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By Root 728 0

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.

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