The first practical U.S. patent describing a space station was filed by a NASA engineer in 1961. This was three years before the first American space walk and seven years before anyone bunny hopped on the moon. Already, NASA was thinking seriously about living in space.
It wasn’t until 1966, though, that an engineer proposed a specialized air lock for a space station—a kind of hinged tube jutting from a craft that could depressurize and re-pressurize.
None of the early spacecraft, the Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo capsules, had dedicated air locks. On these missions, during space walks and moon jaunts, the open hatch exposed all parts of the inside of the craft as well as any astronauts, suited-up of course, to the vacuum of space.
“Depressurizing the entire vehicle, which would require the use of individual space-pressure suits for all occupants” was “substantially impractical,” wrote J. H. Judd, the owner of the space-station air lock patent. There is a desire, he wrote, that astronauts on a long-duration mission “be able to work in a shirtsleeve environment.” An air lock, then, was critical to creature comfort and the freedom to come and go.
The air lock, in concept, was not a new idea. There were already chambers, used underwater or in poison-gas environments, in which changes in air pressure could be manually controlled. But NASA’s new design would be simpler, lighter, and easily replaced if damaged.
Today, the air lock on the International Space Station still resembles the pressure tube described in patent number 3386685. The entire structure consists of two chambers, one for equipment and suits, and another, a cylindrical chamber with a hatch, for crew who plan to go outside. Astronauts spend hours in this chamber in their suits breathing pure oxygen to rid their bodies of nitrogen, necessary to protect against the bends. There is a lot of waiting; much checking of equipment, seals, valves, switches, and attachments. There’s some conversation between astronauts inside the air lock and with people in mission control. There are sometimes jokes. Usually a lot of important information is conveyed. It’s not very much like what you see in the movies.
The ISS is in low-earth orbit. The moon resides in “deep space.” If you consider Earth to be the original spaceship and the moon or Mars to be a destination beyond, to be the actual place of exploration, then humanity’s time in low-earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972 is something of an air lock. It’s a middle space, after one stage has been completed, a place to wait for the pressure change so the next stage is possible.
This stillness, a kind of waiting for what’s to come, is reminiscent of the phrase “to hang fire,” which appears numerous times in the works of Henry James—often referring to characters who have something to say but hesitate. Appropriately for space travel, the term has a ballistic origin. It describes the momentary pause between the act of igniting gunpowder in a musket, just before the round ball is fired—a thing has been triggered but not yet blasted into motion.
James creates tension in his works with this hang-fire effect, setting up scenarios steeped in anticipation, where characters hesitate when speaking, waiting, unsettled, for events to manifest. In a way, the Cold War ignited something in human space exploration. A trigger was pulled, thereby creating a situation in which all the rockets and space capsules, moon buggies and life-support systems, worldwide mission-control centers and communication protocols, foods in tubes and suits for floating out hatches with rubber seals and orbital mechanics and middle managers and underwater training practice and maintenance personnel and blueprints and hopes and dreams were quickly cobbled together, in less than a decade’s time. There was an expectation that space travel would soon be a regular event, still exciting, of course, but also ordinary, maybe even democratic, not just for highly trained astronauts or wealthy tourists.
To this day it smolders. The actual bullet, air locked, still hasn’t left the chamber. Will we become a species that moves beyond? That explodes into action, opens the hatch, and transitions out of stillness?
In many ways on Earth, as I write this, people are waiting. Politically, internationally, small actions are accruing like patchy dark storm clouds. There’s a sense that world events are adding up to a larger shift, a move away from the order that was. But how and what will it be? We wait. This book is being written a decade after the last great recession in the United States. Economic dips are cyclical and we are due. But when and how hard? We wait. Weather patterns are changing, the planet isn’t what it once was. But how bad might it get? We wait. People everywhere are experiencing personal transitions. Becoming new parents, starting new schools, jobs lost, jobs gained, illnesses revealed, wounds healed, people are falling in and out of love. My brother has died and my parents are aging. I am separated from my partner of fourteen years, divorced soon, and finishing up school in New York while she and the apartment we shared for a decade are in San Francisco. I don’t really know where I live. I haven’t really known who I am as a person not coupled. I’m in an air lock fiddling with these gauges, flipping these switches, suspecting that I’ll need to go out the hatch soon into some new way of being, trusting that I’m wearing a suit that will provide some kind of life support for the next thing I need to do. I tend toward a futuristic mind-set, not the nostalgic, but now in this air lock, I’m willing myself to be an extreme opener of the radical present, and this is what it feels like to wait.
Astronauts on space walks are always and never alone. They go out in pairs, but they are still singularly responsible for maintaining their tether to the station. They have their radios to communicate with mission control, but that’s just voice exchange. And back on Earth, two hundred miles down, those people don’t really know what’s going on inside the suit, inside the body, inside the mind. It takes guts to float out that hatch. But you just do it because that’s what happens next. You can’t go back. Open the door, there we are.