“Station copies,” I say.
I take a moment to think over all the stuff that has been lost. Kimiya’s underwear, my pills, NASA’s $100 million adapter. Schoolchildren’s science experiments. All blown to bits. I joke to Mark that the thing I’m saddest about is the gorilla suit. After having to be talked into it, I had started thinking about all the fun Space Gorilla could have up here. Now he is a burned cinder and raining into the Atlantic Ocean, like everything else on the spacecraft. As stunned as I am by the loss, as overwhelmed as I am by what this will mean for the rest of my year in space and beyond, I’m almost as annoyed that I didn’t get to watch the launch—and the explosion—live. I feel oddly left out of something that is having a huge impact on my life.
I call Amiko and she fills me in on what it looked like: two minutes after launch, the rocket reached maximum aerodynamic pressure, as it was supposed to, then it suddenly blew up in the clear Florida sky. As we talk, it starts to sink in that we have lost three resupply vehicles in the last nine months, the last two in a row. Our consumables are now down to about three months’ worth, and the Russians are much worse off than that.
It occurs to me that maybe we should delay the next crew’s launch until after the increment in September when, for a brief period, we will have nine people up here, with limited supplies and sky-high CO2. It also occurs to me that the ground should have listened to me when I suggested Terry leave his spacesuit gloves for Gennady to use if we have to do an emergency spacewalk. New gloves are coming up on SpaceX, I was told dismissively. Now those gloves are flaming bits off the coast of Florida.
I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again.
8
IN THE SPRING of 1988, I moved to Beeville, Texas, a small dusty town of blowing tumbleweeds halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Beeville is one of a few centers of the universe for young Navy pilots who want to fly jets, and I was thrilled to be there. I moved into a small ranch-style house on a dirt road across the street from a cattle ranch with two college classmates who were also in flight school, ready to start my training.
I began flying the T-2 Buckeye, a twin-engine jet. The first time I dressed in a G suit and oxygen mask to climb into the cockpit, I felt like I had arrived in the big leagues. The T-2 is a forgiving jet, which is why we trained on it first, but it’s a jet just the same, which is to say challenging and dangerous to fly. I had a lot to learn. A jet has a lot more power than a propeller-driven airplane. It can go faster, it can accelerate quicker, and it is more responsive to the pilot’s touch—all of which make it much easier to “get behind” the airplane (when it feels like the airplane is in control rather than the pilot) and get into trouble.
I had to get used to the feeling of wearing an oxygen mask and G suit and flying while strapped into an ejection seat. The equipment is physically restrictive, and wearing it made me more aware of potential danger. It was more intimidating than I had anticipated. At the same time, in that G suit I tended to hold my head higher, shoulders back, and walk with a spring in my step. I was becoming a tactical jet aviator and I was proud of it. There would be times in the near future, though, when my cockiness would be dealt a blow.
After I had flown that airplane for about a hundred hours, it was time to try landing on an aircraft carrier—a Navy ship with a flight deck to launch and recover airplanes. Because an aircraft carrier’s flight deck is so short, it is equipped with catapults to help the aircraft take off and arresting cables to help them stop. The landings are difficult and dangerous, even under the best of circumstances.
This is the point in training when a lot of pilots wash out. I’d known this from the start, thanks to The Right Stuff. Carrier qualifications would be flown out of Pensacola, so I flew there the day before and met my brother and some of his squadron mates at McGuire’s, the bar with the dollar bills all over the place. Mark was a year ahead of me, since I had repeated my freshman year of college. He had gone to Corpus Christi for flight training and was now finishing up qualifying to land the A-6 Intruder on the carrier. When I met him and his squadron mates at the bar, they were all celebrating because Mark and a few other guys had just qualified for both day and night landings on the ship. Now that he had qualified, Mark would soon be moving on to his fleet squadron, stationed in Japan.
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is an incredibly dangerous place. It’s not uncommon for people to be killed or seriously injured there, despite the high level of training. People have died walking into spinning propeller blades, getting sucked down a jet intake, or blown over the side by a plane’s exhaust. Much of the operation is done by a bunch of teenagers, and to avoid accidents everyone must know exactly what his or her job is and perform it well. Mine was to land the plane.
The weather was not great, and because of my experience level I wasn’t yet allowed to fly in cloudy conditions. As I got closer to the ship while keeping an eye on the weather, I noticed my roommate in another T-2 close by. I told him that to avoid running into each other as we dodged the clouds, I would join up on his right wing and we would fly formation. This was against the rules—neither of us had sufficient experience flying formation—but it seemed like the safest thing to do. Once we were clear of the bad weather, I backed off and fell in behind him as we approached the ship.