Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [117]
As we configuredDiscovery for our last sleep period, I repeated my day-one routine. I moved my sleep restraint upstairs and tied it beneath the overhead windows. I intended to stay awake as long as possible to stuff my brain with space memories. While I had every intention of making this trip again, I couldn’t be sure there would ever be a second opportunity.Discovery ’s engine problem had delayed the program by two months. What other problems were lurking? Could one result in a program delay of years, or even total program cancellation? Even if the shuttles continued to fly on schedule, office politics could end my career. It was impossible to know where you stood with Abbey. He might never assign me to another mission. I was going to assume these would be my last hours in space and I wasn’t going to waste them sleeping.
So I watched the Kalahari Desert pass beneath me and rammed its beauty into my overflowing memory banks. The Atlantic blue contrasted sharply with the ocher colors of Saharan Africa. Enormous sand dunes shouldered the beach and rippled inland like tan water. I watched clouds of every imaginable shape and texture: circular swirls of low pressure areas, wispy mare’s tails, cumulonimbus monsters with anvil heads stretching across the sky like the headdresses of Indian chiefs. In sunset and sunrise terminators, thunderstorms cast hundreds of mile-long shadows. Fair-weather cumulus clouds floated over oceans like popcorn scattered on blue carpet. Unseen jet streams rippled solid blankets of white like a stone dropped into heavy cream.
I crossed Africa in minutes and raced over Madagascar in seconds. The Indian Ocean was another vast, empty blue. The 3,000-mile brown continent of Australia came and went in ten minutes. ThenDiscovery was once again over Pacific skies. The view of that ocean always intimidated me—its blue seemed as infinite as space. How much greater its immensity must have seemed from a Polynesian outrigger or from the decks of Magellan’s ships. We astronauts are frequently characterized as heroes and heroines for sailing into a great unknown. In reality no astronaut has ever sailed into an unknown. We send robots and monkeys ahead to verify our safety. Magellan didn’t put a monkey on a ship and wait for it to safely return before going himself. He and those Polynesians set sail without maps, without weather prediction, without a mission control, without any idea of the immense emptiness that lay beyond their meager three-mile horizons. It is laughable to compare astronauts with those explorers. The next humans who fly into a great unknown will be those souls who set sail to Mars and watch our planet dim to a blue-white morning star.
I watched as city lights took on the form of glowing spiderwebs with bright, sodium-yellow interiors and major roads radiating outward and ring roads completing the web effect. I watched lightning begin at one end of a weather front and ripple like a sputtering fuse for hundreds of miles to the other end and then start again. And every ninety minutes I would watch the incomparable beauty of an orbit sunrise. I would watch as a thin indigo arc would grow to separate the black of nighttime Earth from the black of space. Quickly, concentric arcs of purple and blue would rise to push the black higher and higher. Then bands of orange and red would blossom from the horizon to complete the spectrum. But only for a moment. The Sun would finally breach the Earth’s limb and blast the colors away with its star-white brilliance. I wanted to scream to God to stopDiscovery, to stop the Earth, to stop the Sun so I could more thoroughly enjoy the beauty of that color bow.
When sleep finally overtook me, I’m sure I slept with a grin.
Chapter 22
Coming to America
The next morning we prepared for reentry. We scrubbedDiscovery ’s walls and windows clean. An earlier crew had turned over a dirty vehicle to their ground