You’d think mission control would be in complete chaos, right? Phones ringing, data shooting out of computers like lasers, people running around and barking commands. But it’s really quiet. I’ve seen the footage online. Columbia’s reentry and landing CAPCOM, Charlie Hobaugh—their point person on the ground, like Ed Harris in Apollo 13—he’s so calm. As an astronaut himself, he knew that panic is the last thing the crew needed. You can hear him trying to talk to the pilot, Rick D. Husband—“Columbia, Houston, comm check”—even though the radio transmission had long since burned up. He kept trying. And on the video, you see the moment, the moment when he knows. He covers his eyes with a hand. Takes a breath.

And then issues the next command.

Send out the ground crew. The rescue crew. But everyone knows it’s not to save the astronauts. It’s to take care of what’s left of them.

One detail that has always stayed with me about the Columbia tragedy, beyond the horror of that moment when those astronauts knew something was wrong and that they were never going to stand on Earth again, is this: In the shuttle, there was a copy of a drawing that had been done by a boy, Petr Ginz, while he was in the Terezín concentration camp—an image of what Earth would look like while standing on the surface of the moon. It’s a charcoal sketch, or maybe pencil, with lots of spiky rock in the foreground and Earth floating beyond. The boy who drew that knew death was close. Maybe just around the corner. But he kept looking up. To that light.

Petr Ginz was murdered in Auschwitz when he was sixteen.

Ilan Ramon, one of Columbia’s crew, had brought Petr’s drawing with him. He was the first Israeli in space.

Today, I picture Petr, looking past the barbed wire, gazing up at the moon. And that man, decades later, flying away from it. With that dead boy’s drawing in his pocket.

What we need, I think, is a grief sim. But I’ve never heard of one of those.

24

Mae

ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Earth Date: 31 October

Earth Time (EST): 19:45

The Celestron CPC 1100 telescope cost my dad over three thousand dollars. We named her Lucy, for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

She’s one of the best telescopes money can buy: an eleven-inch diffraction limited Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope with an aperture of 280 millimeters, which means I can see craters on the moon. And the rings of Saturn. The bands on Jupiter, and its great red spot. The Orion Nebula.