Heaven & Earth
Only when something goes terribly wrong are we reminded that astronauts live two lives— one heroic, taking them on the world's most dangerous commute, the other mundane, involving the hopes and fears and workaday tasks so familiar to us all.
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At ignition, the three main engines and two solid rocket boosters produce almost six and a half million pounds of thrust. The noise and shaking that the astronauts experience inside the orbiter as it clears the pad and storms into space is of an intensity that is still shocking after months of training. It takes eight and a half minutes to get into space. After the external tank and the solid rocket boosters drop away, the ride changes from a teeth-rattling struggle to a silken glide. The moment that every astronaut prays to live to reach is MECO—main engine cutoff. The minutes from liftoff to MECO have always been regarded as the most dangerous part of a mission, though after the destruction of Columbia on reentry, every shuttle flight will now be bracketed with visceral hazard.
Weightlessness is entrancing and disorienting. Every task takes longer to do; there is a dreamy lethargy of movement. For some reason no one has quite explained, weightlessness makes food taste bland, and astronauts find themselves craving spicy condiments. A significant percentage of astronauts are overcome with space sickness and have to float around for two or three days with barf bags at the ready, though like every other weightless endeavor, throwing up is tricky and time-consuming. In space, the lack of gravity extends the spine and temporarily makes people a few inches taller, though it also gives them backaches. Natural posture changes from upright to a kind of fetal curl. Fluids shift to the center of the body and to the head, making legs skinnier and chests bigger, and faces puffy. Since being weightless feels a little like floating in water, there is a natural inclination to propel oneself using the breaststroke, but this action has no effect whatsoever. If an astronaut begins to weep, which happens from time to time, the tears do not fall. They just form and hover at the corners of the eyes. When it is time for bed, astronauts strap themselves into baglike sleep restraints, and when they are unconscious, their arms drift upward, as if they are slowly grasping at something in their dreams. Sometimes, as their arms move that way, they talk in their sleep.
Their waking hours are heavily loaded with docking procedures, experiments, satellite deployments, and various maintenance and construction errands involving the space station, but sometimes they steal precious time from their sleep schedules and drift up to the orbiter windows to look down on the earth. Astronauts speak of the sight of the earth from space with an enthusiasm that borders on rhapsody. Listening on their Walkmans to John Denver or Judy Collins or some other artist of folkie majesty, they watch the advancing light of the sun creep up over the rim of the nighttime planet and shatter into glorious bands of color. They see streaming plumes of smoke and ash from volcanoes, the white throbs of lightning in oceanic clouds, sometimes even the greenish pulsations of the northern lights. But at times this godlike perspective can grow sinister and isolating. "I could see the whole world, but I felt I had no connection to it," one astronaut told me. William R. Pogue, a Skylab astronaut, wrote that when he embarked on a space walk, he was so unnerved by the presence of deep, pure space that he was reminded of a Bible passage about the "horror of great darkness."
SPACE IS SUCH A DISTANT and dreamlike destination that it is a little hard to imagine that when it is time for the astronauts to come home from orbit, it takes them less time than it might to drive in rush-hour traffic from one end of Houston to the other: an hour and a half, more or less, from the time the shuttle begins its deorbit burn until it lands on the Florida marshlands. The fact that Columbia was so close to home when it was destroyed is only one of many bitter ironies. Because I had gotten to know a few members of the training teams that prepare astronauts for their missions, when I first heard about the disaster, my thoughts turned in their direction. For a year or more before every mission, these teams work with the astronauts on an almost day-to-day basis, sitting behind consoles as they run the crews through increasingly more complex and confounding training exercises in the shuttle simulators. The bond that develops from so many months of relentless work and shared enterprise has a familial intensity. An instructor tells Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr., in his book Before Lift-Off that when the launch date finally arrives, the training team feels as if they are flying in the crew's bodies.
There is a venerable tradition at the Johnson Space Center that usually takes place a day or so before the crew returns to earth. The team that trained them for the mission is in charge of decorating the hallway of the building where the astronauts' offices are located. This decorating of the hall is serious business. It is, as Lisa Reed, a former training team lead, told me without a trace of self-consciousness, a "labor of love." Both sides of the hallway are garlanded with streamers and balloons. There are also cartoons, jokey top-ten lists, photographs that were taken during training or that were downlinked from the mission itself, all suitably captioned with some quip or exasperated comment or malapropism mischievously recorded during training in the instructors' logbooks.
If the hall was decorated in the usual fashion for the return of STS-107, the official designation of Columbia's last flight, one of the items that would have been put up, and then soberly taken down when the homecoming did not take place, was a huge color printout of the mission patch. Patches are also serious business. During one of my trips to the JSC, I asked to visit the Graphics and Publications office. Located across the street from the astronauts' gym, Graphics and Publications is housed in a drab one-story, brick and metal building that looks like the office of an oil-field equipment company. Inside, though, it is more like a hip design studio, with graphic artists peering at their Macintosh screens amid a talismanic clutter of toys and action figures.
When a crew is assigned to a mission, one of the first things they do is get together, rough out a sketch, and appoint a "patch coordinator" to present their ideas to the designers. Technically, the coordinator is supposed to be the only crew member authorized to discuss the matter, but since the Graphics and Publications building is so close to the gym, and since early in their training the astronauts have more time on their hands, they tend to drop by and badger the designers with advice.
They want the patch to represent them. It is the enduring physical legacy of each flight. It's not unheard of for astronauts to go through fifty revisions of the image before sending it to the Center Director for final approval. Sometimes they have an unrealistic grasp of the limitations of the medium. They present the designers with what are essentially engineering diagrams, depicting the shuttle or the space station with a level of detail that could never be achieved with an image made of thread. They are limited to only eight colors, but veteran astronauts who have flown before are sometimes obsessed with trying to pin down in the patch the exact shade of darkest blue they saw out of the window of the orbiter or visually charting the haunting gradations of color from sunlight to black space. They often want some subtle symbolic reference to their children or some nod to the nicknames—the Sardines, the Maggots, the Hairballs—of the classes in which they matriculated with fellow astronaut candidates.
The fate of Columbia was in some ways more like a shipwreck in the sky than anything we have encountered before in our sketchy catalog of space horrors. Unlike Challenger, Columbia did not blow up before it escaped the atmosphere, with its broken parts falling discreetly into the sea. Returning from space, it broke apart on the treacherous atmosphere like an oceangoing vessel splintering on a reef. The flotsam rained down upon East Texas and Louisiana, and one of the things that washed down from the sky was a mission patch from STS-107.
When I saw this patch in a newspaper photograph, it was scorched but whole, lying in the grass. Its shape was the shape of the shuttle itself, probably not a configuration the designers would have recommended, since the sharp edges of the wings and the tail would tend to fray over time. In the middle of the patch was the astronaut symbol, three soaring rays of light passing through a crown and topped off with a star. A cluster of stars on the left wing represented the constellation Columba. In the constellation were seven stars, one for each crew member, and along the margins of the wing their names were worked into the fabric: Husband, Brown, Clark, Chawla, Anderson, Ramon, McCool.
Of all the debris, this patch was among the humblest, one of many patches just like it that the crew had taken up into space to give out later as tokens to friends or family. It would certainly be useless in helping to determine the cause of Columbia's destruction, but I could not look at this patch without feeling that stitched deep into the fabric was some sort of discernible clue to understanding the men and women who had dreamed of flying to the heavens, and who had died trying to come home to earth.
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