Out of Orbit (23 page)

First among the insomniacs was Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s relatively
green administrator, only the tenth chief in the agency’s history. Within the Johnson Space Center’s walls, he had been a controversial appointment, an astutely political, numbers-first, professional bureaucrat. After graduating from Syracuse University with a masters in public administration, O’Keefe began his civil service ascent as a presidential management intern. He later joined the staff of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations and became staff director of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. A burgeoning reputation for budget consciousness earned him the post of comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense under President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Three years later, he was future vice president Dick Cheney’s secretary of the navy. When the next president Bush tapped him to head NASA, O’Keefe had been serving as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. One of his last acts before joining NASA was to reject the agency’s request for $5 billion in emergency funding to balance shortfalls in financing the International Space Station. It was an alarming introduction for longtime NASA staff, who harbored no illusions about their new boss and his priorities.

But despite his bottom-line sensibilities, O’Keefe gradually won for himself a somewhat warmer reputation. He was a big man, born in down-home Louisiana of Irish descent. That alone almost guaranteed him a presence in rooms and corridors. It also guaranteed that he was demonstrative, emotional, and unexpectedly candid in his speech, despite having spent his career tightrope-walking. O’Keefe sounded more like a pilot than a pencil neck, with a deep, easy drawl that spun out
hell
s instead of
heck
s. Even on those rare occasions when his voice didn’t carry out in front him, announcing his arrival, he was one of those people who’s easy to spot from a distance: lumbering, always seeming vaguely uncomfortable in the suits that his station in life forced him to wear, with a head of silver hair and a thick gray mustache.

O’Keefe was hard to miss, and after he was confirmed by the Senate and sworn into his new post on December 21, 2001, he began injecting himself into every aspect of NASA’s impossibly dense operation. He would never know much about rocket technology or
the substance of the experiments that his charges conducted, but O’Keefe compensated for that with his time-won knowledge of people and how they operated. He took pains to remember names and faces, to make a phone call when he could have dashed off an e-mail. More than anything else, he prided himself on being visible, available. He prided himself on
being there
. And so it was that on the morning of February 1, 2003, O’Keefe had been standing in the sunshine beside that runway in Florida, laughing with the families who waited for their husbands and wives to touch down in
Columbia
.

He didn’t have an inkling that something was amiss until a little after nine o’clock, when he saw Bill Readdy, a former astronaut-turned-manager and one of O’Keefe’s principal advisers, walking toward him, looking ashen, and holding the dreaded contingency handbook. It was the sort of thing that was kept in a glass box with a hammer hanging next to it. O’Keefe saw the look on Readdy’s face, and next he saw the handbook, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach.

“We should have heard the sonic booms by now,” Readdy said after he had reached O’Keefe’s side. “This can’t be good.”

Shortly thereafter, the families were hustled away. O’Keefe and Readdy and a few others stayed put, watching the countdown clock tick down to zero. It only confirmed what they already knew. And yet some irrational part of them had needed to watch the passing of the moment of
Columbia
’s scheduled return, uninterrupted by the sound of rubber burning on the blacktop, before they could decide what to do next. Some part of them had needed the hope-snuffing confirmation of that empty runway. Now certain that the show was over, they could begin the monstrous task of picking up the pieces and sorting through the wreckage.

Almost immediately, thoughts turned toward Expedition Six—where today would leave them, as well as tomorrow. In a break from past practice, O’Keefe had been in touch with Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit throughout their mission. He had called them and their wives every couple of weeks, just to let them know that they hadn’t been forgotten. O’Keefe had come to know the men not as
friends, exactly, but better than most of the inputs in his enormous catalog of names and faces. On Christmas, he had even sneaked in a quick call to station from his kitchen.

He called them one more time, less happily, not long after worst fears were confirmed. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit nodded first when he offered his condolences, and next when he said that he had dispatched comfort to their wives, and last when he promised that he would bring Expedition Six home soon.

Like them, however, he just had no idea how.

·   ·   ·

Filling in the gaps in their conversation with O’Keefe, the three men knew only that they might as well settle in more deeply. If they weren’t going to be back in their first homes anytime soon, they needed to make the best of their second, locking themselves inside their own private Idaho, spotless and serene.

Keeping up his crew’s morale became the principal mission for Bowersox. He saw the International Space Station as a big, beautiful ship, and as its commander, he felt that his primary responsibility was to keep it afloat—not only by keeping it in orbit but by keeping it buoyant. More than anything else, he wanted Expedition Six to be remembered for its harmony, for helping to prove that it’s possible for three entirely different people to live together in a tin can, under stress, and still get along like old friends.

They had been told by station veterans that their first month would be the easiest, when they would be mindful of one another’s feelings and opinions, like the early days of a marriage. Then, rising to the surface like driftwood, their true selves would come out, once they were homesick enough and tired enough and bored enough for their tempers to boil over. But Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had found the opposite was true. With each day that dawned between them and
Columbia
, they became only more comfortable with one another and their shared predicament. Station grew only more into home.

They came to appreciate how their days unfolded exactly as
they wanted them to. They liked never having to alter their routine to make room for someone else in it. They were never caught in traffic or in the rain, bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the subway, tied to a desk for hours each day. They never caught colds. They never had to keep appointments or cut the grass. They were never rushed. They were never late.

They also came to trust one another in ways that they had never known before, the sort of unspoken trust that comes only with the knowledge that from here on in, they were on their own. Once they had found that, just about everything else fell into its one best place. Their lives were a strange, unnatural kind of perfect, almost cloudlike. Every day but one had begun with the first of sixteen dawns and the promise of peace.

In the days after disaster, the men resolved to find peace once again.

The healing really began when Expedition Six held their first audience with reporters on the ground. They were asked how they had made it along since they had learned of the loss.

A soft-spoken Ken Bowersox answered for the group: “Well, the folks on the ground have been real good about reducing our schedule, and we’ve had time to grieve our friends,” he said. “That was very important. When you’re up here this long, you can’t just bottle up your emotions and focus all the time. I mean, it’s important for us to acknowledge that the people on STS-107 were our friends, that we had a connection with them, and that we feel their loss. After the memorial service … it was very, very quiet on board the International Space Station. But now it’s time to move forward, and we’re doing that slowly. This press conference today is a huge step in helping us move along.”

What Bowersox didn’t say, but what the three men had learned, mostly on their own, was that there was some power in space that had intensified their emotions, the good and the bad equally. Whether it was the luxury of the time that they had to look inside themselves, whether it was the lumps that caught in their throats almost every time they passed by a window, whether it was a manifestation
of their extraordinary loneliness, they didn’t know. But they were surprised by how long it had taken them to stop their flow of tears. They were professional astronauts, and they had jobs to do, and they had trained for years for every contingency, including bad news from the ground. And yet their eyes had filled over and over again with great pools of water that wouldn’t fall, and it had seemed for a long time as though nothing would break the sadness, as unshakable as the silence inside station.

Slowly, though, starting with that press conference, they began coming out of it, their collective funk lifting like a fog. No matter how forgiving Mission Control was, they were, ultimately, helped along by having so much work to do. They also took breaks to listen to music with happy memories in it, and they distracted one another with stories and questions, and they savored every consoling phone call from home. But they were helped most by the universe. As low as it had sunk them, now it began lifting them back up, on their way to heights that those of us who have spent our lives grounded can scarcely begin to imagine. Looking down on earth had never made them feel insignificant or small. Always, it had made them feel as though they were standing on the shoulders of giants, and now they started to make their way back up to their lookouts again.

·   ·   ·

It hadn’t hurt that a loaded-down
Progress
soon arrived, stuffed full with manna from Heaven on earth. Expedition Six gathered around the hatch, like children surrounding the tree on Christmas morning, and together they opened it up.

Living in a place that could smell like an auto body shop, like so much metal and grease and sweat, they were nearly dumbstruck by the sweet aroma of fresh fruit. The Russian support crew had topped their shipment with oranges, apples, and lemons, and that bushel was the first beautiful goodness that Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit laid their eyes on. They grabbed for ripe citrus and held it close to their faces, breathing it in, a wide-smiling Bowersox and
Pettit posing for photographs, having turned their oranges into clown noses.

Beneath the fruit, there was literally a ton of food, hardware, batteries, water, replacement parts, and gear for new experiments. There were also care packages from Houston and Moscow, bundles of gifts put together largely by their families. There were notes, cards, and artwork from their wives and children. There were home movies, their young boys splashing in swimming pools. There were candy bars and good, dark chocolate. For Bowersox, there was a tube of garlic paste. For Pettit, there were some books, including one filled with his favorite poems by Robert Service.

That night, tucked away in his sleeping bag, he leafed through it by a thin light. He had read each of the poems before, but now, after what he had been through and given where he was, they took on a new meaning for him. He was especially struck by one titled “The Men That Don’t Fit In.” One stanza starts:

In that, and in the rest of it, Pettit saw much of himself, all the more so having spent the day unloading
Progress
.

For Expedition Six, their first job after
Columbia
proved to be a therapeutic exercise as well as a transformative one. With every bag and bundle from their old world that they had floated from the ship and into their station, they found more room for the truth of their new lives to sink in. It was as though a raft had washed up on the shores of their desert island, and they saw everything they had won and lost in all that it had carried. And when they were finished with it, and after they had pushed it back out to sea empty—as though they had made the choice to stay on their island rather than try to pole their way home—they said goodbye to what they had been before its arrival. In some strange way,
Columbia
had started
their rebirth, and now
Progress
had finished it. They were changed men.

·   ·   ·

But with morning came a starker realization. As happy as they were for their new supplies—if they were careful, they agreed, they might be able to stretch out their food and water until June—the full galley and drink bottles reminded them that they could just as easily be emptied.

From station’s earliest days, the shuttle was its principal barge—ferrying not just its modules and parts, but also everything else that its crews needed to survive. Even stuffed to the hatch,
Progress
couldn’t carry a quarter of the supplies that a single shuttle could haul. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit didn’t need an abacus to do the predictive math. For as long as the shuttle fleet was grounded, each of the three men was going to need to live gently, and even then,
Progress
couldn’t be relied on to keep them fed and watered indefinitely. They weren’t yet on a convict’s rations, but there would be no more holiday feasts, and for Pettit, there would be days without coffee. Their daily lives would need watering down, if only there was water to spare.

They also had to hope, more than ever before, that nothing went wrong with their ship. If a sizable part broke down and needed to be sent up in the next
Progress
, there would be less room devoted to their own needs. As much as they had come to love their new home, they feared that they might one day have to fight with it for the ground’s attention, and in that respect, their collective fates had just been tied to their machine in more ways than one.