“He’s not talking to us directly.” The story NASA tells goes from bad to worse. “What’s a fact is that at around three o’clock this morning, he departed in the Soyuz spacecraft that he and his crewmates had arrived in eleven weeks ago. It’s since touched down without incident in Kazakhstan.”
We can see it for ourselves on the data walls, the crew capsule landing in the desert steppes rather much like a wrecking ball. Then a Russian helicopter is setting down, clouds of dirt billowing up from sagebrush and feathergrass.
“If it’s top secret,” says the senator from Virginia in his lilting accent, “then why are the Russians involved?”
“They’ve been our partners on the Space Station since nineteen ninety-eight,” NASA reminds everyone. “We’re still using their Soyuz spacecraft.”
On the data walls, we watch the Russian search and rescue team helping Horton out of the scorched-looking crew capsule’s hatch. They carry him off in a chair as he barely holds up his head, feeling the crushing effects of gravity after months without it.
“His story is that the orbiter and his two crewmates were struck by a swarm of projectiles, possibly debris too small to be picked up on radar,” the president goes on to describe. “And if at the end of the day it turns out to be space trash, junk, fragments of something? Then the damage is accidental, obviously. But we don’t know that yet.” He looks around at the intense faces.
We can’t be sure what we’re dealing with wasn’t an overt act of aggression, he explains. A United States spacecraft may have been fired upon deliberately. This happened after Horton had assisted his two crewmates, helping them suit up. He claims they exited the airlock at 11:46 last night, although there’s no record of the hatch being opened.
As Horton’s story goes, he returned to the robotic arm station to help with the installation of a new power supply on the experiment platform. His two crewmates began their spacewalk, and he described hearing the muffled clangs of their tether hooks against the hull as they began moving handrail to handrail.
Then suddenly, the cameras and radios were knocked out, accompanied by a terrible loud banging. It sounded like the hull was struck by an army of hammers hitting all at once.
“Damaging the experiment platform and robotic arm, tearing the solar arrays.” NASA continues describing what Horton supposedly relayed to his Russian hosts.
“Whatever actually happened, we have no way of knowing yet.” The president picks up where NASA leaves off. “Since none of this was recorded, and we’ve lost all contact with the top secret laboratory. But if what we’re being told is true, there were serious injuries to the crewmates out on their spacewalk.”
Just how serious, we don’t know, because Jared Horton bailed on them, claiming there was only so much he could do to help. Fearing for his own life, he was convinced the hull must have been penetrated, and pressurization would be lost, the air leaking out.
“Despicably, he left his two injured colleagues stranded and for dead,” the president says.
“THIRTY-THREE MINUTES OUT,” THE commander of Space Force, General Gunner, takes over.
Moving a remote control close, he explains that help is on the way, a rescue crew has deployed from the International Space Station （ISS）， headed to the radio-silent orbiting commercial lab. Recorded videos on the data walls show the ISS shining like polished Tiffany silver against blackness.
Its four solar arrays are lit up molten orange by the sun, the Earth a blue and white marble looming large below. A Sierra Space Dream Chaser departs from one of the docking ports. Gliding away through the ether, it brings to mind a mini Space Shuttle, white with black heatshield protection and integrated wings.
The time stamp on the data walls shows the spaceplane left an hour ago, and we’re shown images of the two ISS astronauts inside the glass cockpit. NASA-trained Chip Ortiz from the U.S. and Anni Girard from France are on their way to the rescue with additional medical supplies, and also body bags.
Harnessed in their carbon fiber seats so they don’t float out of them, they’re wearing white launch-reentry suits and helmets that can be pressurized in an emergency. We watch them going through checklists on computer screens, talking to Johnson Space Center mission controllers.
But what we can’t see at this point is the target destination, and there’s no telling what they might find once they get there. The blacked-out panels in the data walls are a reminder that video is missing because of damaged cameras. Or so we’ve been told.