By TIMOTHY FERRIS, February 3, 2003, The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO – In the dark before dawn Friday morning, 24 hours prior to Columbia's re-entering the earth's atmosphere, I went outside to see if I could catch sight of it. Fog hung over the bay, obscuring all but a few stars. I had almost given up when the shuttle suddenly appeared, gliding across a black lagoon of clear sky between two cloudbanks. It didn't look like much – a yellowish dot of light, wavering in the turbid air like a lantern on the stern of a receding square-rigger, bustling eastward with appointments to keep. But as I watched it vanish behind the clouds, I found myself thinking about the seven astronauts aboard.
Like many Americans, I hadn't been paying much attention to these particular astronauts. Then, on the Internet last Thursday, I happened across one of their live broadcasts from space, and wound up watching them for hours on the computer screen. They demonstrated how they ate their favorite foods in the weightless environment (carefully, to prevent crumbs floating around), wryly displayed the frozen blood samples they were bringing back for laboratory analysis on the ground, and cavorted in weightlessness as delightedly as otters on ice.
There was something touching about the modest, almost intimate scale of the science experiments they conducted in the shuttle's lofty laboratory. They ignited balls of fire in a retort to study combustion in their weightless (technically, "microgravity") environment. They carried out "spiders in space" and "ants in space" tests designed by high school students. Mission specialist Laurel Clark, of Racine, Wis., whose gentle, effervescent demeanor seemed at odds with her credentials as a Navy Seals diver and flight surgeon, reported happily that a moth she was scrutinizing "was just starting to pump its wings up."
"Life continues in lots of places," she reflected, "and life is a magical thing."
I grew fond of them. Perhaps that's what brought me out on my widow's walk Friday. On Saturday morning I was up again, hoping to see them re-entering the atmosphere. A shuttle re-entry can be an awesome sight, a stark white contrail drawn across the sky like a fragment of titanic poetry. Television pictures don't prepare you for the enormity of the spectacle, the size of the proscenium within which the drama of spaceflight is played. I'd seen two of them, and was hoping for a third – especially as I'd got to know a bit about the crew.
But the sky was covered by slate-gray clouds. I listened for the shuttle's double sonic boom but heard nothing. Back in bed I thought, they'll be home by now, and fell asleep. An hour later the phone started ringing.
Watching the shuttle go over can make you feel like a savage seeing a ship. It's not terribly far away, typically less than 200 miles high. As Isaac Asimov used to say, you could drive the family car to space in an afternoon, if the car could go straight up. Yet, it's in space. The shuttle astronauts see Earth as it is, just one small planet. They see the atmosphere for what it is, a fragile membrane no thicker, relative to the planet, than the skein of tears that a blink bestows on the eye. And they float, weightless, like fish in the sea or an embryo in the womb. They may be "coasting," like the mariners of old who cautiously kept within sight of land, but the transition they are making could prove to be as epochal as the one that transpired when life first ventured out of the oceans onto land.
Watching the shuttle's customarily perfect skywriting sprawl into deadly chaos on the TV screen, I found myself thinking about those first amphibians and of what they left behind. Up until then, nearly every form of life in this world lived and died in the weightlessness of aquatic buoyancy. (That's how astronauts practice spacewalking today, by donning their spacesuits and climbing into an enormous swimming pool.) Then a few gave up their submarine freedom to labor in the weighty world above.
In a sense, each of us humans recapitulates this ancient transition. We start life afloat, weightless, in the womb, and then are delivered into a world of heaviness and toil. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut on Columbia, said in an interview from orbit that he liked it so much up there that he never wanted to come back. Other spacefarers have said the same thing. Possibly the appeal of weightlessness harbors a species of remembrance.
Which could explain, if dreams have explanations, a dream I had years ago. I'd applied to fly on the shuttle as part of the "Journalist in Space" program, which NASA canceled following the Challenger crash of 1986. One night I dreamed that we were completing a shuttle mission when something went wrong during re-entry. Instead of descending to Earth we skipped off the top of the atmosphere and were flung into space, never to return.
As the red clouds of dawn fell away beneath us I turned to the terrified astronaut sitting next to me and said: "It's all right. It's O.K. We're going home."
Timothy Ferris is author, most recently, of ``Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth From Interplanetary Peril.''