Out of Orbit Read Online Free PDF Page B

packages and then were told that they had to wait to open them … and wait … and wait … and wait.
    For their patience, they were each rewarded with eight hours in their private bungalows and split-levels immediately after they returned to Houston. Pettit sneaked home and saw Micki, but he made the visit late at night, when he was sure his boys were asleep. He opened their bedroom door. Their faces were barely illuminated by the light in the hall. He stole a look at them, but he didn’t dare even whisper a good night or a farewell, lest he wake them up and hear their cries for a hug. Then the father and the astronaut in him would have had to fight it out, and he didn’t like to think about who might have won.
    ·   ·   ·
    Back in Florida, there had been no such break. A flurry of work had begun, aimed at beating the beta-angle period and putting an end to Houston’s waiting. Using ultrasound equipment, sleuths found a bruise on the carbon composite material that makes up the Canadarm’s bone. Engineers in Toronto replicated the damage on a working test arm and began running a series of experiments, trying to decide how the wound affected the arm’s structural integrity.
    Meanwhile, workers at the Cape found the source of the oxygen leak: a small metal part—another one of those single critical things—had worn out and cracked a hose near the cargo bay’s forward bulkhead, just behind the crew cabin. It was replaced and the rest of the hoses were tested.
    There was more good news. The Canadian engineers decided that their arm was in fine working order and needed only a patch.
    With that work under way, NASA decided to open a launch window. The moonlit evening of November 22 looked like a good, safe bet.
    ·   ·   ·
    The crew spent their last, long days before launch filling the lonely hours the way astronauts always have. They had trained as though for inevitable disaster, strapped into simulators that replicated just about every physical possibility: the motion-based simulator, which swung them through every axis to prepare for the turbulence of launch; a fixed-base simulator that left them able to sketch from memory the shuttle’s flight deck on the back of a napkin; an engineering simulator to practice the fine art of rendezvous; Shuttle Training Aircraft to make rote even the most difficult approach; T-38 flights to keep up on their instrument reading; and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory for space-walk training and emergency bailout practice. They’d even exited a shuttle mock-up in wire baskets and learned how to drive the tank that sits on the launchpad, its armor thick enough (theoretically) to protect the crew in the event of catastrophe, providing they made their way to it in time. But now that make-believe was giving way to reality, all of the training in the world would fail to carry them into space. Now that they weren’t just playing pretend, it was time to plumb some deeper well.
    All three members of Expedition Six were married. Bowersox had three children, the youngest of whom was six; Pettit’s twins were not yet two years old; Budarin had a pair of teenage sons. After making sure their wills were written and in place, they penned letters and cards for their kids that they hoped would never be read, outpourings of sentiment that, depending on the course of the comingdays, might become the only memory that sons had of fathers. Imagining those letters being carried in the wallets of boys grown into men, or folded up in their nightstand drawers, or hidden inside boxes of secret things … That was enough to make even the most sure-minded man feel a lot less like saying goodbye.
    Not entirely by accident, leaving was no longer a choice. Once again, they flew across the Gulf from Houston to the Kennedy Space Center. Their families were waiting for them there, but behind a double yellow line that no one was permitted to cross in case germs came with them. There would be no more