Still, in spite of potentially nerve-wracking claustrophobia and other strains, the Expedition Six team members stayed level-headed and sane.
"Bowersox was the firstborn brother," Jones writes. "He was reason and responsibility. Pettit was the wide-eyed kid who loved eating his drinks with chopsticks." (Pettit loved experimenting with fluids. His other efforts included that Alka-Seltzer trick.) "Budarin was the weird uncle from Russia." Although he spends much more time describing each of them, the author doesn't much deviate from those simple thumbnail descriptions.
Still, Jones finds ways to overstate each case. "Like Picasso going through his Blue period, Pettit had once been obsessed with clocks," he says of Pettit's ingenious tinkering. Much is also made of Budarin's revelation that a breakfast packet of dried strawberries, if soaked in water all day, would make a nice dinnertime dessert. "Another lesson learned, another trick revealed," Jones writes of this.
But he makes it clear that the astronaut world has needed to lose its daredevil edge, and that a new breed of calm, stoical, strawberry-soaking astronauts will help give a business-as-usual facade to great space leaps of the future.
At Edwards Air Force Base in California, where Tom Wolfe's test pilots created their legends in The Right Stuff and where Bowersox later trained as a test pilot, "the romance has been waived for reason," the book says. "And at the end of the day, today's students are far more likely to retire to the in-school lounge with their textbooks and a cup of coffee than to some dusty desert bar with black-and-white photographs of dead pilots on the wall."
For all the professionalism and sang-froid described in Too Far From Home, though, there remains a real, underlying sense of what makes astronauts so far removed from the ordinary. Even when performing routine repairs, an astronaut may gaze at his or her foot and see behind it a similar-sized object that turns out to be Australia.
Emotions in space are no less strange; they bring higher highs and lower lows. And the title Too Far From Home hints at the secret ambivalence that goes with this territory. At first glance, to the sentimental reader, the title may signify the loneliness of space travel. But when the men of Expedition Six returned to Earth, they missed their privilege and isolation. They were homesick here, too.
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