#4 – "The Gondolier" – May, 2024 (Part I)

An astronaut drifts away from his ship.

Image courtesy of Ben Wakeman

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I – THE FATHER

Commander Kozlov’s father, Sergei, gripped airplane armrests as if he were on a rollercoaster ride, but he had an affinity for the stars. His friends called him a “space buff,” and his wife teased him about being a “stargazer,” but as a professor of Ancient Greek at Princeton, the father quietly thought of himself as a spacephile.

“Philos means mutual friendship, but another word, agape, would be even closer,” he wrote his ten-year-old son, Mikhail in a birthday card: “ἀγάπη is a deep love shared with no expectation of it being returned.”

In 1977, the week Mikhail was born, the first of two Voyager spacecraft was launched for Saturn. The coincidence charmed Sergei, and he began to cut newspaper clippings of the four-year mission for his infant son. Then, in a surprise to everyone, the two spacecraft exceeded their anticipated lifespans and the mission continued on for decades. At the time of his father’s death in 2008, the two probes still radioed messages from the barren fringes of our solar system.

On his deathbed, Sergei presented his son with the deteriorating photo album. While Mikhail waited patiently at his father’s hospital bed, Sergei taped a final picture onto the last black page and closed the album with a trembling inscription: “ἀγάπη – In infinite beauty there is infinite sadness.”

The picture he taped on his last day was the “Pale Blue Dot,” a photo taken from one of the Voyager probes. In 1990, at the direction of Carl Sagan, the Voyager spacecraft was pivoted gently away from the dark heavens and back towards its ancestral home, already four billion miles away. In the celebrated image, the Earth appears as an ephemeral dot the size of a single pixel.

But there was more to the father than poetry.

In the margins of a half century of his Voyager clippings, he had also scribbled crude diagrams and notes on termination shocks, interstellar mediums, solar winds, thermal cycling, orbital debris, and microgravity. As he grew, Mikhail developed an equal and parallel passion for the stars with his father, if one focused on man’s role in near space rather than the infinite heavens.

In 1998, Mikhail graduated from the US Naval Academy. In 2002, he arrived at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. He spent six months on the ISS in 2004 as a flight engineer. In 2011, he floated 80 yards from the ship untethered. At the time he was only the third astronaut to venture that far. In 2017, NASA named him a mission commander.

Out of earshot, crews joked about his “ice testicles.” After three stints in orbit, a Flight Director dubbed him “Ice-T” during a raucous post-mission banquet toast. The nickname intended to honor his fearlessness took because it hinted at the emotional distance he maintained from the moment his teams entered orbit. His crews simultaneously resented him and sought his approval like a father figure.

During his first spacewalk after his father’s death, Mikhail wrote his father’s name and the “infinite beauty” inscription on the backside of a laminated photograph of the Pale Blue Dot. He released the image into the heavens with a flick of the wrist and it tumbled gently away from him, spinning end over end into eternity.

“The heavens and the Earth, the heavens and the Earth,” he whispered as it tumbled. There was also poetry in the son.

As Mikhail drifted untethered through space over the final two hours and fourteen minutes of his life, he looked at the bright blue-green dream of Earth and thought repeatedly of his father’s inscription.

The sadness was crushing.

II – INTO THE INK

“You’re okay, Rodriguez, you got gripped. It will pass. Breathe.”

Mikhail was coaching rookie astronaut Alex Rodriguez through his first spacewalk. Rodriguez was the only member of their five-man crew with the skills to fix the jammed gimbals that oriented the space station’s solar panels. Without them, they could not maintain the ship’s flow of power.

But thirty seconds in and five feet from the hatch, Rodriguez looked away from the vessel’s surface and down towards his feet. Below the toe caps of his pressure boots and the dangling Kevlar tether that kept him from floating into the cosmos, the blue-green swirl of Earth loomed into view like a surprise deity. The view was too much for the first-timer. Rodriguez became so overwhelmed with terror, he froze.

“You got gripped. It can happen to anyone,” Mikhail explained. “Pretend you’re in the pool at Houston. Keep everything simple: you’re a guy with a fancy soldering gun, a couple wires and 8000 volts running near your fingertips. What could possibly go wrong?”

Out of character, Mikhail joked with him, probing for the psychological key to calm his young flight engineer. Understanding his crews was a strength, but Rodriguez looked back at him without expression.

So, the key for Rodriguez was not humor. Mikhail regretted the choice at once, in the same way he regretted having Rodriguez outside the ship or on the mission in the first place.

A new tack:

Mikhail pivoted from jocularity to command. “Let’s do it. Into the Ink we go. Follow me,” Mikhail ordered crisply. Mikhail pushed off away from him and towards the deployment ledge of the solar panel. He landed softly there. His own umbilical tether floated lazily after him. Turning back, Mikhail hand-signaled at Rodriguez like a traffic cop to say, “Your turn. Go.”

The rookie astronaut still couldn’t unstick, and Mikhail came close to calling it and lifeguarding him back to the hatch, but he was struck by an insight. Under great stress, Rodriguez might need to be treated like a child. Mikhail took a moment to calculate the new approach, then tried again. This time, he whispered confidentially, never mind that they were on comms, and the crew would hear the exchange.

“You’ve got this, Alex. You’ve got this. I know you do.” It was as if he was cheering a depleted runner through the last mile of a marathon.

It might have been the surprise of his commander using his first name or the fatherly warmth, but Rodriguez gave a thumbs up, took a breath and pushed off. He landed at an off angle, but Mikhail had time to catch his tether and arrest the young astronaut’s trajectory. He reeled him in and settled his astronaut onto handholds on the solar panel. Then Mikhail bumped his helmet face to face against Rodriguez’s like he’d thrown a touchdown pass and the kid caught it.

Their faces weren’t a foot apart. It wasn’t good. The interior of Rodriguez’s helmet was thickly fogged. The kid was hyperventilating.

They were already thirty yards from the hatch.

*

While he waited for the young flight engineer to settle himself, Mikhail remembered teaching his daughter, Ariadne, to swim to the pool lip in the deep end.

She’d grinned ear to ear that morning. They were at the Y. She’d only learned to doggie paddle thirty minutes before, and he hadn’t had a chance to finish congratulating her on this second milestone before she launched off from the cement edge of the pool again, this time directly into the heart of the pool.

It was a mistake, and he forced himself to grip the pool’s edge while she worked through it on her own. He willed himself to be a teacher and not a father.

But when Ariadne got too far out and realized she couldn’t make it back, she surprised him. She had the calm to flip onto her back and float. Then she called for him. He swam out to her slowly without saying a word lest he disrupt something he couldn’t even explain. While he glided her back in smoothly on her back, she’d already passed through a brief squall of tears and arrived at a single word of explanation.

“It was a mistake she won’t make again,” he told his wife that evening.

He was in bed. Amanda was by the door of the master bathroom. They still lived on Darrel Lane then.

They both shook their heads at their daughter’s courage.

“She really just said ‘Oops,’ Mike? That’s incredible.”

*

Five minutes passed. Mikhail and Rodriguez floated casually. They talked through it.

“You want to know what they don’t teach you at Sonny Carter?”

The kid shook his head “no.” The fog in his helmet was clearing, a good sign.

“There are three things that can happen out here on an EVA the first time. One, you get agoraphobia. Two, you get claustrophobia and you want to tear your suit off. You got number two.”

“Yeah. It got me. I don’t know why. I felt trapped for a moment. Sorry,” Rodriguez said, clearing his throat from the stress. The pitch of his voice remained elevated, but he was settling.

“What’s the third thing?” Rodriguez suddenly asked.

Mikhail grinned. “The third thing is you’re out here having a religious experience. I think we can rule that out for you, Alex.”

He couldn’t remember ever using a crew member’s first name. Rodriguez would never be out here again. His career in space was over. The kid must have known. Still, Rodriguez laughed at his Commander’s teasing and risked shifting to a single hand on the panel grip before turning his head back to look at Mikhail.

“You were the religious experience, right?”

“You’re wrong there, Rodriguez. The heavens picked out a demon for me.”

Mikhail didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t Rodriguez’s business what he experienced in his first walk, but stare too hard into the Ink, and it will drive a black spike through your heart. Ten seconds after that you’re crying because you think you’re seeing God.

Nothing prepares you for any of this.

III – NEWTON’S THIRD LAW

Rodriguez was an electrical engineer. He should have known not to touch a rubber panel guard. The first thing they teach you is that static electricity should frighten you a lot more than space debris, and it’s a lot more dangerous than claustrophobia. Touch something that isn’t grounded and you can light up like a Christmas tree.

But the kid did touch something.

It couldn’t have been too strong a charge, but his cold-welder still spun from his hand. The torch cartwheeled in slow motion towards his tether. At the same time, the shock knocked Rodriguez from his grip on the solar panel, and he drifted backwards from his handhold.

It was hypnotic. Nothing ever had anything so slow happened so quickly.

The cold welder stretched Rodriguez’s tether taught, and then the tip of the torch seared the line. The line glowed like a fuse and cut Rodriguez free. The tool pirouetted somewhere offstage and cascaded into the void. Sliced from his cord, the young engineer drifted a meter past the far edge of the panel and then beyond. Ten yards of cord followed him absently.

“Stay calm, Alex. I will get you. Do nothing. That’s an order,” Mikhail barked out.

Rodriguez didn’t listen.

He tried to maneuver himself back to the ship with his jetpack thrusters, but in his haste he put himself into a slow spin which he then compounded by trying to counter with an opposing thrust. At the same time, he continued to drift away from the ship.

At the JSC they called controlling your movement with the thrusters “popping the backpack.” Movements disconnected from the ship were “space ballet.” But astronauts in space for the first time quickly realize that it’s almost impossible to teach an astronaut to “dance” in a swimming pool.

When push came to shove, and Rodriguez needed to be as delicate as a ballerina on point, he spun himself around like a breakdancer.

Mikhail couldn’t rescue his flight engineer tethered. As it was, his own cord barely reached to the outer edge of the panels. Adrenaline that had been gathering and shaking on the tip of his own internal eyedropper suddenly released. There were now two frightened astronauts.

His fear surprised him, but he knew how to slow down. There was always time to settle. Even with Rodriguez drifting, he took a slow breath. Then, with calm and focus, he unclipped his spacesuit carabiner from the tether and pushed off. He softly adjusted his angle with his own thrusters. He reminded himself he’d done this before.

By the time Mikhail reached him, Rodriguez had drifted a hundred and fifty yards from the ship. No astronaut had ever been this far away from a vessel, and certainly not two astronauts at the same time.

Regret over what he did next flashed continually over the next two plus hours. If only he hadn’t approached from the front. If only he had treated Alex as a drowning man out of the gate, it wouldn’t have happened. If only he’d grabbed the tether and not the man. Looking back, the “if onlys” were endless: mistake after mistake after mistake.

The young engineer, as he should have predicted, grabbed onto his commander in clawing desperation. Then Rodriguez foolishly popped the thrusters on his backpack with his commander dangerously close to the nozzles. The Earth began to spin wildly around them, orbiting them like their own private moon. Mikhail had to fight his way free of his flight engineer with a rough shove, compounding the problem, but luckily he was still able to grab his engineer’s tether to keep them both connected as he cleared him.

Rodriguez’s tether begin to rotate in his hand like a rope, and the muscle memory of endless practice rescue sessions took over. As the cord reached its peak tension and then began to turn him, Mikhail gently pulsed the thrusters so that the tether wound the other direction. This was ballet.

Back and forth. Over and over. It was almost meditative. If you don’t slow a panicking spinning astronaut, they’ll crawl right towards you. Mikhail didn’t want or need to get anywhere near his panicking spacewalker.

The process took far longer than he anticipated, but he gradually stilled them both, winding and thrusting and unwinding. Once stable he would navigate them back to the ship.

The ship was easily three hundred yards away now and appeared significantly smaller.

“Shhhh,” Mikhail whispered to Rodriguez the whole time like he was soothing an infant. “Shhhh.”

And then suddenly, when half a tank of fuel for the thrusters should have remained, somehow, against all instrumentation, he ran out of fuel. The heads-up display confirmed it.

“Minor development, Houston,” Mikhail announced with dark humor.

*

Newton’s Third Law had never been clearer.

They couldn’t both return to the ship, but either could push the other, the pusher floating off in an equal and opposite direction.

Now it was all over except the physics.

The ship would have time to course correct with its own thrusters to get close enough for Dupree to perform a rescue. His second-in-command Cooper was good. She could gently redirect the ship. There was a chance for one of them. A strong chance.

Mikhail never considered another course of action. He certainly wouldn’t have let a crew member be the one pushing him. It was Rodriguez that was going home.

“Do you trust me, Alex?”

“I do, Commander.” The kid was shaking his head “yes.”

“Good. Curl up into a ball, as tight as you can make it. I will save you,” whispered Mikhail, soothing the larger man as Mikhail now approached Rodriguez on the tether.

Alex tucked up into a fetal position exactly as he was told. He pulled his knees into his body, wrapping his arms around them and settling his forehead in as much as was possible in a bulky spacesuit. Soothed into fetal infancy, he’d done as he was told at last.

“Yup. Just like that,” he whispered. Briefly, Rodriguez’s imploring face angled towards him through the orange of the visor. Mikhail took a final look at the man, at any man and said, “You’re going home, Alex.”

Mikhail delicately pushed his crew member, directing him to the ship, and with equal and opposite force he pushed himself into the heavens.

Five minutes later, after the flight engineer’s slow motion cannonball drift towards the ship, a cheer went up in Mikhail’s helmet. He was too far away to witness the rescue now, but they’d done it. They’d caught him.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Alex was panicking somewhere in the safety of the airlock.

But nobody was coming for Mikhail. He wouldn’t have allowed it. Houston wouldn’t have allowed it. There was no Hail Mary plan.

'“This is it,” an ancient inner voice observed indifferently.

There were no more tasks, no more missions, no more men, nothing to focus on but the hopelessness of his situation and the black expanse that awaited him.

The Conclusion ➡️

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"The Gondolier" – May, 2024 – Part 2