Out of Orbit (24 page)

·   ·   ·

Overnight Expedition Six had become the second kind of science in space. The first is programmatic science—those studies that have been planned sometimes for years, experiments in fluid dynamics or crystal growth or protein production. The second, what Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had become, is fluke science, the science of accident.

None of them was a stranger to it. But now Pettit, in particular, distracted himself by opening random doors in the hallways of his imagination. He no longer confined his experiments to Destiny or to the racks of rudimentary physics and chemistry. He began to look at the entire station as his once-in-a-lifetime laboratory, and everything in it as an object of curiosity. Everything, he decided, had secrets to share.

Solving water became one of his principal riddles. He had stumbled upon his interest in fluid dynamics in weightlessness innocently enough after he grew tired of drinking everything through a straw. First, he began squeezing out shimmering spheres of coffee into the air, where they’d wait for him to swoop in and collect them in his mouth. Soon, though, he realized that he could play his own version of catch and release, pinching the spheres between his chopsticks and popping them down his gullet, where they would splash against the back of his throat like water balloons. For a long time after, he ate his drinks—one more thing that he did because he could do it up here, and he couldn’t down there.

But, as it usually did for Pettit, the play turned into questions, which yielded to the hunt for answers. Although the three men kept up with most of the programmatic science they had been assigned—Budarin the mushroom picker especially liked tending the green pea plants—Pettit found the time for his own brand of research. He pinned up a backdrop comprised of a white towel laid against a dark blue shirt, set up his video camera, and filmed himself turning water into art.

Early on, he created thin films by slipping a wire hoop into a bag filled with water, like those plastic rings with which children blow bubbles. The result was an intricate little window only three hundred microns thick; in essence, he had made water into a two-dimensional object. He could blow on the films and shake them and bounce them and see what they did in response, but that carried his interest only so far. He began injecting food coloring into the water or mica flakes or salt crystals. They would dance in beautiful, unexpected patterns whenever he stirred them with a syringe or heated the water or shone a flashlight on it. After he grew a little braver, he
punched his hot soldering iron through the windows, and the water sizzled and bubbled but never lost its shape, throwing off steam and tiny, boiling droplets in every direction. In station, he could use the same ingredients to make coffee or fireworks. Suddenly the possibilities seemed limitless.

Soon he graduated to great spheres of water the size of soccer balls, anchored by the same wire hoops. If he blew on them, gorgeous wave patterns crossed them, swinging back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. If he tossed an Alka-Seltzer tablet into them, they frothed and danced into a white globe that would eventually explode itself into a thousand droplets. (He discovered that if he began to spin it before it self-destructed, however, the bubbles were confined to the center of the sphere, forming a perfect white axis.) And if he used his syringe to make an air bubble inside the sphere and then filled that pocket with droplets of water, they created what he called his “symphony of spheres.” Taken together, they looked a little like rain falling inside itself, until the larger sphere gobbled up the smaller ones, winning some mysterious battle between mass and velocity.

There was a fundamental beauty in each of these tricks. For Pettit, that was reason enough to perform them. But at night, tucked away with his computer, he would watch his day’s work in slow-motion and wonder what made his inventions do the beautiful things that they did. He knew that there was science locked away inside his art, some practical application just waiting to be lifted out of the water. Somewhere in the middle of his symphonies were the answers to thunderstorms and interplanetary physics, the sorts of eurekas that keep men like him up for days at a time, frantic.

He didn’t stop there—he couldn’t. He made centrifuges out of old shampoo bottles, watching their contents collect around the sides, leaving a perfect, circular void in the middle. He set up a metal platform and threw bolts at it, at different velocities and rates of rotation, trying to predict how they would bounce back and almost always finding that they disobeyed him. And he filmed himself spinning just about everything he could lay his hands on—books (including
Understanding Engineering Thermo
by his old professor,
Dr. Octave Levenspiel), empty eggshells, camera lenses, water bottles—just to show that in space, everything charted its own course. Everything followed its own orbit through the universe.

·   ·   ·

For all three members of Expedition Six, it was the travels of light that they liked watching the most. On earth, light had seemed a simple mechanism: when the sun was out, it was there, and after dark, it was not. But from the vantage of space, through their breath-fogged windows, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit saw light do so much more than flick itself on and off. They saw it dance and swirl, change color, and turn into liquid, smoke, and sometimes a mirror. For them, light became a changeling.

They especially enjoyed its company at dusk. Pettit could break down the physics of twilight and explain why they were seeing what they were seeing, but for once, the why of it didn’t matter, even to him.

When the night wrapped its way around the earth, its leading edge looked not so much like a clean, defined band, but more like rolling surf. Expedition Six could see thick, curling waves flooding out the remains of the day—mostly green, but sometimes red, and depending on the phases of the moon and the cloud patterns that they covered up, some blue and a hint of yellow might be mixed in just for gasps. It looked as though the sunset was guided by the tides rather than the other way around.

Minutes later, the view became even better. After night had made its full pass, it left airglow in its wake. Through the window, the earth’s true horizon curved in the distance, smooth and jet-black; above it, the atmosphere remained lit up somehow, by a kind of thinly spread twinkle. That milky layer had something to do with atomic oxygen and its reaction to the billions of solar particles raining down on it, but the men of Expedition Six forgot all about that when they put on their headphones, waited for the strings to come in, and watched stars shine through the earth’s own light.

And still there was more, especially whenever station passed over Canada. That’s when they saw aurora borealis, the northern
lights, rising high over the Arctic, swirling around the magnetic north pole like a multihued hurricane. It changed its shape and its color with every pass, sometimes looking as dense and foreboding as thunderheads, sometimes looking as delicate as breath that had frozen in the cold. There were nights when it looked as though it might produce its own soundtrack, when, if only they could crack open their windows, Expedition Six might hear the light howl.

During blessed orbits like that, the men forgave themselves for feeling teary and sentimental, as though they were listening to wedding speeches or a few hundred cellos rise up at once. Moments like those—when it seemed as though the earth and its wonder was there for them and for them alone—made them never want to come down.

·   ·   ·

But the moments in between had little room left for dreaming. They were filled instead with the sort of reality that feels cold and unforgiving, as grimly opportunistic as termites. It would wait to confront them until they were quiet and alone and their window was out of their reach. It knew when their minds were ripe for invasion.

It attacked most often after the ground had delivered the latest findings in the
Columbia
investigation. Each snippet of news brought back another somber recollection or planted a new seed of dread. The bad feeling reached its zenith when Bowersox and Pettit woke up to find that a short length of film had been uplinked to their computers. The footage was grainy and blurred by heat shimmer, but slowed down enough, it captured what looked like a piece of insulating foam breaking off
Columbia
’s external tank during its liftoff and striking the underside of its wing. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything.

The men of Expedition Six watched the sequence until they had committed every frame to memory. It became their version of the Zapruder film—and like those who had turned away when Kennedy’s head had snapped back, Bowersox and Pettit always shuddered at the moment of impact.

Foam had often fallen from the tank (during Expedition Six’s own launch, fragments had peppered
Endeavour
’s belly hard enough to crack its heat-resistant ceramic tiles), but it had never wielded the heft to damage the shuttle fatally. Now, although there were still engineers and technicians within NASA who continued to dismiss the theory, it looked more and more plausible. It was finally confirmed when a piece of foam was fired out of a gun at a reinforced carbon-carbon panel, replicating the collision, and it made like a cannonball. Looking at that entrance wound gave every astronaut the feeling that they had cheated death only because the aim of their own lost foam had been less true. It was as though they had each been lucky enough to duck bullets, but their friends had not.

For the men on station, having survived the trip up and having yet to make the trip down, the realization left them swallowing a hot, sick feeling. They suffered from the sweats that follow catastrophe averted, the closest of calls. Perhaps sensing their discomfort, the ground told them not to worry, the foam problem would soon be fixed, the shuttles would return to flight, and before they knew it, a crack crew would be knocking on their door, ready to bring them home.

But Expedition Six knew that was so much wishful thinking. They knew that the shuttle was still a long way from returning to space—months, probably years. And even if the fleet did launch again, it would carry up with it a prohibitive failure rate. Despite the best efforts of its greatest defenders, its reputation was sealed. Of the five shuttles, two had been reduced to heartbreak. Expedition Six weren’t in any rush to hitch a ride back to earth on what might prove to be the third.

·   ·   ·

Instead, they spent their time busily turning their desert island into more of a paradise than a prison. Together, they rededicated themselves to making station into a sanctuary, and to figuring out how they might stay hidden away for a long time in it.

They began to experiment mostly on their own bodies, which still, despite decades of advances in weightless exercise and psychological
support and their own pure will, represented the greatest single constraint to interplanetary travel. We are well on our way to building the machines that will carry us to Mars and beyond; we just have to find a way to help our fussy, fragile bodies catch up.

Muscle atrophy and bone decay remain the biggest concerns, the loss of the strength that rising out of bed every morning gives us. But long-duration flight presents more subtle dilemmas, too: the long-term effects of carrying too much blood in the head and chest; the rampant growth of kidney stones; nausea; a loss of hand-eye coordination; trouble sleeping and fatigue; and the development of a host of immune system deficiencies evident upon an astronaut’s return to earth, a consequence of so long spent in a germless bubble. There are also the psychological problems that can surface over such a long time away: deep feelings of loneliness and depression (such as those John Blaha experienced on Mir), irritability and moodiness (evidenced by the Skylab mutiny), and even a brand of acute paranoia, the sort of sweaty claustrophobia that science-fiction films have made into a virtual cliché.

The mysterious case of Salyut 5 is the classic example. Having been left empty for two weeks, the capsule was occupied by a pair of highly trained cosmonauts, Boris Volynov and Vitaly Zholobov. It was expected that they would remain in orbit until they broke the Soviet space endurance record. But after just seven weeks in space, they were called back down to earth and hustled out of view. It was never made public at the time, but now it appears that the crew began to break down in the isolation. It started with minor quarrels between them and the ground, escalating into a series of complaints over several unverifiable plagues. The final straw was their repeated bawling over an inescapable, acrid odor in the crew quarters, the source of which could never be found and which could never be fixed. It was also never a problem again.

Home and away, there are countless links between physical woes and psychological troubles, but space seems to be a particularly holistic environment. There have been frequent cases of the mind following the body down a slippery slope, astronauts and cosmonauts
having been driven nearly insane by complaints of heart murmurs and shortness of breath, ailments that disappear as soon as they’re back on the ground.

So, like foundation inspectors trying to ferret out the rot, flight surgeons and medical technicians have used the International Space Station’s crews as subjects in a grand experiment, dedicated to improving the physical and mental well-being of long-duration astronauts, in the hopes that one day the men will learn how to keep themselves as fit as their machines. They are so heavily monitored that they can feel as though they’re on the slab and about to have their ribs cracked open, living subjects for an autopsy.

All three members of Expedition Six were dissected, but in some ways, Ken Bowersox was their principal cadaver. In tremendous physical shape from his years of military service—he has been a dedicated jogger since his days at Annapolis—he was an ideal candidate for learning how best to keep the human body from failing. Whatever physical functions could be tested and tracked (his heart rate, his lung capacity, his blood composition, his reflexes) were held up to the light throughout his months in space. But for most of his journey, the focus remained on the fundamentals of his architecture, the root of just about every collapse in the history of manned space flight, muscles and bones.