It was hot as hell out here. In lighter-weight but still-stifling space suits, we stood around NASA’s newest Hydro Impact Pool (more pond than pool) where a tall crane that ran along a scaffold spanning about half the pool’s length hoisted an Orion crew module (aka capsule) complete with parachutes draped over its hull.
“Our first drop will be unmanned,” said a guy on a loudspeaker. “We’ve set the tests up to simulate a worst-case splashdown: all parachutes deployed and a high-impact pitch with plenty of roll.”
DSG’s autonomous crew modules, also known as “Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicles,” look a lot like the old Apollo space capsules, only larger. Each crew module can attach to a “service module” that carries fuel, air, solar collectors, and other spaceflight necessities. Emergency departures from DSG are splashdowns like Apollo did sixty years ago: each Orion module detaches from the space station, maneuvers into position, dumps its service module, then drops like a hot rock through Earth’s atmosphere into an ocean. I spent the last week with my nose buried in Jason Reimuller’s classic text, Spacecraft Egress and Rescue Operations: Planning for and Managing Post-Landing Contingencies in Manned Space Missions. With a name like that, it was guaranteed to take my mind off whatever was up with Ali, right? But despite my need to stay focused as my launch date neared, she was front and center in my thoughts. We’re out here now and she won’t even look at me.
“If you’ll all direct your eyes to the capsule,” said loudspeaker guy. Orion sped over the pool like a zipline, then plunged into the water with a splash that came within centimeters of soaking us. The capsule bobbed back and forth like a bop bag, rolling so far over on its sides I was sure it would capsize. But it stayed upright like a buoy. Tethered to the capsule’s hull, the parachutes floated alongside.
“We are ready for the first team,” loudspeaker guy said again.
A raft ferried out four ASCANs, who entered the capsule from a side hatch. Each capsule could hold eight astronauts, but the crane wasn’t meant to hoist more than four. They spent time inside getting situated, then up went the capsule, tilted at about a forty degree angle, back and over the pond’s edge.
“Three, two, one, release,” we heard. It soared over water then splashdown!
The trainees emerged from top and side hatches, shaken but unvanquished. Two inflated their life jackets but after fighting with the parachutes, gave up and clung to some supports on the hull. The other two waited at the hatch doors for the raft. I wondered how these strategies would work if the capsule were sinking or burning. Everyone was smiling and talking. It didn’t seem, from here anyway, like one of our harder sims. More like the attractions at Anderson Park pool back home. We always, always, always broke the only one person allowed on the water slide at a time rule, starting with the tradition of big brother sliding with little sister, too short to slide on her own; then big sister sliding with little brother; then all three siblings in train formation, alternating sis-and-bro cabooses, right up through high school. The lifeguards hated it and we got tossed off the slide more than once. But family traditions die hard and the summer before Brian died, the three adult sibs were train-sliding again.
It was my turn in the capsule and since Ali hadn’t been yet, I wondered if she would join me or sit it out. She sat it out—what the hell? Our all-female ASCAN group climbed into the raft and I shot Ali an evil eye as we crossed the pond. I thought about confronting her.
“Everyone in?” our instructor said, looking around the crew module. “Aboard DSG, none of these seats are down. Take them, like so, and fold them up.”
We each took a seat, undid some latches and locks, and followed his lead stowing them. “What we’ve just done is increase the net habitable volume to a fair bit over the old space shuttles,” he said. “The entire shuttle. This open area is where the payloads and other equipment are kept.”
It was roomy, more than it looked from the outside. We folded the seats back down, belted in, and went over the instrument controls.
“The capsules have both cloud and touch-screen control systems,” he said. “The cloud screen gives you a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the capsule’s exterior at all times, except during re-entry, when the heat shuts everything down.”
I looked up at the control screens. Ali probably understood most if not all of them. Too bad she wasn’t here to guide. Once we were all belted in, “Ready?” On our collective thumbs up, the instructor got out, closed the hatch, and up we went at a cock-eyed angle.
“Three, two, one—release.”
“Shit!”
“Ohhhh.”
The plunge was nothing like I had guessed watching from outside. Nine tons of steel in free fall—no wonder. The water felt like concrete when we hit—I thought my teeth were going to bash into the back of my skull.
“Damn,” the ASCAN next to me said. “So we’re expected to do this from how many kilometers?”
“DSG’s around four hundred,” I said.
“You going by Space Chaise?” pronounced Space Chase, NASA’s space taxi, formerly known as the Dream Chaser. It looked like a small, cute version of the original shuttle.
“There and back,” I said.
“Lucky you!”
“So cool.”
I evacked out the side hatch, fighting with the parachutes, then figuring the hell with it, inflating my life vest, and hopping into the water. The raft crew had to fight the parachutes to
get to me, and didn’t look too happy, but I was too busy cooling off to give a damn.
So did I really need to know what was bothering Ali enough to stalk her back to her hotel room after she ate dinner at Starport? Abso-fucking-lutely. I knocked on her door.
No answer.
“Ali?”
I opened the door and walked in.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Door was open,” I said.
“Like hell.”
“It was. You could have been collapsed in here for all I knew.”
She pushed past me and turned the knob. And turned it. “You broke it.” She spun the knob sarcastically. “Jesus.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This, for starters.” She spun the knob again.
“You’re avoiding me.”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“Totally, you are,” I said.
She looked at me, looked away, took a deep breath.
“Ali.” I took her arm, gently getting her to face me. She looked me in the eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said.
My stomach got cold. My mouth went dry. “What?” I stammered.
She took her arm back.
“This isn’t a good time,” she said. “You can’t be focusing on stuff like this anyway.”
“Stuff like what?”
“I don’t wanna have this conversation now,” she said. “I don’t.”
I turned, stumbled, and walked out the door. I lingered in the hallway long enough to hear what sounded like a chair being placed against the broken door knob.
The next morning at my one-person “graduation,” I got a plaque, a photo op with the space center brass (and Texas Governor), and a “Commercial Crew” pin—a stylishly altered version of the silver pin ASCAN grads receive. It looked like a star with a red, white, and blue light trail shooting through the collar of a space suit. My significant others were due to watch me launch in Florida, so I held back a heads up about graduation. I didn’t want anyone, including David or Mom or Uncle Ron, to feel obligated they needed to be here. I put word out that afternoon, feeling very alone in my hotel room, despite that my phone kept ringing. I was almost packed and ready for the next leg: Cape Canaveral.
“Jennifer. Wow,” Dr. Levitt said. “You’re gonna hear this a lot, so I don’t want to belabor it and make it sound trite, but we are so, so proud of you.”
“Thank you,” was all my emotions allowed out. It felt amazing, hearing that from Dr. Levitt.
“We will all see you in a few days. Brandy and Shonstein are already on their way.”
“Really?”
“They may even beat you there,” she said. “You’re taking some supplies aboard they want handled with extreme care.”
“Well played!” Dr. Marcum said on my second call. “Or more accurately, worked. But from what I’ve been hearing, you mastered the space game with the prowess of an Olympian.”
I smiled. “You should have been an English professor,” I said.
“My parents wanted something more practical. Like abstract math.”
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you,” I said.
“I’ll accept that very concrete honor after this is over and you’re safely returned, with Crimsy in tow, we hope.”
David and mom—who sounded good—Nathaniel, Cooper, Parada—I heard from them, too.
“I haven’t stopped praying,” Parada said. “The Lord bless you and keep you and shine His face upon you.”
The Shock Diamonds threw me a dinner party—pizza, beer, and Coke—and Ali was there, smiling but reserved. She shipped out for desert Mars terrain training in a few days and I wanted a long goodbye, maybe to make up for the others I never had. I watched her from my perch in the air, hoisted (but not tossed—somebody cracked that I was heavier than I looked) to a rousing rendition of She’s a Jolly Good Astro and best wishes for a safe trip.
I was wound up, nervous, and couldn’t sleep so I jogged to the gym at Gilruth Center, aka Johnson Building 207. I kept running, on the treadmill, staring at the news, which included a piece about the latest United Nations doings over the Crimsy controversy, when one of the gym’s staff made me jump.
“Shit!” I slowed down.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He pointed down.
“Whoa,” I said and jumped off. The undercarriage of the treadmill was smoking. He unplugged it.
“Probably a short,” he said. He came back with an “out of order” sign and I moved on to some weight machines. It was late and there weren’t many people around. I was ready to leave when I saw a familiar figure doing what she and I had been doing in here since about a week after we arrived: muscle ups on a pair of rings. It’s a hard exercise, and I admired the way she so smoothly pulled it off. I wasn’t alone. She always drew a line of passing gawkers when we were here at our normal time.
I marched up to her, at an angle where she wouldn’t see me until I was upon her.
“Jennifer!”
“So you do still recognize me,” I said.
She dropped from the rings. “Of course.”
“Same question, then. Why have you been avoiding me?”
“You really want to talk about this here?”
I looked around and shrugged a “why not?” She walked over to a weight machine, leaned against it, sipped from a plastic bottle, and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead.
“What am I to you?” she said.
I didn’t understand, and it must have shown.
“What am I to you?” she asked.
“A friend, a very—”
“How do you feel about me?”
“What—great. Why wouldn’t I?”
“What does that mean, great? Great what? Great that—” She turned around, looked at a guy running a vacuum cleaner. “They’re closing,” she said. She started walking. I kept up and followed her into the locker room.
“Ali?”
“I’m feeling a little exposed here,” she said, undressing near an open locker.
“Same,” I said.
I saw the fine golden hairs on her forearms, the slope of her neck as it met her shoulders, the tall fineness that began in her legs and traveled to her hands and her cheeks.
“This is intense shit,” she said. “I can’t take anything for granted.” She went into the shower stalls and I heard the water. I followed.
“You think I’m taking things for granted?”
She looked at me, framing her face with the shower curtain. “I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I do know I’m terrible with goodbyes.”
I raised my hand to smooth away a strand of wet hair between her nose and cheek. She closed the curtain. I stood outside it, burning, angry, but not saying anything. Not at first, anyway.
“There is inside me (and with sadness I have seen it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love,” I said. It was a line from The Scarlet Ibis, a short story I read in grade school about a boy who loses someone very dear to him, but doesn’t realize what he’s lost until it’s too late. It seemed to reflect the way I felt now.
“I’m not being cruel,” Ali said, peeking through the curtain.
I turned and started walking away from the sound of rushing water.
“Jennifer,” Ali called. I wheeled around and almost slipped on the wet floor. She shut off the shower, nudged the curtain aside, and gazed at me. I heard the water dripping, from her and around her. “Be safe,” she said.
“I will,” I said. “You, too.”
That was the length of our long goodbye.