Out of Orbit Read Online Free PDF

shipped to the Cape and made whole in the Vehicle Assembly Building, a leftover from the days of Apollo. Its volume is almost twice as large as the Pentagon’s. To put that sort of scale in perspective, 6,000 gallons of paint were needed just to tattoo an American flag on its flank. In it, a second army of workers picks up from the first, taking the parts and making them into a whole, a machine of almost surprising fragility.
    They all remember that for STS-71—the one hundredth manned flight in American space history—a small number of Northern Flicker woodpeckers had taken roost on the shuttle
Atlantis
, knocking holes into its external tank. Since then, fake owls have been installed around the launchpad, leaving this fantastic, $2 billion spaceship guarded by a few bucks’ worth of Taiwanese plastic. Those owls serve as a constant reminder of how close failure is, howeverything and everyone here depends on everything and everyone else, the bunch of them tied together like climbers roping their way up a mountain.
    And if any one of them misses a step, or if any of the thousands of others before them already has—if an O-ring gets too cold and brittle, or a detonator cable is left unattached, or a sliver of aluminum finds its way into the hydrogen peroxide system, or an oxygen tank is dropped and forgotten about and then a switch is flicked on the way into space—the shuttle and seven astronauts will be lost, probably in a ball of fire and smoke.
    ·   ·   ·
    In the hours after the oxygen leak was discovered, workers emptied the fuel tanks as carefully as they had filled them and opened the payload doors, hoping to find the source of the oxygen leak that had sent the crew back to the ground. Bag-suited engineers climbed aboard a platform that would lift them to the front of the cargo bay to start their inspections. Just as they began to rise, a spotter on the ground was distracted, and the platform bumped into the Canadarm, the shuttle’s robotic arm. A small square of the arm’s thermal protective blanket was torn away, and now there were two problems to fix, not one.
    If the arm was ruined, the
Endeavour
would need to be rolled off the launchpad, pried loose from its external tank, towed back to its hangar, have its arm replaced, and finally get fitted out for flight again. That kind of delay would likely have pushed liftoff into something called the beta-angle period, a two-week stretch in December when the sun and the earth conspire to leave Expedition Six’s ultimate destination, the International Space Station, without shade. While the station can rotate and shift position to protect itself from the heat, the shuttle can’t stay docked in the middle of those acrobatics.
Endeavour
would remain grounded until the end of the year.
    For the crew, it was one more worrisome hitch. In their private quarters, still coming down from their near-launch adrenaline burst, they were called together and told that their next try would be delayeduntil November 18 at the earliest, and that they might as well head back to Houston. They packed up their few belongings and flew home in their trusty two-seater T-38s, feeling disappointment and maybe just a little relief. They had been granted a reprieve from deadline’s stress, if only for a short while.
    They remained largely locked down in the quarantine that they had been ordered into weeks before. Contrary to the feelings of the
Apollo
astronauts, the enforced isolation was not just for appearances. One common cold shared among them might have been enough to ruin everything. (Already, sinus congestion is the plague of most missions, because fluids that are normally drawn down by gravity suddenly start flowing up.) But even for the toughest-nut crew members, the exile was hard to stomach. These were boring, idle hours filled with last-minute busywork and the occasional outbreak of night sweats. It was as though the men had been given their destinies in gift-wrapped