Atmosphere(88)

But she was seeing double, her vision looping, as if replaying a bad videotape. Her stomach felt both full and hollow. Her throat constricted. She could feel bile coming up through her chest.

Within the first hour of being in space, as the majority of the crew got to work, Joan vomited three times.

This continued through revolution after revolution around the Earth. She puked through each of the many sunrises and sunsets, what she usually used to measure days now coming in ninety-minute revolutions. The only thing that made her feel better for the first twenty-four hours was that Harrison was puking, too.

He puked for one day.

She puked for three.

Sometimes, during those days, as she made her way into the Spacelab module and conducted her experiments, she was fighting against a haze of confusion. Joan could not always focus her eyes, could not count her fingers. In fact, at one point, she lost the ability to recognize where her arms were or how to control them. She, twice, could not swim out of Spacelab until she summoned all of her strength—as if lifting a car on Earth—to pull herself through the hatch. On the third day, she developed a headache so painful she could not keep her eyes open.

What are we doing? Joan thought. Believing we have any right to be up here?

“Look at the smallest thing you can, and don’t move,” Harrison told her as they hung in their sleeping bags.

Joan moaned. She was determined to finish her experiments. But it was making her feel even sicker to think about them.

“Don’t look out the window—it’s not like being carsick,” Harrison said.

“I know,” Joan said. “I’m trying to just keep my eyes closed.”

“No,” Harrison said. “Do what I did and look at your fingernail. For as long as you can stand to.”

She stared at her fingernail for six and a half hours.

“You hanging in there, Goodwin?” Donna said through the earpiece at some point on day four. What a joy it was, to hear Donna speaking to her as CAPCOM. Joan knew that it could not have been easy to get everyone on board with her coming back to work so quickly. But Donna, clearly, had pushed it through. How delightfully unsurprising. Joan was not sure that she herself would have that in her. But it thrilled her to know that Donna did. That Donna would make the world give her all the things she wanted all at once. “Feeling any better?”

She wanted to tell Donna everything. She wanted to say, I don’t think humans are meant to be up here. And I’m worried I’ve spent my entire life hoping for something it turns out I can’t stand. And I don’t know who I might be anymore if I don’t want to do this ever again.

But there would be time for that later. Instead, she said, “I’ll survive.”


On the fifth day, not long before the end of the mission, Joan felt well enough to look out the window.

As she stared ahead, at the big, bright, deep blue of the oceans of Earth, she took a full breath for the first time in days.

There it was.

Earth.

Daytime over the Pacific Ocean.

She looked at the western coast of the United States—all green and fading brown, cloud patterns across it in the starkest white. She could spot Baja California, but she could not tell where the border between the United States and Mexico was for certain. She could not see countries, with firm lines and borders. She saw only landmasses, undivided.

It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.

She thought back to Sputnik 1.

She’d been seven years old, looking up at the night sky with her father, when she had seen the satellite overhead in her binoculars. It rocked something in her, that humans had sent something up into the sky. That week, on the news, she kept hearing that “the Russians” put a satellite in space and that America must catch up.

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all.

Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there.

Humans had gone to the moon.

And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be.

Look what we humans had done.

We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly.

It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt.

Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.

Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”

“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.

Joan nodded.