Out of Orbit by Chris Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

Pettit knew, despite everything that had happened, despite all that he had gone through—including his three heartbreaking rejections—that along with the others, he had finally made it. In eight spine-jarring minutes, he had become a real live astronaut. Along with six men, some New Mexican green chiles, and a toy bee, he had arrived.

2 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ENVELOPE
    From birth we’re conditioned to accept the limitations of gravity. Only a lucky few of us can dunk a basketball; if we slip on a patch of ice, we’ll land flat on our backs; whenever we drop a glass, it’s doomed to smash into pieces. Suddenly, for the crew of
Endeavour
, none of these hard truths remained. Everything they had learned, everything they had come to expect of themselves and their environment in their time on earth, was no longer there for them to hold on to—nor did it hold on to them. One by one, they undid the straps that lassoed them to their chairs and began floating around the shuttle’s cabin. For the rookies among them, Don Pettit included, the first few moments were a little clumsy; they looked like kids who had been thrown into the deep end of a pool for the first time. It would take them days, even weeks, to relearn how to do the things that on earth had been automatic, something as simple as moving from a seat to a storage locker, without looking as if they were flailing. Their lives had been stripped of their usual anchors, their leverage, their footholds and resistance. All that was left was a kind of lightness. They could feel everything, even their insides, trying to lift.
    As is the case for many astronauts, the feeling made Pettit go green. On earth, everything in his body—half-digested food, mucus, stomach acid, waste—had been perpetually drawn down and out. In space, everything seemed determined to head up and away. It was as though someone had shouted “Fire!” in the crowded theater that was his guts, and now a packed house was scrambling for the exits.
    But for the more experienced crew members, the feeling borderedon jubilation, as though they’d been cut loose somehow, unshackled and relieved of their earthly burdens. For them, weightlessness was freedom. Nikolai Budarin, who could seem hard-hearted and gruff on the ground, almost stereotypically Russian, smiled brightly and giggled, batting around his toy bee. He looked in for a nice, long high. Ken Bowersox, too, felt as though he was back where he most belonged, in a perfect, permanent state of flight. But for Pettit, the feeling was still foreign, even alien. He felt a little lost.
    In a way, they all were. Buzz Aldrin, after he had bounced across the surface of the moon, talked about how much he had liked having something solid under his feet once again, even if it was only thick dust—how with the planting of that famous American flag, he had felt that he was
somewhere
. In deep space, he had felt rudderless, just another nowhere man, and he had realized that it was gravity that he had been missing. Gravity, even just a little bit of it, had given him the feeling of being home.
    Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were scheduled not to know that feeling again for a little less than four months—a semester in college, football’s regular season. Only minutes into their flight, they understood that from here on in, and in everything they did—eating, working, sleeping, playing—there would be reminders that they were long gone. Now doing somersaults in the air, the first two looked ecstatic for it; the last hoped he would find his buoyancy soon enough.
    Some astronauts took days to stop barfing, and did so only after injecting themselves with buckets of Phenergan; others were left chewing handfuls of aspirin, combating the aches in their legs and spines, which can begin to stretch out and lengthen as much as an inch without gravity closing the gaps. Already, Pettit felt as though he were on a rack.
    Before launch, he had received counsel from a classmate