Out of Orbit Read online

  PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS

  Copyright © 2007 by Chris Jones

  All Rights Reserved

  A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 2007 by Doubleday under the title Too Far from Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.broadwaybooks.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All photographs courtesy of NASA.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Jones, Chris (Chris Alexander)

  Out of orbit : the true story of how three astronauts found themselves hundreds of miles above the earth with no way home / Chris Jones.

  p. cm.

  1. Space vehicle accidents. 2. Manned space flight—Risk assessment. 3. International Space Station. 4. Columbia (Spacecraft)—Accidents. 5. Risk management. I. Title.

  TL867.J658 2008

  629.45—dc 22

  2007034216

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79390-4

  v3.1

  For Lee, who always brings me back.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1 SIMPLE MACHINES

  2 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ENVELOPE

  3 THE GEOGRAPHY OF ISOLATION

  4 TIME AND DISTANCE

  5 GONE

  6 THE BEST PARTS OF LONELY

  7 EARTHSHINE

  8 A THIN THREAD

  9 MISSION CONTROL

  10 “I THINK WE’RE IN TROUBLE”

  11 THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Photo Insert

  PROLOGUE

  Only minutes earlier, they had been something else—something big enough to be held in the hearts of millions—and soon they would be that big again, but now they were just three men in a bucket floating on the ocean, still far from home. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins had gone to the moon and back in the capsule nicknamed Columbia before splashing down 812 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. Their miracle trip had taken them a little over eight days. It would be another three weeks before they’d complete the journey from the South Pacific into the arms of their wives.

  In July 1969, the world changed, or at least its envelope did, pushed more than a quarter of a million miles across a vacuum. Even on a planet pockmarked by conflict, there was a new hope to latch on to. But that optimism didn’t extend into every corner: no worry-minded scientist would gamble on how much these three men who’d changed the world had changed right along with it. Maybe they weren’t like the rest of us anymore. Maybe they no longer belonged here.

  They had lived in impossibly close quarters, drunk water from a pistol, and filled themselves up with a paste engineered to taste like Canadian bacon. They had been weightless, then not really, then weightless again, their blood still pumping but without the usual dams and anchors, flooding into their organs like water finding its level. They had crossed 25,000 miles in an hour. They had soaked up galactic radiation and navigated by stars. They had looked at snapshots of their families and swallowed hard, and they had wondered whether any single breath was meant to be their last. Two of them had walked in dust that might have contained spores, germs, bacteria, untold ancient lunar diseases and pandemics that every known inoculation couldn’t fight; the third had passed over the dark side of the moon, out of radio contact, alone, for seven orbits, a hermit’s passage.

  Like no other men before, they had gone very far away. Who knew how different they might be when they came back?

  Was something new and terrible hiding in the bottoms of their lungs or the ridges of their fingerprints? Or, worse, had they absorbed some stowaway parasite like sunlight through their skin?

  What did space do to something as finite as a man’s mind? How did punching a hole through Heaven unsettle a man’s soul?

  What kind of unforeseen reaction might begin if they dipped a foot into the salt of the ocean? If they shook hands with the rescuers who were on their way in the fat-bellied military choppers? Could even a sneeze make the 812-nautical-mile trip to Hawaii, and from there jump to Japan and California, choking billions of bronchial tubes with some nameless unstoppable plague?

  How had space interrupted their bodies’ clocks and rhythms?

  How had it skipped their hearts?

  How could it not?

  And so for Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, the waiting began, first in their bucket, still far from home.

  · · ·

  Back then, as forever, as always—until these days, perhaps—the remedy to any unexplored horizon was a colony. The men of Apollo 11 would remain in their exclusive society, cut off from the rest of us, kept under glass. They would become the world’s most famous and wide-smiling lepers. Three weeks seemed like a good settlement period. The mysteries of the universe would be waited out.

  Every precaution would be taken till then. The swimmers dropped out of their helicopters and attached two orange life rafts to the module, one for decontamination and the other for recovery. One of the swimmers opened Columbia’s hatch, threw in three green, nylon, one-piece biological isolation suits, and slammed the hatch shut. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins each zipped on his suit. The American flag had been stitched to their left shoulders, their names across their chests; their faces were made alien by oval lenses and breathing masks. The swimmer then reopened the hatch and helped the astronauts into the decontamination raft. The four of them floated on the ocean’s gentle surface, under clouds, looking in those outfits more like Martians than moonwalkers.

  They were sprayed down with sodium hypochlorite (the module itself would get a betadine bath), transferred to the recovery raft, and lifted like tuna, in Billy Pugh rescue nets, into Helicopter 66 (“Old 66” to the Black Knights inside). The chopper normally hunted for lost surfers and enemy submarines off the California coast. Now its role had changed: for the astronauts in their zipped-up suits, it made more like a pretty good furnace. But the heat was a small complaint—during an earlier recovery exercise, high winds and seas had stalled the lift, and sharks had forced the swimmers back in their rafts. Now that there were no second chances, each part of the plan had to fit into the next without seams.

  The decontamination raft and whatever invisible cargo it now harbored was scuttled, and the chopper made the short, thirteen-mile flight to the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, on which 2,115 officers and men, 107 NASA officials and civilians, a trio of pool reporters, and President Richard M. Nixon were waiting to make three men in a bucket big again. (The excitement had left the president first needing to take a leak. “Marine, where’s the head?” was his opening verbal salvo after splashdown.) But no wives awaited. Old 66 touched down to cheers on the flight deck, was dropped by elevator to Hangar Deck No. 2, and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins walked through a plastic tunnel into their next new home, the Mobile Quarantine Facility.

  Really, it was a souped-up Airstream trailer, a thirty-five-foot-long shining cylinder of unpainted aluminum, smooth except for the rivets. Inside, it looked like just about every other Airstream pulled off the assembly line, with the exception of an obtrusive ventilator above the fold-down table in the kitchenette. Isolation was guaranteed by negative internal pressure and the filtration of any effluent air. That was the science of it.

  For the astronauts, though, it was just the latest in a long string of tin cans. Once inside, they showered, changed into blue flight suits, and settled in for speeches. N
ixon, his bladder successfully emptied, told the three men that they had been the principal actors in “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.”

  Now joining the trio in their trailer were a technician named John Hirasaki and a NASA physician, Dr. William Carpentier.

  The good doctor was never really part of the gang. There was a divide between him and the astronauts, the same gulf that’s always broken off pilots from oddsmakers and logicians, flight surgeons especially. They had no dreaming in them. Asked what would happen if a medical emergency hit the crew of Apollo 11 before they got off ship, Dr. Carpentier said, “That would be rough. But I’d say the Captain would have to treat the astronauts like carriers of an infectious disease and keep them in quarantine.” The panic in a dying man’s face viewed through a window would be trumped by the most pessimistic clinical imaginings.

  With that grim scenario in mind, the crew of the USS Hornet began humping a souped-up Airstream to Pearl Harbor, full steam ahead.

  · · ·

  In the meantime, the three travelers were subject to the first of several physical exams and asked to fill out customs forms, like any other tourists: in the space reserved for declarations, they wrote “moon rock and moon dust samples—manifests attached.” Aside from border agents, thousands more islanders were waiting for them by the time they made it to Honolulu. As many as 25,000 hoped to catch sight of the fresh-tinned astronauts. The Mobile Quarantine Facility was lifted from the carrier, loaded onto a truck, and ferried through the waving crowds from the water to Hickam Air Force Base, where a U.S. Air Force C-141 jet transport waited to swallow the trailer whole.

  They were back in flight, over the Pacific and on into Texas. They touched down at Ellington Air Force Base in the early hours of the morning, with Armstrong providing the homecoming soundtrack on his ukulele. Finally their wives emerged out of the night. Jean Aldrin wore red; Pat Collins wore white; Jan Armstrong wore blue. They smiled up at their husbands, whose hands and faces were pressed against their palm-streaked windows to the world.

  They were so close to home. But sometimes the distance between a man and his home can’t be measured in miles. What keeps him away is time, or a wall as thin as a single sheet of glass.

  · · ·

  The astronaut-lepers were hustled into the lunar receiving laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston. It was as nice a prison as they could have asked for. They slept in genuine beds. Their showers were hot. They lined up for cafeteria-style food, and they ate together.

  But they were prisoners, nonetheless. They were interrogated—they were asked what happened when, and sometimes they were asked the why of it, too—and they were poked and prodded, the way astronauts have been since they first touched space, shuffling through hallways with monitors strapped to their pale skin, eyed all the while by men hiding behind white masks as though something unearthly might burst out of their chests after any given breakfast. Fact was, no matter how much they tried to feel normal again, the rest of the world wouldn’t let them. It began to dawn on them that their quarantine would never really come to an end.

  Their feeling that they had become men apart went beyond all of the questions and examinations. It ran deeper than that. There were things that only they would ever know, things that they would never really be able to share.

  They knew fear: there had been an even-money chance that Eagle would fail to lift off the moon’s surface, leaving Armstrong and Aldrin to wait for their air to run out, as Collins watched helplessly, and that was just the start of the nightmare scenarios. They had told reporters before their trip that they had tried not to think about dying—in an explosion during the launch, or after colliding with a meteor, or by sinking in quicksand to the center of the moon, or because of something more mundane, like an oxygen leak, a guidance system failure, an uncontrolled spin, a fuel line plug, a cracked valve, or some goddamned shark waiting open-mouthed in the South Pacific—but they were also realists, and despite their brave public faces, they had gone through their wills before they left.

  They knew, too, a terrible solitude: they had been planted in the middle of a desert in the middle of a blackness that stripped them of any horizon. They were as alone as men had ever been, cast in what Aldrin called “magnificent desolation,” as if they had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean, with only the sound of their breathing for company.

  Most unsettling of all, they knew longing, and for more than just their wives. From the moment they left the moon, it rose in them like a tide, minute by minute, day by day.

  · · ·

  They thought it might subside, once they were back in their living rooms, once their long wait was over. Michael Collins, the trio’s least-famous name but most-public face, summed up the feelings of the group: “I want out,” he said.

  At nine o’clock in the evening, on August 10, 1969, they got their wish. At last they hugged their wives, smiled for the cameras, and headed home. They sat on their couches, and they put up their feet. A record amount of tickertape would soon fall on them in New York City, the big-blast kickoff to the rest of their now-historic existences, lived out in the world’s memory banks and on free luxury cruises, in exchange for giving small talks. It would all be very fine.

  But it would never again be enough. Worst fears had come true. They really weren’t like the rest of us anymore. Space had changed them after all, only in ways that science might not have predicted and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins might never have dreamed.

  For the rest of their lives, no matter how many crowds surrounded them or how much tickertape fell on their heads—no matter how many hearts they were held in—in their own hearts they would remain three men sitting in a bucket, forever far from home.

  1 SIMPLE MACHINES

  For this one dream, men had turned chimpanzees into crash test dummies, gone through a thousand pink enema bags to make sure their own plumbing was ready to withstand the trip, and finally been launched like artillery shells—in corrugated-tin capsules held together by hardware-store screws—deep into the black. Not much later, they were balancing themselves on top of six million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it on fire. Today the insanity physics continue. Astronauts blink down the risk that a rubber O-ring on one of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters might give way, spraying a flame laced with powdered aluminum, ammonium perchlorate, and iron oxide onto the external fuel tank, igniting its cargo of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and having their cockpit turn into a coffin.

  All to cross the gap between home and away, to cross a distance that, on land, any old rust bucket could fart across in a couple of hours. But the gulf between earth and space is, and always will remain, a wider divide: it’s a chasm without walls, and plenty of men, as well as a couple of women, have died trying to string their way to the other side.

  · · ·

  Captain Kenneth Bowersox had survived the trip four times, twice as a pilot in the space shuttle’s forward right seat, twice as commander in the forward left. Now he played the unaccustomed role of cargo, staring at rows of storage lockers instead of the beckoning sky. The pilot had become the passenger, one of three men crammed below decks like ballast, waiting to be shuttled on Endeavour to the International Space Station.

  Despite having been shunted downstairs for launch, Bowersox had been looking forward to his fourteen-week-long mission the way the rest of us look forward to a much-needed vacation. Although he had visited space four times, none of his previous shuttle missions had lasted more than sixteen days, and he had never been to the International Space Station. He had always felt that he had been asked to come home too soon. This time, however, he would have time to linger. He and his colleagues would conduct a range of scientific experiments and busily maintain station—astronauts rarely bother to slip the in front of station, thinking of it as a place rather than a thing—but their principal assignment would be to make themselves and the men and women who would follow them content living in orbit
. Even before launch, Bowersox was confident that, as far as finding happiness went, he would succeed. He might have been flying steerage, but space was still his island in the sun.

  For all that Bowersox tried to focus on the destination, he couldn’t help wishing he was up above for the journey. He wished he was alongside the two men in the front-row seats—in his seats—able to take in the view and, more important, see the fifty control panels and nine monitors that flashed before Commander Jim Wetherbee and Paul Lockhart, the pilot. Against his life’s habit, Bowersox had ceded control, and now he shifted in his seat and fiddled with his straps. At least Wetherbee had been in space five times already, and like Bowersox, he was a Naval Academy man and okay by him; Lockhart, in contrast, was making just his second trip, and only five months after his first, back in June 2002.

  Also, he came out of the air force.

  Worse, Lockhart wasn’t meant to be flying today. Had everything gone to plan, Lockhart should have been in Houston, watching NASA TV, trying to get out from under the private jealousy that runs through every grounded astronaut forced to watch another man’s dreams come true.

  The man stuck watching television this time around was Gus Loria of the marines, who had thrown out his back in August and been scratched from the mission, which would have been his first. Instead, Lockhart’s vacation plans had been canceled, and he was pressed into emergency service, jammed into the same seat on the same shuttle he’d occupied just that past summer. It was still set for his height, and he settled right in.

  Loria was less comfortable on his perch back in Houston, and he wasn’t alone among the unhappy spectators. Joining him was Dr. Don Thomas, a four-trip veteran and the science officer who had been expected to join Bowersox and the Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin—a former engineer who had logged nearly a year in space on Mir, the International Space Station’s burned-up predecessor—for their stay. Over two years of training, at home and in Russia, in simulators and classrooms and T-38 jets, they had become Expedition Six.