December 29, 1984
First Griff’s voice gone.
Then Hank’s.
Then Steve’s.
Now Lydia’s.
“Ford, we read you,” Joan says.
Joan is now all Vanessa can hear, all that lies between her and isolation.
With the hand that’s not pressed to Griff’s suit, Vanessa bangs on the side of the airlock, trying to get someone’s attention and wake them up. The force of it pushes her backward. She rights herself.
“LYDIA!” she screams. “STEVE! HANK! SOMEONE!”
The ghostly quiet of the shuttle overwhelms her. Suddenly she becomes aware of her body floating in microgravity. The slowness, the absence of both feet on the ground. She has never felt the full scope and terror of floating the way she does in this moment, tethered to nothing, unable to move.
“Ford, the cabin pressure has returned to safe levels and the airlock is fully pressurized. We want you to bring Griff out of the airlock.”
Vanessa closes her eyes. This is another thing she learned as a child. That the world beyond the edges of her eyelids can and will be a dangerous place.
But that she can hide from it for whole seconds at a time when she closes her eyes. So she stays there, and breathes. In once, out once.
When she opens her eyes again, she is surprised by the steadiness of her voice. “Copy that, Houston. Preparing to enter the cabin.”
She takes her hand off Griff’s stomach; it’s no longer needed to protect him from the lack of pressure. And then she starts to open the hatch.
Once it’s open, she begins to swim out of the hatch to the mid-deck with Griff in tow. She takes off both of their helmets.
She can work her way out of the pants of the space suit. But it is hard to maneuver the torso piece without assistance. The suits are designed for crew members to assist each other when getting in and out.
Vanessa begins to panic, claustrophobia setting in. She thrashes against the suit, which only makes it worse. She cannot lose control of herself right now.
She counts her breaths and then she moves her shoulder in a way that feels unnatural, as if her collarbone might snap.
But then she stops.
Because there, floating toward her, is Hank. His entire body is swollen. His face is mottled, his skin covered in a rash so severe that for a moment, she thinks it is blood. But she realizes the blood is under his skin. She wants to
ask him if he’s okay.
But there’s no doubt.
Hank is dead.
She closes her eyes and screams, breaking herself out of the rest of her suit. She has never heard her voice do this: it is a raw screeching sound.
When she finally gets the suit over her shoulders, it catches against her forehead and scrapes the skin above her eye.
But then she slithers out of it.
She manages to remove Griff’s suit, too, with somewhat less agony. Then she pulls down his cooling suit, exposing his chest and stomach, so she can assess his injuries. The shrapnel did not break through his skin, but there is already visible bruising across his lower stomach, extending up into his chest.
He must be bleeding internally. There is no way to know, right now, just how bad it is.
She should have told him not to leave the airlock hatch open. One small shake of her head would have prevented this.
She could not have stopped the leak. That would have happened no matter what. But she could have prevented the blow to his chest if only she hadn’t gone along with his stupid fucking idea. Instead, he is floating in front of her, unconscious.
Vanessa looks down to see Hank underneath her. She closes her eyes. Do not think of Donna pregnant this past summer. Do not think of the smile on Donna’s face the night they announced they were engaged.
Vanessa sees another pair of feet between the mid-deck and the flight deck.
She moves toward them.
When she gets to Steve, she holds in a yelp. He is lifeless, drifting. Dead
man’s float.
There are droplets of blood in the air around him, which he must have coughed up. She puts her hand to his neck and checks his pulse without an ounce of hope, confirming what she already knows.
How can her heart sink in microgravity? But it does.
She does not want to think of Helene and the girls. Her stomach turns as she imagines Apollo waiting by the door.
She does not want to think of just how alone she herself will be in this world without him to guide her. In this ship, out in space, inside her own head.
She inhales. “Houston, this is Navigator. Astronauts Steve Hagen and Hank Redmond are dead. John Griffin has suffered potentially critical internal injuries but is breathing. Do you read?”
She can’t fall down in microgravity, but the idea sounds so nice, right now.
To let go and land on her knees and throw herself onto the ground.
“Roger that,” Joan says, her voice so gentle that Vanessa wants to cry.
“We read that Hagen and Redmond have died. We have vitals on Griff. We believe Danes is alive as well. Please confirm.”
If Donna and Helene are listening in on the loop from their homes, Vanessa just told them their husbands are dead. Her throat constricts and goes sour. She swallows hard.
She looks to her left and then her right, and then, finally, up. That’s when she sees that Lydia is floating near the ceiling, one arm stretched out.
Vanessa finds her way to her and places two fingers on her neck.
“Houston, I can confirm Lydia Danes is alive,” Vanessa says.
“Copy that, Navigator,” Joan says. And then, her tone almost breathless: “Thank you.”
Vanessa looks past Lydia and sees where the hole was. She can barely stand to look at it. Such a fragile, cheap repair, and yet—if applied seconds earlier—might have saved them all.
“Houston, Danes found the leak and sealed it with a clipboard and duct tape.”
Joan is quiet for a moment. Vanessa is now hanging on her every word.
“Roger that,” Joan says. “Cabin pressure is now approaching 10.2 psi. We
believe that with monitoring, we can keep it stable long enough for you to get everyone home.”
“It was the last thing Lydia did before she passed out,” Vanessa says.
“Yes, Navigator,” Joan says. “That is our conclusion as well.”
It was Lydia, of all people, who had saved them. Saved her. Vanessa laughs for a moment—the sound has a dark tinge to it, an uncontrolled terror.
She knows that if she keeps laughing, it will be exactly like crying. It will take over her body—her horror shaking within her to get out—and she will not stop until it is far too late. She is teetering on the edge of mania, and it is so tempting to give in to it, to lose all touch with what is happening and let
her mind leave her.
But she can’t.
“Lydia has the bends,” Vanessa says.
“That is our estimation, yes,” Joan says.
“How long does that give her?”
“She needs treatment within ten hours,” Joan says. “Griff maybe sooner.
We cannot be certain due to the internal nature of his injuries, but we are tracking his vitals and we are formulating a plan. We believe it is possible to have you home in as little as three revs.”
“Four and a half hours? Is that even possible?”
“We believe it is. We will begin deorbit as soon as we can.”
Vanessa closes her eyes. “How soon until you have the deorbit plan?’ ”
“Confirming landing sites, back to you ASAP. In the meantime, we ask that you prepare the deorbit checklist and, as you do, that you leave the biomedical sensors on Griff and attach a set to Danes as well, so that we can monitor her vitals from here alongside his.”
“Roger that,” Vanessa says. And then she cannot help herself but to confess. “Houston . . . we . . . we left the hatch open.”
“Copy that,” Joan says. “We already suspected that was how Griff was hit.
We are just glad you were not. We need you up there. Back to you soon with
our contingency deorbit plan.”
“Copy.”
Vanessa takes in a full deep breath and looks around the ship. An entire crew unconscious or dead.
She is a mission specialist. But she has been begging to be given a chance to pilot this thing for years. And now, ironically, she will finally get what she’s asked for.
She can do this. She has never landed a space shuttle before—not even in a simulation—but she will do it today.
And so, as Mission Control comes up with the plan, Vanessa grabs the deorbit procedure checklist and reads it.
She has to stabilize everything in the orbiter—nothing can be free-floating, all must be strapped down. This usually refers to things like microphones and sleeping bags and binders, the items the crew needs. She had never, until this moment, realized it would ever refer to the crew themselves. She has to strap them in.
She considers the seats in the flight deck. After all, there are four of them.
But she needs full use of the flight deck to land.
And so, for Steve and Hank, she settles on the airlock.
She nods, swallowing. A droplet of blood floats past her, and she pulls away. She grabs a Huggies wipe from the stash that has been ripped off the wall. She takes the wipe, opens it fully, and touches the corner of it to the blood droplet as it passes through the cabin. It absorbs into the sheet, gone from the air.
She begins with Steve. She tucks the wipe into the front pocket of his shirt and then grabs his hand. She can’t imagine not talking to him every day. Not calling him when she’s afraid she’s screwed something up. She has always understood that Steve being ten years older than her has allowed her to put more faith in him than he probably ever asked for.
But now, looking at his face, she regrets so sharply that she never told him how much his guidance meant to her. She had just left it for him to glean from her high fives and thank-yous.
“Steve,” she whispers to him. “I have to put you in the airlock, okay?”
Her throat catches as she sees his expressionless face. But there is no time for that. She pulls his body toward hers and swims slowly through the mid- deck.
She pushes him inside the airlock and knows that she will need to shut the inner hatch to keep him from floating back into the mid-deck. Before she does, she wants to tell him that he’s the best commander she ever had. But
she knows what he would say to that: I’m the only commander you’ve ever had.
Anyway, it would feel awfully final. It doesn’t need to be like that. She closes the door.
Afterward, she takes Hank and pulls him toward the airlock, the same as she did with Steve. She tells him that his joke earlier about getting home in time to watch M*A*S*H was funny. But she cannot bring herself to reassure him about Donna and Thea. All she can think of is Donna bringing Thea to the Outpost last month, Hank showing his baby girl off the entire night.
Vanessa snaps herself out of it. This is not something she can indulge right now.
When she gets to Lydia, she looks at her face. It is swollen but peaceful, without any of Lydia’s usual consternation. In this one acute moment, Vanessa regrets not trying to understand Lydia better when they were both on Earth. Joan was the only one who had ever really tried, the only one who had ever seen what Lydia was capable of. Joan had tried to tell her. Vanessa sees that now.
Carefully, Vanessa unzips the top of Lydia’s flight suit and applies the sensors for respiration, temperature, and heart rate. She zips it back up and takes Lydia’s hand in hers for a moment. She squeezes. Wordlessly, she pulls Lydia to the flight deck and puts her in the chair behind the commander’s seat. She buckles her in.
Then Vanessa takes Griff in her arms and carries him to the flight deck, putting him in the seat next to Lydia. And in a moment that she does not know is happening until it is over, she leans forward and kisses him on the temple.
“Navigator, this is Houston.” Joan. Finally, Joan is back.
“Copy.”
“Prepare for a contingency deorbit. We can land at Edwards in three revs.
They have full trauma center capabilities. We are going to begin the deorbit checklist.”
All on her own, Vanessa will need to stow away all the equipment— including everything that was torn off the walls—and shut the payload doors.
Then she will have to get in the pilot’s seat and begin the process of reentry.
She has been through enough in her life to know that there is no value in
long-term thinking right now. In a crisis of this magnitude, you are best served by evaluating second by second.
So Vanessa does not imagine herself back on Earth. She does not imagine landing this shuttle. She does not imagine preparing for reentry.
Instead, she imagines strapping the lockers back onto the walls.
That, she can do.
Almost anyone who is cleared to be in the flight control room is there. The director’s suite is filled with men in jackets and ties. The simulation supervisors’ room is packed.
Joan can tell, just based on the hum within the room, that the theater behind her is filling up.
She cannot turn around, and she cannot consider just how many people are listening in on the main loop right now. It is accessible to almost three thousand people, across the Johnson Space Center and the wider Houston area, including the astronauts’ homes and news organizations.
On a normal day, most of them would not be listening. Now they almost certainly all are. This accident has, most likely, already been reported all over the world.
Which means that Donna and Helene know. Even if they weren’t listening earlier, they know by now.
In fact, because of the way some of the men keep glancing behind themselves, Joan suspects that either Donna or Helene is in the theater now.
Most likely Helene. Donna is the sort of person who needs to be alone in a situation like this. She has most likely handed Thea over to someone and locked herself in her bedroom or bathroom, refusing to respond to anyone.
Helene, on the other hand, is the sort of person who needs to see what is happening for herself. It is almost certainly Helene.
Joan keeps her gaze forward.
The commotion around her is distracting, but the din of murmurs and whispers within Mission Control forms a calming reminder that NASA is not merely a collection of individuals. NASA is a team. Joan had never before in her life felt the sense of belonging that she has with the people here at NASA.
If they get the shuttle home with Vanessa, Lydia, and Griff still alive, the entire campus will share in the relief. And if tragedy strikes further today, Joan knows this team will carry that burden together.
Still, there is a burden that Joan will carry alone.
Joan watches Jack. His shoulders are hunched, his fists tight. Joan opens and closes her own hands, trying to make space in the bones.
Since the end of November, Joan has been having dreams in which her life is less complicated than it really is. When she wakes in the morning, she
always has to take a moment to understand that the dream wasn’t real.
But today, she keeps forgetting that this is real.
Steve and Hank are dead. Griff and Lydia might not make it.
At least Vanessa is safe right now.
“Houston, the galley has been deactivated.”
Jack: “Let’s prep her to close the payload doors.”
Joan on the loop: “Copy, Houston. We want you to begin to close the
payload doors.”
“Roger that,” Vanessa says.
“Let’s go to the deorbit checklist, page two-dash-fifteen. You will be running a deorbit burn soon.”
“Copy that,” Vanessa says. And then, more quietly: “Okay. I can do this.”
Joan knows that tone in Vanessa’s voice. The tiny waver.
“Ford,” she says. There is so much she wants to say to Vanessa that she can’t. “Everyone here believes that you have the ability to land Navigator safely today on your own.”
Joan believes this. Even though no one in the history of NASA has ever had to do it before.
Vanessa does not respond for a moment. Then: “Thank you, Houston.
After a certain point, the shuttle can land itself. We just need to get to that point as quick as we can. I’m going to get started.”
What if Joan got on the loop and said what she was really thinking? What if she told Vanessa everything she needed her to know?
Watching the telemetry monitors, Joan can see that Vanessa has thrown the first switch to close the payload bay doors. The left one has closed. As Vanessa begins to close the right, Sean Gutterson stands up.
Sean: “Flight, this is RMU. The latches on the right forward bulkhead aren’t closing. We think the PLBDs were hit in the explosion.”
Jack stares ahead and blinks.
“Houston,” Vanessa says. “I’m getting a malfunction signal on the right forward bulkhead gang.”
“Roger that,” Joan says and looks to Jack.
Jack holds his pen, clicking it over and over, grasping it so tight his fist is
red and his knuckles turn white. He closes his eyes and inhales, shaking his head. “Ford’s going to have to do it manually.” He opens his eyes. “If she’s going back into the payload bay, that means she has to get into the suit on her own. She can do that, right, EVA?”
Chuck Peterson, the man assigned to extra-vehicular activity, stands. “The suits were not designed that way. But she got out of it by herself, so we believe she can get into it by herself.”
“If you tell her she has to do it,” Joan says, “she will.”
Jack nods. “EECOM, are we still at 10.2 psi?”
“Affirmative.”
“What does that give us for a pre-breathe?”
Greg does not answer Jack at first, still calculating. Jack stands up, tosses the pen onto his desk. “C’mon! What does that give us for a pre-breathe?”
Greg: “We believe seventy-five minutes. The team is evaluating whether we can shorten it.”
Jack leans onto the desk in front of him. “Either way, when you add in the time to get in the suit, and get the latches closed, and get back in and start the deorbit, we’ve lost a rev, maybe two.”
He looks across the room to Tony Gallo, the flight dynamics officer.
“FIDO, get us landing site options.”
FIDO: “Copy that.”
Ray: “Flight, Surgeon. Based on Griff’s vitals, he may have more time than Danes. But if we don’t get them home in the next seven hours, one or both may not make it.”
Jack: “The shuttle cannot land without the payload bay doors shut. It will burn up on reentry.”
Ray: “Yes, but Griff and Danes may not survive the time it takes for her to get into the payload bay.”
Jack: “None of them will survive reentry if she doesn’t.”
FIDO: “We can still land at Edwards on the next rev, but then the closest opportunity after that will be twelve hours after.”
Jack closes his eyes and nods. “Then let’s hope she can do it within ninety minutes. CAPCOM, prepare her for EVA.”
Joan: “Roger that. Navigator, Houston. You will need to close the payload bay doors manually. Please prepare to get into the EMU.”
“Copy, Houston.”
And then, more quietly, Vanessa says, “I . . . I don’t know how to get into the suit without help. It was hard enough getting it off.”
“Understood,” Joan says. “Tell me what you need from us.”
“You can’t help me,” Vanessa says. “No one can.”
Joan does not know what to say. “Copy that,” she says, finally. It is so useless.
Joan can see the future for a moment—everything that happens if this doesn’t work.
“I’m going to start the oxygen for the pre-breathe,” Vanessa says. “And then figure out how to get in the damn suit again. I hope you all can talk me through how to put my shoulder back in the socket if I dislocate it.”
Joan considers how to respond, but then Vanessa speaks up again.
“I’ll have to get Hank and Steve out of the airlock. Then I’ll get in there and depressurize again. Then I’ll figure out what’s wrong with the latches and come back in here and start deorbit and land this thing. And somehow do it in less than four revolutions.”
Joan waits an extra moment, to make sure Vanessa is done.
“You and I . . .” Joan says. “We will do this together.”
“I’m . . .” Vanessa says. “I’m grateful you’re the one in that chair today, Goodwin. I’m glad it’s you.”
Joan stares forward, worried she might catch someone’s eye. She is good at this, understanding what Vanessa means. So this is enough for now.
She closes her eyes and begs the unfolding cosmos: Please. Please don’t take Vanessa.