![]() He knew that it was impossible, in 2003, for his wife or anyone else to survive a fall from space. "We don't have confirmation," Cabana said, "but from what we gather, the vehicle broke up at an altitude that was not survivable."Įven during these first moments, unequivocally the worst of his life, Clark didn't allow himself the comfort of denial, of hope. Jonathan Clark, husband of astronaut Laurel Clark, now stood by his son, silent, thinking about scratched blue skies over Texas.Įventually, a friend of his, the director of flight-crew operations, Bob Cabana, entered the briefing room and faced them, the sons and daughters and wives and husbands. The escorts then hustled them urgently, without explanation, to the briefing room, where Dr. Shortly afterward, the cell phones of the NASA escorts who had been assigned to the families all began to ring at once, like in the movies when all the cops at a bar or a wedding are suddenly called to duty. And then the speakers were cut off, and the families were left with just the big numbers on the countdown clock, which descended toward zero and then, having reached it, reversed course, began to ascend. ![]() The people in mission control continued their side of the conversation for several minutes, and the families sitting in the bleachers by the field continued to listen in. " Columbia, Houston, we see your tire-pressure messages and we did not copy your last." But then mission control began picking up readings that indicated some sort of problem with the shuttle's landing gear, with its tires. Until about T minus fifteen minutes, the chatter had been the usual dry swapping of info: speeds and altitudes and so on. Speakers flanked the countdown clock, and the speakers had been broadcasting in real time the transmissions between mission control and the shuttle. Less than fifteen minutes before, he and the others had all been sitting on bleachers on the tarmac of the three-mile-long landing strip at the Cape, watching the big media-friendly countdown clock as it ticked down the seconds to the shuttle's arrival. He sought out his eight-year-old son and went and stood by him. He shut off the television and returned to the rest of the group. Over Dallas, she would be about two hundred thousand feet above the surface of the earth. He watched the trail trifurcate against the blue sky, performed some rough calculations in his head. The television told him that the video came from a news crew on the ground in Dallas. The screen showed a bright blue sky with a single trail of plasma scratching across it, becoming then two trails, then three trails, then more. He ducked into the office and closed the door. Jonathan Clark had the key to the flight surgeon's office because he himself was a flight surgeon, had worked six shuttle missions in the past, though for the current shuttle mission, STS-107, his only role was that of an anxious spouse waiting for his wife to return from space. ![]() The job of the flight surgeon is to monitor the health of the astronauts from afar. And so he slipped out the first chance he got and walked down the hall and unlocked the door to the small office that typically is used by whichever ground-based flight surgeon is assigned to the current shuttle mission. They wouldn't answer any questions, just stood there grim and silent. The escorts had hustled them from the landing strip to the briefing room shortly after it became clear that the shuttle had missed its scheduled arrival time. His son and the other children, along with the other husbands and the other wives, were down the hall, in the large briefing room where their NASA escorts had told them to wait. He was alone when he discovered she was gone. Published in the August 2012 issue of Esquire UPDATE (October 14, 2012): So, the Man Fell to Earth - Does It Matter? To see balloonist Robert Harrison's full photos from space, read this and more stories on overcoming the impossible in Esquire's August 2010 issue
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