Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space

by Chris Jones Narrated by Erik Davies

Overview

An incredible true-life adventure set on the most dangerous frontier of all-outer space

For a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk it entails: men such as U.S. astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine fourteen-week mission maintaining the International Space Station.

But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home.

Too Far From Home chronicles the efforts of the beleaguered Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow as they work frantically against the clock to bring their men safely back to Earth.

Chris Jones writes beautifully of the majesty and mystique of space travel, while reminding us all how perilous it is to soar beyond the sky.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171788278
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Related Subjects

• Science & Technology
• Aerospace Engineering
• Engineering
• Astronomy
• Astronautical Engineering - Space Stations & Satellites
• Astronautical Engineering - Spacecraft
• Astrophysics & Space Science
• Outer Space - Observation & Exploration

Read an Excerpt

1 SIMPLE MACHINES

For 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, and plenty of men, as well as a couple of women, have died trying to string their way to the other side.

Captain Kenneth Bowersox had survived the trip four times, twice as a pilot in the space shuttle's forward right seat, twice as commander in the forward left. Now he played the unaccustomed role of cargo, staring at rows of storage lockers instead of the beckoning sky. The pilot had become the passenger, one of three men crammed below decks like ballast, waiting to be shuttled on Endeavour to the International Space Station.

Despite having been shunted downstairs for launch, Bowersox had been looking forward to his fourteen--week--long mission the way the rest of us look forward to a much--needed vacation. Although he had visited space four times, none of his previous shuttle missions had lasted more than sixteen days, and he had never been to the International Space Station. He had always felt that he had been asked to come home too soon. This time, however, he would have time to linger. He and his colleagues would conduct a range of scientific experiments and busily maintain station--astronauts rarely bother to slip the in front of station, thinking of it as a place rather than a thing--but their principal assignment would be to make themselves and the men and women who would follow them content living in orbit. Even before launch, Bowersox was confident that, as far as finding happiness went, he would succeed. He might have been flying steerage, but space was still his island in the sun.

For all that Bowersox tried to focus on the destination, he couldn't help wishing he was up above for the journey. He wished he was alongside the two men in the front--row seats--in his seats--able to take in the view and, more important, see the fifty control panels and nine monitors that flashed before Commander Jim Wetherbee and Paul Lockhart, the pilot. Against his life's habit, Bowersox had ceded control, and now he shifted in his seat and fiddled with his straps. At least Wetherbee had been in space five times already, and like Bowersox, he was a Naval Academy man and okay by him; Lockhart, in contrast, was making just his second trip, and only five months after his first, back in June 2002.

Also, he came out of the air force.

Worse, Lockhart wasn't meant to be flying today. Had everything gone to plan, Lockhart should have been in Houston, watching NASA TV, trying...

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