Out of Orbit (20 page)

She also liked that they were both Westerners (Micki was from Wyoming) because she believed that the Continental Divide ran through relationships, too. She had always felt that people who had seen mountains were different from people who had not. They were more limitless somehow.

Their marriage proved it. In August 1995, they made the long journey to Australia—opting, true to form, to visit its barren west rather than its urban east—and decided that it was a fine place to get hitched. Staying at a sheep ranch that took in lodgers, they mentioned
to their hosts that they planned on getting married. The ranchers first explained the legalities of union Down Under; next they volunteered that their daughter had recently been married at the ranch, and they’d happily put out the same spread again. After Don and Micki drove up the coast for a spell, stopping in Monkey Mia to play with dolphins in the warm water, they returned to an unforgettable setup. About a dozen other leather-faced ranchers had been invited and come on in from the outback; Don, who had planned on wearing shorts, was scrubbed clean and dressed up (and squeezed into polished shoes two sizes too small); the top half of the daughter’s wedding cake had been taken out of the freezer and set on a table. Under perfect skies, in the folds of rugged, almost breath-catching country, Micki Racheff became Micki Pettit, by witness of sheep and tearful strangers.

·   ·   ·

She didn’t know it then, but Micki had signed on for a life as uncommon as her nuptials.

A couple of years after they had started dating, Don was granted his third interview to become an astronaut. Trying to feel optimistic, he flew to Houston and sat down before a stern panel. But when Micki picked him up at the airport upon his return, she could tell just by seeing him that the interview had not gone well. The candidates had each been told that they would soon receive a phone call. What they weren’t told, but what they all knew, was that if they got a phone call and heard one man’s voice, it was good news; if they got a phone call and heard another man’s voice, it was bad. Sure enough, one afternoon Pettit picked up the phone and heard the Grim Reaper’s telltale wheeze coming across the wires. Don and Micki sat quiet, heartbroken, but together. And together, they began to accept that Don would probably never make it into space. They decided to move on with their earthbound lives, Micki on the radio, Don at the lab.

Then, suddenly, just a few weeks after they came home from Australia, Don was granted another interview, his fourth. It felt like his last, best shot at his dream, and, already like astronauts, he and
Micki prepared down to the smallest detail for the big event. They fought to make sure that they didn’t overlook whatever tiny thing had been holding him back, whatever it was that made him good enough to earn interviews but not a seat on the shuttle. For maybe the first time in his forty years, Don bought himself a good suit and tried his best to put himself together. Micki, looking in the mirror with him, made sure that even his socks would pass muster. Immaculate, Don boarded a plane for Houston, and Micki waited back in New Mexico for his return, never allowing herself to imagine that those anxious nights alone might make for good practice.

It was months before the phone rang again. When it finally did, in April 1996, it was someone other than the Grim Reaper calling. It was Don, calling from that cramped cottage in storm-lashed New Zealand, and here he was, telling Micki that he was about to have the chance to travel much farther away from home. They screamed and cried and laughed at each other over the Pacific. It was an unreal moment. That cute guy in the kitchen was now a full-fledged astronaut, and he and his wife would have until August to quit their current lives and head for Houston.

At the radio station, Micki announced to her friends that she would be leaving. With old images of the smoothed-over Apollo wives and their permanent smiles springing to mind, one of Micki’s friends joked that she had better pick up a pillbox hat.

Later, driving in their short convoy to Houston—Don in his junky pickup truck and Micki in her sedan—they filled the lonely hours in West Texas by talking on their CB radio, having assumed truckers’ handles for the trip. First Micki Racheff had become Micki Pettit. Now she had taken to calling herself Madam Pillbox.

But it was months before she really took the change to heart—not until Don was dipped into the Johnson Space Center’s neutral buoyancy pool, the massive tub in which apprentice astronauts enjoy their first chance to splash around in spacesuits. Micki went to watch (wearing a security pass that read
ASTRONAUT DEPENDANT
) and to take pictures. Don was below her feet, at the bottom of the world’s largest swimming pool, trying to regulate his breathing, weightless for the first time since he’d been sick on a plane that was
falling out of the sky. That was when Micki first realized that this new life of hers was real, that she wasn’t just floating through some elaborate fantasy, a dream, or her husband’s sometimes too-fertile imagination. Suddenly she was down there at the bottom of the pool right alongside Don, trying to keep her own breathing under control. Though she kept the thought to herself, she couldn’t help thinking: Oh, shit.

She was finally an astronaut’s wife.

·   ·   ·

The role has changed since that night when Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Aldrin, and Mrs. Collins wore red, white, and blue. Then, an astronaut’s wife had her background and credentials as closely scrutinized as her husband’s had been. NASA didn’t want any of the women saying or doing anything even remotely untoward, anything that might cause the American public to withhold a single ounce of the love and energy that had been pouring into the program. That meant that most of the wives were cut from the same (spotlessly clean, neatly arranged) cloth: they were pretty and deferential, doting mothers, and uncomplaining homemakers. (“You worry about the custard, and I’ll worry about the flying,” Frank Borman, the commander of
Apollo 8
, had famously said to his wife, Susan.) Most of all, they were to make for good television. During launches, their lawns would be covered by reporters and satellite trucks; in between, they would express their pride in their husbands in feature reports and on the pages of
Life
magazine. They were to glow through all of it. The wives were an integral part of a giant publicity machine, the women behind the men destined to become heroes.

It was an uneasy life in a lot of respects. Their husbands were often absent and, at best, part-time fathers. Stress was a permanent fixture in their lives, most acute when their husbands were on their way to space, in space, or on their way back from space. (Most of their homes were equipped with “squawk boxes,” which relayed the chatter between the rockets and Houston, but someone from the office was usually assigned to listen along with them, so that the transmission could be disconnected in the event of trouble.) These brave
women coped with fear, infidelity, loneliness, and their own pressures of performance.

Not surprisingly, the combination took its toll. Some of the wives, including Susan Borman, began drinking heavily. One of them, Pat White—the widow left behind by Ed White, killed in the
Apollo 1
fire—committed suicide many years after the accident.

But for the most part, the wives were exactly what they were expected to be. They were military wives, and their children were military children. They were all too accustomed to their husbands and fathers leaving for long deployments and finding themselves in mortal danger. The families, in turn, assumed a stoicism that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the hard road to migrant California, passing by Tom Joad’s jalopy. They prepared themselves for doom, having learned to assume that one day, two men in crisp uniforms would knock on their door with white-gloved fists and tell them that there had been an accident. Even if they were lucky enough to duck firsthand grief, no doubt they had been brushed by it. Someone they knew had lost someone close to them in a fire or a wreck or a dogfight. They had probably attended the funerals, and they had probably brought over a hot chicken dinner for grieving widows and orphans, and they almost certainly had seen a flag lifted from a coffin, folded into a triangle, and handed to a stone-faced woman dressed in black.

Because almost all of the pilots who become astronauts today are still plucked from the military, their wives, too, remain what they always have been. Most of them are not the snow-white trophies of old, and most of them don’t turn a blind eye to the girls in other ports, the way they once did. But some part of them still exudes the air of widows-in-training. They are the sort of women who have grown into their hard shells. They are also private, formal, careful, pious, and sacrificial. Annie Bowersox, Ken’s wife, is built true to the prototype. She knew what she had signed on for, and she knew what was expected of her. On those rare occasions when Mr. and Mrs. Bowersox attended astronaut socials, she understood perfectly what was meant when women were asked to wear “church dresses.” She had already filled her closet with them.

But when the class of 1996—forty-four members strong, a cull so large that they were nicknamed “the sardines” because there wasn’t enough office space to fit them all—and their families received their first such invitation, Micki Pettit was baffled. She had no idea what a “church dress” was. It wasn’t until after some whispered consultation with a few of the other wives that she discovered, to her mock horror, that a church dress was one that made a woman look like a barrel. Curves are frowned upon, and cleavage is strictly verboten. The astronaut business is a serious one, she was told—all the more so, ironically, when it is conducted on the ground. There are cliques and favorites and rituals and rites of passage, and with the sardines especially, there was a long line ahead of them to get into orbit, fraught with missteps and peril. No one wanted to stand out, at least not for the wrong reasons, and that included their wives showing too much tit.

Trouble was, no matter what Micki had on, her husband couldn’t help standing out, ignoring even his legendary classroom pronouncements on the color of rocket fuel. Since Skylab, when astronaut-scientists first began joining towheaded military fliers on missions into space, the “civilians” have been looked at as oddities and interlopers, as though they never quite fit with the program. They were cargo, and worse, they spent their precious time in space growing tiny plants and blowing bubbles (which, to NASA’s navy and air force men, was a little like obsessing over how to make perfect toast while riding the world’s greatest roller coaster). Spaceflights suddenly felt like high-school cafeterias, with the jocks and the geeks staring at one another from separate tables across the room.

It didn’t take long for there to emerge a further divide, this one among the scientists themselves. First, there was the majority, all of those mission specialists who dreamed of becoming the envy of their gravity-bound peers, zooming into space on the shuttle; conducting simple, camera-friendly experiments; and returning home in two weeks with a lifetime of stories to tell. Then there were those very few scientists who wanted to land themselves on station, out of reach of ground control and its rigid demands. They yearned to be
cut loose, free to explore each and every idea that filled up their dreams. The shuttleheads saw something bizarre in those fantasies, something lonely and rudderless. (They also didn’t like the idea of spending years training in Russia.) But from his first weeks in Houston, Don Pettit set his sights on measuring his time in orbit in months, not days. He made it plain that he didn’t mind going it alone, and he didn’t mind one bit if he was sent up there and forgotten. He had been saddled with the image of the outcast for so long, it didn’t even occur to him to fight it anymore.

He might have even gone out of his way to cultivate it. Because of the limited number of houses for sale near the Johnson Space Center that summer, and because there was such a large incoming class, most of the recruits had already toured one another’s homes. As soon as one of them made a down payment, the rest of them nodded, able to remember from jammed open houses its layout and lawn ornaments. The Pettits had gone in for one of the bigger homes, partly because they were thinking about starting a family, but mostly because Don wanted a three-car garage, which he promptly filled with his tools, experiments, old electronics, and an entire jet engine. In addition to its square footage, their home also boasted a gas fireplace, which, because it’s usually plenty hot in Houston, had found a place in the memory banks of each of the families who had seen it. It seemed to most of them like a loopy extravagance.

It also had fake logs stuffed into it, which Don couldn’t abide: if he was going to watch something burn, he might as well watch something interesting burn. And so he set about replacing the logs with a diorama of a miniature village, complete with scorched rooftops and panicked residents jumping out of their windows. Whenever he flicked on the gas, the town would appear to go up in smoke—and so, too, did another wisp of his reputation each time a joyless visitor asked to see his latest creation.

·   ·   ·

Fortunately there were plenty of misfits within the astronaut corps—not only fellow civilian scientists but also the international
astronauts who joined NASA, a little more arty, a little more experimental than some of their American counterparts. They were a little more out there, and Don and Micki joined them on the edges of the fraternity. In addition to Chris Hadfield, the Canadian guitarist, the English scientist Piers Sellers and his wife, Mandy, became good friends. So, too, did Ilan Ramon, the Israeli payload specialist, and his wife, Rona. Unlike some of NASA’s military fliers, they would meet at places other than church. They would get together for dinner and drinks, for long nights of music and debate. Those nights made Houston feel more like home and getting into space feel less like a war of attrition.

The Pettits were soon distracted by bigger battles, anyway. Shortly after moving to Texas, they had tried starting a family. It was not easy. After a couple of futile years, there came long, painful rounds of tests and injections and the tough questions that childless couples have to ask themselves. There was more failure and heartache until Micki finally became pregnant—Don was in Russia when she found out, and she had to share the good news over the phone—and gave birth to twin boys, Evan and Garrett, in November 2000.