Formerly titled Too Far From Home, Out of Orbit (2007) is a captivating true chronicle of three astronauts – Americans Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian Nikolai Budarin - stranded in space for three months.
Space shuttle Endeavour lifted off in November 2002 as Expedition Six. The mission objectives were to: (1) deliver cargo to the International Space Station; (2) relief the three astronauts on board ISS so that they could return to Earth after six months in space; and (3) remain on ISS for four months to learn how to live in space.
Already onboard the ISS were Expedition Five’s two Russian cosmonauts and a female American astronaut. The ISS was a stepping stone to further space exploration: a giant “mobile” built and equipped by the United States and Russia, as well as Canada, Japan, Brazil and 11 European nations. Docking was achieved successfully, the crews exchanged places, and the Expedition Five team returned to Earth.
The three Expedition Six crew members would be picked up by shuttle Atlantis and the Expedition Seven crew in March. But this never happened.
On February 1, 2003, space shuttle Columbia had been orbiting Earth and was due to return. Sixteen minutes from home, during re-entry, the shuttle disintegrated, killing all seven American astronauts onboard. NASA put an indefinite halt on the shuttle Atlantis mission – meaning that the Expedition Six crew were stranded in the International Space Station without a ride home. Instead of being eight weeks to the end of their mission, their ride “wasn’t coming any time soon.”
How long would they be in space? How long would their food and water last? How did they fill their days? What does living in zero gravity indefinitely do to your bones, your body, and your mind? How would they cope with “weeks and months of interrupted sleep, sensory deprivation, isolation, confinement, latent danger, poor hygiene, lousy food, chronic noise and vibration, and close, permanent contact with fellow crew members?”
Jones details the long and long-distance loneliness, the everyday routines of the three astronauts, how their background and careers led them to this point, and the wives and families they’d left behind on Earth as they were caught in limbo between “striking a balance between the epic and the everyday.”
Russia’s shuttle Progress was on its way to deliver enough food and water to last them until June, but it couldn’t take them home. In April, NASA’s plan to bring them home was to call upon the assistance of Russia and its Soyuz TMA-1 capsule – “inelegant, but a functional workhorse.” The astronauts expected to ride home on a shuttle – the size of a Boeing 747. Instead, they were going to attempt to ride home in a capsule: a piece of equipment roughly equivalent to “a padded box attached to a parachute.”
As planned, at the end of April 2003, the Russian expedition Soyuz TMA-2’s crew relieved the three astronauts. Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit headed home on the Soyuz TMA-1 capsule. The plan was to land in Kazakhstan, on soil. Although cramped and squeezy, all seemed well, until re-entry.
On re-entry the capsule caught fire, went into a steep ballistic descent, and veered wildly off course. It’s times like this that NASA wondered “why there wasn’t a f-g satellite phone in the f-g Soyuz so that Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit could call in and announce their f-g location.” A faint beacon sending locator signals was heard by the pilots heading to rescue them. But “beacons were one thing. Human beings were another … There was no way to know whether that high-pitched squeal was announcing an astronaut’s safe arrival to life on Earth or his premature departure from it.”
Every page is gripping and exciting. Every page is the truth.
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