Out of Orbit by Chris Jones Read Free Book Online

came back okay. Inside the crew cabin, Pettit strained to look out of the mid-deck’s single porthole, a solitary five-inch-wide window back and to his left. All he could see was night, lit up with a glow.
    Their headsets filled with noise, like static.
    They could sense the shuttle pulling the stack toward its belly. It felt as though the beast was being held back, which it was, by those eight giant bolts, until it had built up the necessary thrust. It seemed like a long time for the crew to have to grit their teeth.
    Five.
    Four.
    Three.
    Two.
    The solid rocket boosters kicked in. The bolts exploded.
    One.
    Now there was no going back. Liftoff.
    Almost instantaneously, they were pushed back into their seats by the force. Now they could decide how well the simulators had prepared them for the feeling. It has been likened to being strapped to the front of a freight train, or surfing the Loma Prieta earthquake and its aftershocks. Bowersox remembered it well. Budarin, accustomed to the bucking of the Russian
Soyuz
rocket, thought it was a relatively gentle shove. Pettit decided there wasn’t any call for metaphors. To him, it felt exactly how he imagined it might. It felt like he was riding a rocket.
    “GO WITH THROTTLE!”
    And up they went.
    Seven seconds into their flight, they cleared the tower, and the technicians in Texas took over from those in Florida.
    More than thirty seconds later, the sound of their engines finally washed over the crowds gathered ten miles away in Titusville. Until then, hushed spectators had followed a silent light.
    But inside
Endeavour
, it was loud. Engines roared. Equipment rattled. Everything shook. In the middle of chaos, there was nothing to do but wait, the idle members of the crew reminding themselves that every second that passed was one second less for something to go wrong.
    After a little more than two minutes, they had reached an altitude of twenty-seven miles, and
Endeavour
’s solid rocket boosters were jettisoned, blown clear by explosives and eight small rocket motors. The crew let loose their first sigh of relief. They had out-raced the ghosts of
Challenger
. Now if something went wrong, there were options: first Florida, then Spain, then California. Until then, there had been only go or no go, life or death.
    It helped that their ride began to smooth out, even as their altitude and speed steadily increased. It felt less like they were in a rocket, and more like they were in the lead car of a very fast train.
    Everything was normal. Everything was good.
    Outside of their porthole was just more black.
    Six minutes later, just eight and a half minutes into the flight, the main engines shut down, making the ride quieter still—until a loud clang signaled that the external fuel tank had been blown loose and begun to come apart, left to splash down, in pieces, in the Indian Ocean. The lost tank was like a penny thrown into a gorge from a bridge. It gave some gauge of the distance that the crew had covered, reminding them that they were a long, long fall from earth.
    The reaction control system took over, tiny rockets that fired for short bursts, pushing the shuttle away from its fuel tank and making sure that it would eventually find its proper attitude, top down, belly up. Finally the shuttle slipped into orbit, at a speed of 17,489 miles per hour. Then, it was quiet. Then, the crew could breathe. They listened to the fans venting around them and the chatter of instruments and the best wishes and congratulations crackling up from the ground.
    They felt lighter suddenly, as though they were lifting against their straps.
    They could feel their shoulders relaxing.
    Their jaws loosened.
    And then, blinking away the sweat, Don Pettit caught something out of the corner of his eye. There, hovering in front of him, was Nikolai Budarin’s bee. It was floating, weightless, tied down only by its string and looking as massive as a billboard: YOU ARE IN SPACE, it announced. That’s when