Riding Rockets

Atlantiscrossed Central America in less than a minute and I looked ahead to America’s East Coast. In a six-minute passage, the city lights of the entire seaboard passed by my window: Key West, Miami, Jacksonville, the cities of the mid-Atlantic, then Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland. The lights sprawled over the darkened continent like so many yellow galaxies.

Twenty-two minutes north of the equator,Atlantis brushed the Arctic Circle. The deep night of winter in the northern hemisphere made it ideal for viewing the lights of the aurora borealis. I watched them grow and collapse in their ephemeral, spiritlike dance. Streamers of emerald green and fuchsia waved as if rippled by the wind. The lower end of one curtain took on an intense glow, like the head of a comet, its attached streamer trailing away like a sun-blown tail. The lights were so captivating I watched them until they were just a haze on the receding horizon, and I was happy to know I had tickets for the next show starting in ninety minutes.

I moved to the back cockpit to enjoy a different light show…the atomic oxygen glow engulfingAtlantis ’s payload bay. The low-orbit space through whichAtlantis plunged was not empty. We were in the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, which contained billions of atoms of UV-altered molecular oxygen known as atomic oxygen. The wind they produced was vanishingly thin, but it was enough to react with the shuttle’s windward surfaces to cause a Saint Elmo’s–like fire. The glow was so intense it appeared we had flown into a hazy alien fog. Every affected surface was covered to a depth of several feet. If we had not been warned of the phenomenon, I would have worried we had passed into the Twilight Zone and our spaceship had been transformed into a ghost ship. We had been damned by the curse of the skull man.

Atlantiscurved over northern Europe toward another forty-five minute day. If ever there was a music composition perfect for watching the beauty of an orbit sunrise, that composition would be Pachelbel’s Canon. As the violin melody played on my Walkman, the rising sun painted the horizon in twenty shades of indigo, blue, orange, and red. God, how I wanted to stop and just hover.

I took off my headset and watched the Earth in silence. I also wanted tohear spaceflight and seal that memory in my mind. The cabin fans stirred the air with their constant soft whoosh. From downstairs I could hear the muted clatter of the teleprinter printing out checklist changes and weather reports for tomorrow’s reentry. Someone coughed. The UHF radio captured the gibberish of a foreign pilot talking to his controller somewhere below.

I inhaled the smell ofAtlantis. There was no evidence of the humanity that inhabited her, no odor of our bodies, our food, our waste, our emesis. The engineers had done a remarkable job of filtering the air. The only “smell” was that of unnatural sterility. I missed the scents of rain, desert, and sea…and I had only been away from the Earth for four days. I wondered if engineers would ever be able to package smells of our home planet so that Martian pioneers could remember their roots. For their sakes, I hoped so.

I took a moment to look aroundAtlantis ’s cockpit and capture that memory, knowing that when I crawled from her side hatch tomorrow it would be for the last time. The windows and floor were the only surfaces not covered with switches, controls, circuit breakers, computer monitors, or TV screens. Cue cards dotted the panels. Bound checklists were similarly scattered on Velcro pads. Twelve years ago, I had been overwhelmed with the machine’s complexity. Now, the cockpit was as familiar and comforting as my living room.

I turned and looked forward. The PLT’s seat belt hovered like a charmed snake. The three computer screens were off. No reason to waste power during a sleep period. My eyes touched on the life-and-death switches I had so often feared might play a part on one of my missions: the abort selection switch, the SSME shutdown buttons, the BFS engage buttons. I would never need any of them and I thanked God for it.