Riding Rockets

To the strings of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” I watched my planet silently move under me. But this time I was seeing it as never before. Not only was our orbit steeply tilted to the equator, we were also in one of the lowest orbits ever flown by a space shuttle. We were scarcely 130 statute miles above the Earth, approximately the distance from New York City to the eastern tip of Long Island, or Los Angeles to San Deigo. At this altitude the planet was hugely close and there were new details of its earth, sea, and sky to thrill me.

I could see the patina of the Earth’s oceans. The wind-rumpled water gave them the texture of an orange rind, but in colors that varied with the angle at which the Sun stuck them. At high sun, the open seas were Crayola blue. At grazing angles, they reflected tones of gray and silver and copper. In places of exceptional water clarity, like the Caribbean, the dunelike humps and valleys of the seafloor were clearly visible, their white sand diluting the ocean blue to yield a striking turquoise. In the sheen of the Sun I could see evidence of the dynamics of the sea. There were circular eddies similar to the low-pressure-cloud swirls in the atmosphere. Boundaries between currents appeared as dark lines. Currents past headlands would create noticeably different downstream wave patterns, exactly like the ones I could see in clouds downstream from mountain ranges. In Persian Gulf anchorages I could make out the “dots” of supertankers and occasionally, in the glint of the Sun, I would catch sight of the V-shaped wake of one of these monsters under way. Later, asAtlantis was on the descending portion of an orbit deep into the southern hemisphere, I watched the miles-long bluish-green ribbon of a bloom of plankton. We had been told to expect to see these in the fertile waters approaching Antarctica. Farther south, a flotilla of icebergs sailed on currents like so many ships of the line.

At the southern limit of her orbit,Atlantis ’s nadir came within three hundred miles of the coast of the Antarctic continent, now in late summer. I pulled a pair of gyroscopically stabilized binoculars from their Velcro anchor and peered southward. The pole was nearly 1,800 miles distant, so I had no view of it. Instead, I focused on the rugged coastal mountain chains. The occasional black of a windswept cliff was the only color in an otherwise sheet-white topography.

Atlantiscurved northward and began her 12,000-mile fall toward the opposite end of the Earth. It was a remarkable physics that kept me on this godly merry-go-round. We were literally falling. Just as a thrown ball falls in a curve,Atlantis was on a curving trajectory to impact Earth. But impact never came because the Earth’s horizon was continually bending out of the way.Atlantis ’s engines had thrown her onto a falling curve that matched the curvature of the Earth. In my upper-cockpit perch, I had no sense of that fall but in the windowless mid-deck I had experienced brief moments in which the sensation had been overwhelmingly powerful. The day before, I had been seized with an illusion that the mid-deck cockpit floor was steeply tilted and if I didn’t grasp something I would slide down it. Try as I might I could not convince myself that I would not fall. I actually seized the canvas loop of a foot restraint to keep from sliding off my imaginary cliff. The sensation was so distracting I finally abandoned the mid-deck and floated upstairs. The view of the Earth’s horizon immediately eradicated any sense of the fall.

The ocean underAtlantis was now the Pacific. The sun dropped and its terminator light painted a scattering of cumulus clouds in coral pink. In the darkness that followed I looked spaceward to the unfamiliar stars of the southern hemisphere. The Magellanic Clouds were visible as hazy smudges. A quarter moon rose. Seen through the thick part of the atmosphere, the orb was severely distorted, appearing boomerang in shape, an effect of the light-bending qualities of the air. The crescent tips were squeezed inward and the greater surface bulged outward. Only after rising above the atmosphere did the crescent appear normal. Then, it cast a spotlight of silver across the water. Except for its grand scale, the sight was identical to watching the moon rise over the sea from a Cape Canaveral beach.

Just twenty-two minutes after leaving Antarctica’s seas,Atlantis passed over the equator and I was treated to the never-ending light show of the intertropical convergence zone. Here, the trade winds of the northern and southern hemispheres mixed in equatorial heat and humidity to produce perpetual thunderstorms. The nimbus clouds took on the appearance of sputtering fluorescent lightbulbs, so continuous was the lightning within them.