Page 3 of Stars
The first time Sasha had met Mark Keating, he’d been obliterated by simultaneous hero worship and searing, crippling jealousy. He couldn’t form a coherent sentence around the man, and he’d fallen back on his tried-and-true military distance and decorum. He was as stiff and dour as every bad Russian joke there was. For months, he’d endured the nicknameRed Robotwhile he threw himself into training harder than anything he’d ever done in his life. He might not have been as impressive as Mark, as hilarious as Grayson, as charming as Cliff, as laid-back as Petra, or as suave as Rory, but damn it, he wasgood.
And good got noticed.
As training had progressed through the two-year curriculum, Mark paid more and more attention to him. Sasha was singled out for additional training scenarios. One-on-one exercises. Private tutoring. Extended training in the T-38s. Mark would pull Sasha over to eat lunch with him in the cafeteria, work out with him and his friends—actual astronauts who had earned that gold astronaut pin—in the gym.
Slowly, Sasha went fromRed RobottoAndreyev, and then, as he and Mark became friends, toSasha.
The two years flew by. Most of Sasha’s original class was still there, but not all. Some had washed out or couldn’t hack the medical. Now word was going around that these were the final training scenarios. Files were being completed, checklists signed off. For months, Mark had been assigning trainees to specific training modules with a focused curriculum for each trainee astronaut.
He was preparing specific crews for specific missions.
They’d be actual astronauts soon. Not just trainees. Not just candidates.Astronauts. Somewhere in NASA there were plans. Maybe even launch dates.
Sasha was so hungry for space he could feel stardust falling on his skin when he drove into the desert and lay in the bed of his truck, watching meteors streak through the sky as he listened to Sergey’s voice over the phone. He could taste iron and ozone, feel his heart beat in time to the winking of the ISS in orbit. “I’m going to go up there,” he’d whisper to Sergey. “I’m going to space.”
Doubts still crashed into his mind when he was struggling to sleep or running laps around Johnson Space Center.NASA would find out his—their—secrets. NASA would change their mind. He was only a political pawn. He was only a figurehead. He wouldn’t ever truly fly into space. Something would happen. It always did.
Sasha unlocked his gloves and pulled them free, then unlatched his helmet. TheEclipse’s GPS chimed, and the simulator’s speakers played the sound of waves right on cue. “Houston, splashdown,” he said triumphantly. He read his coordinates, a perfect X off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. “Please send the US Navy to pick me up.”
“How about you call the Russians?” Gordon grumbled. “Maybe they’ll recognize that piloting. I certainly don’t recognizethatfrom any training manuals.”
Sasha laughed, and over the radio he heard Mark’s quiet chuckle. “You didn’t count on Sasha pulling a Crazy Ivan.”
Mark sounded proud. Sasha beamed. Behind him, the simulator’s hatch undogged, and he looked backward, upside down, and waved to the techs clambering in to unstrap him. Mark and Gordon kept going over the radio.
“The OMS burn knocked out every system he needed for reentry,” Gordon snapped. “Without guidance systems and flight control, the angle was too steep, and with his engine fire, there wasn’t any way to correct the pitch and speed.”
“Sasha found a way.”
“How did he know the drogues wouldn’t snap off?”
“After last week, when you gave us that drogue failure reentry? I know Sasha. I bet he went home and read the technical specs cover to cover, and then the blueprints after that.”
Mark was correct. Sasha had been in the right seat, beside Mark as mission commander, when Gordon had loaded a reentry simulation with complete parachute failure. Mark had attempted an abort to orbit, trying to get back to the ISS, but they’d used too much fuel on the reentry and had plummeted to Earth. Gordon had tacked up their failure on his death wall and grimly calculated that their crater would have been larger than the state of Rhode Island.
“Look, he beat you, Gordon. Don’t look so upset about it. Be happy that one of us lived!” Mark’s laughter flowed over the radio as Sasha crawled out of the simulator. Exiting the sim was like trying to scuba through a jungle gym while wearing an extra hundred pounds. It was like trying to be reborn.
“You don’t get it at all. This isn’t a game. I’m not trying to trick you, and I don’t want to kill you all over and over and over—”
“Could have fooled me,” Mark interrupted. “With that wall you keep.”
Sasha kept quiet. No one back talked Gordon, ever.
But Mark wasn’t just anyone.
“You forget, Keating. I wastherefor the last two real-world failures.”
Ice water plunged through Sasha’s soul. Barely anyone said the names of the two doomed space shuttles anymore, as if saying them aloud would summon the dark energies of their failures and the ghosts of their dead crew.
Challenger. Columbia.
Preventable accidents.
“It was a failure of culture that led to those deaths, Keating. Isawit. I waspartof it. I was a kid sitting back seat in Mission Control for Challenger. It was my first job out of college, and I had rocket fever. Launch, baby, launch. Don’t let safety get in the way of the real work. And we allowed slips, and we allowed problems to become the new normal. And peopledied.”
Silence. Sasha couldn’t even hear Mark breathe over the radio. He padded down the ladder and crossed the simulator room, heading for Gordon’s office. He saw Mark and Gordon squaring off inside. His soft-soled LES boots barely whispered on the linoleum.
“The worst failure that can happen is an acceptance of deviance. A tolerance of wrongdoing. We let the astronaut gods of the Apollo program build the shuttle program, and we didn’t stop to question their choices, their attitudes. We didn’t challenge them when they cut corners. We didn’t push back when we needed to. And that attitude killed fourteen astronauts.”
