now they began working through checklists and itineraries dictated by the ground, timed down to the minute. For the first few hours in orbit—“post-insertion,” it’s called—the crew’s cabin is abuzz. For Expedition Six, still isolated down below on mid-deck, their principal job was to turn their cold, sterile surroundings into something that looked more like a train’s sleeping car. They folded away the seats, activated the cooling system, set up the exercise machines, fired up the galley, and rolled out their sleeping bags. It was like those frantic few hours after you pull into a campsite, and the tent needs to be pitched and wood needs to be gathered before dark. Unrolling the sleeping bags gave each of them that feeling especially.

But this was no ordinary wilderness they were in. After about ninety minutes of yeoman effort, Pettit had lost himself and his sickness in the hurry. He had maybe even forgotten where he was, exactly, at least until he visited the cockpit for the first time. He laughed when instinct still made him grab hold of the ladder that pointed the way, even though it was now about as useful as a paperweight.
And then, with the space shuttle turned upside down, and with two large windows making up most of the cockpit’s ceiling, he floated into what felt like a bubble of Heaven. There, filling his eyes with a warm, soft light, was a panoramic view of earth, of white clouds and blue ocean, half of it bright with sun and half of it dark with night.

He blinked once, twice, three times. For maybe ten seconds, he stopped, losing hold of everything he had left to do, instead caught stealing a look at everything else that had opened up for him. A big part of him wanted so badly to press his nose against the glass, but the rational rest of him—not to mention Bowersox and Budarin, still plugging away—called him back to work. He pulled himself from the window, telling himself that he would have all of the time in the world for staring.

The rest of the trip passed as though in a movie, projected on the giant blue screen stretched out underneath them. Everybody took his turn in a front-row seat. They could see the Blue Nile meeting the White Nile at Khartoum, boat wakes and vapor trails, the northern and southern lights in the same shift, cloud shadows that stretched for hundreds of miles.

The rapture was tempered only by the still-haunting specter of absent friends. During
Endeavour
’s long chase of the International Space Station—it would take nearly forty-eight hours to track it down—Bowersox gave a surprisingly revealing interview about Don Thomas to the Associated Press. Maybe, as with the bee, there were still strings attached after all.

“This emblem that’s on our shirt was designed by Don,” Bowersox began, talking about the triangular Expedition Six patch that had been stitched to their flight suits, depicting a stylized station eclipsing the sun during yet another orbit around the earth. “So he’s with us every minute in spirit and we think about him a lot and we can only wish him the best. We know this has been very, very hard for him, so that’s been the toughest thing for us, too. But he’s a big part of this mission. Everywhere we go we see reminders of him, and there’s no way we could not think about him.”

At the same time, Bowersox admitted that he hadn’t spoken to
Thomas since that awful night when he told his friend that he had been bumped from the mission: “It’s still kind of painful and sore for Don. When he talks with us, it becomes even more painful. We’re going to try to connect with him when we get on orbit or after we get home, after he’s had a little bit of distance. But this is a hard thing, to be so close to accomplishing a dream—going for a long-duration flight was Don Thomas’s dream—and when he wasn’t able to do it, it hurt him pretty bad. So as the distance and the time heals that wound, then I think it’ll be a little bit easier for him to discuss how much fun we’re having in orbit. I’m happy to get to fly with Don Pettit, but I was really looking forward to flying with Don Thomas, too, because he’s such a great guy.”

Like athletes, however, the men of Expedition Six needed to start thinking only of tomorrow. Along with the rest of
Endeavour
’s crew, they helped examine the Canadarm to make sure its earlier brush with disaster really hadn’t limited its function. Happily, it appeared to work just fine. Testing it further, the crew turned on the cameras attached to the end of the arm and began scanning the luggage stowed in the shuttle’s massive payload bay. The biggest, most important piece of cargo would soon be locked onto the International Space Station: the P1 truss, a $390 million chunk of station’s ever-expanding backbone, a girder assembly that all on its own measured forty-five feet long. In addition to supplying structural support for the modules that housed the astronauts—acting like the sticks in a giant kite or the flying buttresses in a Gothic cathedral, depending on your feelings toward station—the truss contained three ammonia-filled radiators, folded up like accordion panels, that would help vent the excess heat generated along with much-needed electricity by the station’s solar panels.

Looking at the almost ghostly images of the truss from the safety of the crew cabin, Expedition Six reveled in their special delivery. They could see something beautiful through its utilitarian mass—not so much in what it was but in what it represented. It was a part of what has been called the most ambitious single construction project since the Great Pyramids, and now it had made the giant leaps from drawing board to space to impending installation.

With it, Expedition Six was about to become a part of history, too.

·   ·   ·

After two nights in space—sleeping with their heads strapped to their pillows, so they could feel the softness of them, and with their arms sometimes floating freely, leaving them looking like drowned sailors—
Endeavour
’s crew woke up excited to catch their first glimpse of their final destination. With each successive rocket burn, still being coordinated and fired from the ground, the shuttle was drawn closer to what first appeared as a small, white light, like a star that was brighter and closer than the rest. Inside that light, Expedition Five—two cosmonauts, Valery Korzun and Sergei Treschev, and the American Peggy Whitson—waited eagerly to greet their visitors. Because of
Endeavour
’s earlier troubles, they had spent nearly 170 days in space, and they were ready for new faces and hugs.

“You guys look pretty good out there,” Whitson radioed.

“We were just saying the same about you,” Mike Lopez-Alegria said in return.

Although both the shuttle and the station each rocketed across space at five miles a second, their relative distance closed slowly, and for good reason. There was disaster lurking behind their dance. A collision would almost certainly see these ten astronauts made to look more permanently like drowned sailors, with their newfangled ships done in by old-fashioned holes.

Nine miles out from station, at 2:15 on a Monday afternoon, a short burn of the shuttle’s left-hand orbital maneuvering system put it on a nearly perfect course. At that point, the ground began ceding some of its control, giving permission for Commander Jim Wetherbee to look through his window and fire as many as four short correction burns over the next couple of hours. Once
Endeavour
was within six hundred feet of station, the previously shared load was placed entirely on him. With a gentle touch of the stick, he could nudge the shuttle up or down, left or right, as though lining up the biggest pool shot of his life, until he was satisfied that he had found his dead aim at the docking port in Destiny, the last in the station’s
chain of modules. When it came right down to it—having come so far, so fast—Wetherbee had a margin of error of just three inches to work with. Not surprisingly, he took his sweet time in closing the last of the gap.

Docking was scheduled for 4:26 p.m., but it wasn’t until just before five o’clock when the shuttle and the station finally connected, 250 miles above the great blue expanse of the South Pacific, making contact just behind the top of the shuttle’s cockpit. For the last several feet, Wetherbee had slowed his approach down to a little more than one inch per second, a veritable crawl considering the urgency with which the shuttle had left earth. The union was as soft as a first kiss.

The astronauts waited for the gentle waves of their impact to subside before they triggered the hooks and latches that would keep the shuttle in place. It took another hour for the small tunnel that had formed between the shuttle and station to pressurize. It was checked for leaks, and after they had been given the all-clear by the ground and each other, Expedition Five and
Endeavour
’s crew opened their respective hatches and finally, literally, flew into one another’s arms.

With Whitson snapping pictures, Wetherbee was the first to cross the threshold into station. Bowersox followed closely behind, already in the blue shorts and sock feet that he would sport for most of his mission, and next came Budarin, still giddy and smiling. Hanging like subway riders on the restraint bars bolted to the station’s ceiling, everybody hugged and clasped hands with everybody else and started shouting greetings in Russian and English at once.