A Short Story About Reaching For The Stars and Falling Short

This time of year, I feel it’s important to reflect back on not just this year’s goals, dreams, achievements and failures, but to review the entire span of your life’s journey. A number of you know that I turned 60 this year. What you probably don’t know is that one of my greatest achievements and failures happened in the span of about ten minutes when I was in my twenties.

NASA was created in 1958, one year before I was born. Ever since I was three years old, I wanted to be an astronaut. Each year for Halloween, I dressed up as a space traveler. When I was eight, I made my first telescope, and every school report I turned in was about rockets or space.

While many kids fantasize about becoming an astronaut, I was fixated on this quest. There are two paths to accomplish this; military and civilian applicants. I had to take the civilian route, which meant earning a doctorate and getting in the best shape of my life. In general, you must be in extremely good health to be an astronaut as it's expensive to make an emergency return to Earth in case of medical emergency in orbit. NASA requires that you have 20/20 vision, blood pressure not more than 140/90, and a height of between 62 and 75 inches. I was able to meet all these requirements. There also are interviews during the selection process to figure out if a candidate is physically and psychologically able to work as an astronaut. Flexibility, group work skills and a love of learning are some of the personality traits NASA looks for. With a little luck, I passed with flying colors in all these areas.

My parents and I were thrilled when I was selected for the rigorous NASA training program. I made it through basic training. This included learning how to scuba dive, do military water survival training, exposure to high and low atmospheric pressures, flights in the "vomit comet" and receive media training, among other things.

After graduation, I was selected for a flight mission on the Space Shuttle which carried Spacelab, designed in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA). Spacelab was not built for independent orbital flight but remained in the Shuttle's cargo bay as us astronauts entered and left it through an airlock.

You can’t imagine how excited and nervous I was for this first flight on the Shuttle. I had studied every component of this vessel. I was chosen with several other astronauts to venture outside, making the a “extra-vehicular activity” (EVA) or spacewalk. As I opened the shuttle’s hatch, then transferred into a deployable airlock, I went outside and pushed out to the end of my 25-metre umbilical. I was looking down and seeing from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea. 

The silence of open space was broken only by the sounds of my beating heart and breathing muffled by headphones inside my helmet. Suspended 220 statute miles above the surface of the Earth, I was attached by just an umbilical cord of cables to our spacecraft, as it orbited the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. Yet, it felt as if I were almost motionless, floating above a vast blue sphere draped with a colorful map. Lifting my head, I could see the curvature of the Earth's horizon.

The euphoria was unreal. Here I was accomplishing the greatest achievement of my life. Throughout the time I had been floating free of the spacecraft, I had been facing directly toward the Sun. The strength of light was intense and the heat incredible. I felt sweat accumulating in drops on my face and running down under the collar of my shirt. My pressurized suit was extremely stiff, and I had to exert a tremendous pull against the inflated rubber to bend my arms and legs. There was no gravity to give me leverage in the vacuum. Even the slightest movement required extreme effort.

Instead of being trapped inside a claustrophobic spacecraft, I was suddenly surrounded by the limitless universe. Before me, only twenty plus other men had ever experienced such a sensation. I did not feel lonely, for I knew the whole world was keeping up with my every move. Some NASA shrinks had warned that when I looked down and saw the Earth speeding past so far below, I might be swamped by space euphoria, as if I was in a headlong fall. Ridiculous. My world was relative not to the Earth, but to the spacecraft, and we were bulleting along at the same velocity. There was no disorientation whatsoever. My only connection with the real world was through the umbilical cord, which we called the “snake,” and it set out to teach me a lesson in Newton’s laws of motion. My slightest move would affect my entire body, ripple through the umbilical, and jostle the spacecraft.

Soon, Jordan, Abe and Frank had all come out of the hatch and were hooked up to our snake connecting us all. I was tethered at the beginning, then Abe, followed by Frank and Jordan at the very end. I prepared for my first big chore, evaluating something called “umbilical dynamics.” I did not have the sort of space gun for mobility that Frank had, for my job was to determine whether a person could maneuver in space just by pulling on the long umbilical tether. Nobody in history had ever done this before connecting four people on the snake for a spacewalk. We were pioneers.

So, I pushed off and rose like a puppet on a string. I had been weightless for two days already, so that sensation wasn’t new, but now all four of us was moving away from our security blanket, the protective shell of the Space Shuttle.

To this day, I still don’t know what got into me that moment, but it ended my short career as an astronaut and NASA never mentions it.

I watched with horror as Jordan, gaping, started spinning out-of-control into that limitless void of space. He was tumbling every which way. The three of us just stared stunned as Jordan looped crazily further into space, ass over teakettle, as if slipping in puddles of space oil, with no control over the direction. Though Jordan was kicking and flailing, it could not change his fate. He had 7.5 hours of breathable oxygen and his body was going to be lost in space forever or at the right angle and velocity, he might even fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

Abe and Frank both turned to me with dumbfounded looks on their face and asked what got into mind at this very moment to initiate a game of Crack-the-Whip?

Happy holidays and don’t forget about your dreams,

Dan Fine