Riding Rockets

I couldn’t sleep…and it wasn’t because of any backache. I didn’twant to sleep. I wanted to celebrate. From MECO to this moment, I had been too busy with checklists to really consider the life-changing experience of the past twelve hours. I had done it! I was an astronaut in the cockpit of a spaceship orbiting the Earth. I was living what Willy Ley had written about inThe Conquest of Space. I wanted to scream and shout and punch my fists in the air. Fortunately for the rest of the crew, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I floated my sleep restraint upstairs.Floated! God, I still couldn’t get my mind around the reality of it. I tied the bag under the overhead windows and slipped inside. I would celebrate by sightseeing. Since the autopilot was holding the shuttle with its top to the Earth, I now had the planet in my face.

Other than the breath of the cabin fans and the white-noise hiss of the UHF radio, the cockpit was midnight still. In the silence I felt as if we had stopped dead in space. In all my other life experiences speed meant noise…the howl of wind gripping a cockpit, the roar of an engine. Now I was traveling at nearly 5 miles per second and there was only silence. It was as if I were hovering in a balloon, and the Earth was silently turning beneath me.

I was also gripped with a powerful sense of detachment from the rest of humanity. There was nothing at the windows to suggest any other life in the universe. I was looking to a horizon more than a thousand miles distant and could see only the unrelieved blue of the Pacific. In each passing second that horizon was being pushed another five miles to the east but still nothing changed. There was no vapor trail of a jetliner, no wake of a ship, no cities, no glint of Sun from a piece of glass or metal. There was no signature of life on Earth. And the view into space was even more lonely. The brilliance of the Sun had overwhelmed the faint light of the stars and planets. Space was as featureless black as the ocean was blue.

The Sun was intense and the cockpit grew uncomfortably hot. I pushed from my sleep restraint and hovered in my underwear a few inches from the glass. In my relaxed state my arms and legs folded inward as if trying to return to their fetal position. I had become a hairy2001: A Space Odyssey embryo.

The forty-five minutes of my orbit “day” drew to an end and I was treated to another space sight of such breathtaking beauty it would challenge the most gifted poet. AsDiscovery raced eastward, behind her the Sun plunged toward the western horizon. Beneath me, the terminator, that hazy shadow that separates brilliant daylight from the deep black of night, began to dim the crenellated ocean blue. High clouds over this terminator glowed tangerine and pink in the final rays of the Sun.Discovery entered this shadow world and I turned my head to the back windows to watch the Sun dip below the horizon. Its light, which to this moment had been as pure white as a baby’s soul, was now being split by the atmosphere. An intense color spectrum, a hundred times more brilliant than any rainbow seen on Earth, formed in an arc to separate the black of earth night from the perennial black of space. Where it touched the Earth, the color bow was as red as royal velvet and faded upward through multiple shades of orange and blue and purple until it dissipated into black. AsDiscovery sped farther from it, the bow slowly shrank along the Earth’s limb toward the point of sunset, diminishing in reach and thickness and intensity, as if the colors were a liquid being drained from the sky. Finally, only an eyelash-thin arc of indigo remained. Then it winked out andDiscovery was fully immersed in the oblivion of an orbit night.

Suddenly the uniform black of daytime space was transformed into the stuff of dreams. The Milky Way arced across the sky like glowing smoke. Other stars pierced the black in whites, blues, yellows, and reds. Jupiter rose in the sky like a coachman’s lantern. For planet and stars alike, there was no twinkle. In the purity of space they were fixed points of color.

I stared down into the dark of the Earth. Lightning flashed in faraway Central American thunderstorms. Shooting stars streaked to their deaths in multihued flashes. To the northeast I could see the sodium glow of an unknown city. At the horizon the atmosphere had a faint glow caused by sunlight scattering completely around the Earth. In this glow the air was visible as several distinct layers of gray.

I watched a satellite twinkle through the western sky. ThoughDiscovery was in darkness, the other machine was far enough to the west to still reflect sunlight.