Too Far From Home
A Story of Life and Death in Space
1 SIMPLE MACHINESFor this one dream, men had turned chimpanzees into crash test dummies, gone through a thousand pink enema bags to make sure their own plumbing was ready to withstand the trip, and finally been launched like artillery shells—in corrugated–tin capsules held together by hardware–store screws—deep into the black. Not much later, they were balancing themselves on top of six million pounds of rocket fuel and lighting it on fire. Today the insanity physics continue. Astronauts blink down the risk that a rubber O–ring on one of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters might give way, spraying a flame laced with powdered aluminum, ammonium perchlorate, and iron oxide onto the external fuel tank, igniting its cargo of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and having their cockpit turn into a coffin.
All to cross the gap between home and away, to cross a distance that, on land, any old rust bucket could fart across in a couple of hours. But the gulf between earth and space is, and always will remain, a wider divide: it’s a chasm without walls, ...
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