While the world grieved for the Columbia crew lost Feb. 1, 2003, three lonely men in space had a somewhat more complicated reaction. They were the members of Expedition Six, two Americans and a Russian installed at the International Space Station. They had been there since the previous November, and they were getting ready to come home. But the Challenger disaster suspended space travel, so no new crew would arrive to relieve them in the foreseeable future. Suddenly they were stuck in a sci-fi limbo.
This crisis became the basis for an Esquire article in which Chris Jones recreated the experience of the three men: Donald Pettit, Captain Kenneth Bowersox and Nikolai Budarin. Jones focused tightly on this story, giving it both intimacy and suspense. Now, one National Magazine Award later (Jones won for feature writing in 2005), his longer, less assured version of Expedition Six's perilous journey has been turned into a book.
Like air in a vacuum, the story told in Too Far From Home expands to fill the boundaries it has been given. But it has lost its tight focus and some of its verve. Jones' efforts to provide context for Expedition Six yield more generic, less compelling historical detail about both the American and Russian space programs, as well as occasionally inflated prose about the lyrical loneliness of an astronaut's mission.
"Like every astronaut and every cosmonaut, from the first to the last, they were seen as something alien and wonderful, these ordinary assemblies of skin and tissue that had been turned into artifacts by virtue of the places they had been," he writes about the Expedition Six members, post-expedition. And: "Between expectation and reality, between flying and falling — between earth and space, between home and away — there will forever remain some kind of gap." Whatever this is, it isn't the right stuff.
With his book based largely on the astronauts' recollections ("NASA declined to help me out — for reasons I've never been able to fathom," Jones writes) and on data that is also well documented on the Web site Space.com, he must bring something unusual to what would otherwise be a relatively routine and mundane mix, despite the drama of Expedition Six's temporary dilemma.
So he concentrates on the you-are-there physical peculiarities of life in space. Oh, wow: Imagine what happens when someone puts Alka-Seltzer in a bubble-sphere of water under zero-gravity conditions. This account is actually at its best with space-trippy images of that kind.
Then there are the diapers. With no inkling about how notorious these would become, Jones makes diapers part of his detailed examination of how astronauts perform bodily functions in space. No spitting allowed: they have to swallow their toothpaste. Moisture from their sweat will eventually wind up in their tea.
Russian cosmonauts are too tough to wear diapers. Americans do, but the Expedition Six crew declined to use them once it had been determined that they would go home on an outmoded Russian capsule, the Soyuz TMA-1. That trip, which became a nail-biter, was supposed to be relatively brief.
"The American space program has traditionally paid little attention to the psychological health of its astronauts in space," Jones notes. But "there is strong evidence that spending a long time in space can make people crackers." Diapers and all, Too Far From Home is certainly prescient this way.
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