Too Far From Home by Chris Jones

Author:Chris Jones [Chris Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407013176
Publisher: Random House

6 THE BEST PARTS OF LONELY

Since forever, it's always been easier to be the one who's gone away. There aren't the same feelings of having been abandoned, and there aren't the constant reminders that someone is missing from life. Along with everything else that the departed leave in their wake— the unfinished book on their nightstand, the growing pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table—the uncertainty is perhaps the worst of it. For those left behind, it makes for empty days and restless nights, hours occupied by asking the same question over and over again: When will you come back home?

After Columbia, Expedition Six were finally forced to share mystery's burden. They knew that they weren't coming home sometime in March, as had been planned. And they knew—despite reassurances from the ground—that they wouldn't return to earth on Atlantis, the shuttle that was meant to retrieve them. Beyond those absolutes there was only a seemingly infinite list of unknowns. And as hard as Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin, and Don Pettit tried to block out the questions of how they might return, when they were bundled up in their sleeping bags late at night, they couldn't keep their minds from groping in the dark for anything that looked like an answer. They never found one.

They weren't alone in their sleeplessness. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and at NASA's headquarters in Washington, D.C., hundreds of men and women were troubled by the fate of these three astronauts who had so suddenly lost their ride home.

First among the insomniacs was Sean O'Keefe, NASA's relatively green administrator, only the tenth chief in the agency's history. Within the Johnson Space Center's walls, he had been a controversial appointment, an astutely political, numbers-first, professional bureaucrat. After graduating from Syracuse University with a masters in public administration, O'Keefe began his civil service ascent as a presidential management intern. He later joined the staff of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations and became staff director of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. A burgeoning reputation for budget consciousness earned him the post of comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense under President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Three years later, he was future vice president Dick Cheney's secretary of the navy. When the next president Bush tapped him to head NASA, O'Keefe had been serving as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. One of his last acts before joining NASA was to reject the agency's request for $5 billion in emergency funding to balance shortfalls in financing the International Space Station. It was an alarming introduction for longtime NASA staff, who harbored no illusions about their new boss and his priorities.

But despite his bottom-line sensibilities, O'Keefe gradually won for himself a somewhat warmer reputation. He was a big man, born in down-home Louisiana of Irish descent. That alone almost guaranteed him a presence in rooms and corridors. It also guaranteed

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