May 2007

Growing up, I loved space. I loved science fiction, astronomy and the space program and by the time I graduated from high school I thought I might become a physicist by day and a writer by night.

In my first quarter at Stanford, I took a freshmen seminar taught by a physics professor emeritus and wrote my class paper on solar power. The class and the paper were interesting and showed me I might enjoy being a physicist but I envisioned a life of isolation, tinkering alone in a lab somewhere for the rest of my life. Since I knew writing was a solitary hobby, a solitary career in addition to that was not too appealing, nor were the very strict course tracks required of all science majors. My goal in college was to dabble in as many areas as possible. So I gave up on physics. (Not that the world lost a great physicist as a result.)

As time went on, I failed to keep up with astronomy and physics. Unfortunately, dabbling in science was not easy. The most interesting sounding science classes usually required a series of tedious prerequisites. Without the prereqs, my options were limited to little more than “Biology and the Oceans” (which I took) and “Physics for Poets” (which I didn’t). So I was excited when a one credit lecture series called “Life in Space” came along. It was a very cool class about the problems of living in a weightless environment. It reconnected me with my interest in the space program but only briefly. The fact is I’ve been out of the loop for many years. A telling point: when I was into those subjects, the book of the moment was The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which I gather is now thought of as glorified New Age pseudoscience. I guess I did jump on the chaos craze for a while too.

Anyhoo, I recently read a good book that allowed me to get back in the space program loop (if not the sci-fi/astronomy/physics loop): Too Far from Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space, by Chris Jones.

It is the story of Expedition Six, the International Space Station crew of two astronauts and one cosmonaut that was orbiting Earth the day the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated minutes away from landing. With the shuttle grounded after the accident, they were stranded in space and ended up having to return on station’s lifeboat, a Soyuz capsule. (One thing you learn in the book is that the astronauts call the ISS “station” and not “the station.”)

You also learn a lot about the Russian space program. While the Americans landed their reentry capsules in water (prior to the shuttle), the Russians land their capsules in Kazakhstan. The Russian capsules use parachutes and one meter from the ground rockets fire to soften the landing. Talk about waiting until the last second! One time the capsule landed and a pack of wolves surrounded the cosmonauts while they awaited the recovery team. Since then, the Russians have kept a shotgun behind one of the capsule’s seats. (Really.) Russian spacecraft sound like deathtraps that are somehow kept in operating order by resourceful cosmonauts. Usually, that is. Russia has had some prominent disasters too, like in 1971 when three heroes of the Salyut I space station suffocated during reentry and were found dead in their capsule on the Kazakh steppes.

Out of the loop as I have been I didn’t realize station has been continuously occupied since October 2000. Each new crew is called an Expedition and now we’re on Expedition 15. I knew shuttles and Russian missions were going up to station but I did not pay much attention to what they were doing up there. This book was a fun way to catch up, to get a little history while learning about life in space. I recommend it for fellow space geeks, especially those who have been neglecting their geekdom.