I dreamed of falling out of the sky, of burning up, of feeling intense pain, then blackness, then nothing.
--Brian O'Leary
The Making of an Ex-Astronaut
Falling...
Falling...
Nine miles and more.
The ocean and sky merged into one seamless blue-grey blur as she dropped in free fall for a terrifying eternity. Hands that must have been hers reached for the helmet behind and above her head, but fear-clenched fingers refused to obey her commands.
A whistling sound outside intensified until it swelled into a banshee howl of death. The crew cabin shifted about with a gut-wrenching jolt. Wires and control cables trailing behind the shattered orbiter gripped the thickening atmosphere, acting like vanes to stabilize the cabin's descent. Now she clearly saw where they were doomed to die.
No one could save them. Something had gone terribly wrong and nothing could stop their horrible plunge into the Atlantic.
It had happened at throttleup. The shuttle started to oscillate. Then the explosion. Then an awful lurch as the crew cabin broke free and -- no longer ærodynamically streamlined -- hit the thin atmosphere and began to tumble wildly.
One of them screamed. That she heard it at all meant that the compartment still held pressure. Atmospheric forces acted upon the cabin, slowing the huge piece of the demolished orbiter, forcing them forward against their restraining straps. As if a giant's hand dragged them toward the earth, she felt a mighty force in front of her pull them down, down, downward to the sea.
She wanted to scream but no breath escaped her frozen lungs. The orbiter contained no ejection seats, the controls of the ruined crew cabin connected to nothing, the wings and rudder and elevons trailed somewhere far away, fluttering slowly in pieces toward the ocean.
Her tortured mind frantically sought some way to survive, but only one horrifying realization seized her terror-consumed thoughts.
They lied!
The screaming outside grew louder than even the thundering roar of liftoff. They plummeted straight toward a delicate mosaic of waves in the wall of water below.
It couldn't be much longer, could it? Did Houston know they were alive?
Her family watched from the Cape. Watched this!
The looser cables ripped away from the cabin with the shattering crack of gunshots.
Ahead of her -- below her -- glittered the tiny white splashes of a frolicking pod of dolphins.
"Oh, God!"
Tammy Reis awakened an instant before impact. She always did.
Heart racing, sweat-soaked, she ran a pale, trembling hand through her neck-length sable hair, then reached toward the night stand. The cool condensation on the water glass sent a chill through her fingers and palm. She shuddered and took a long drink.
The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger years before still haunted her dreams. For a space shuttle pilot, such nightmares constituted a betrayal by that most intimate of enemies, her subconscious mind.
She refused to submit. After every night of terror in which she fell to her death, Tammy Reis seized the dawn with an angry fervor, a renewed conviction that she would not permit the spectre of death to wrap its dark claws once more around the Shuttle. She possessed the power -- the will -- to steer NASA toward its destiny. Death, even her own death, served a higher cause if it came while reaching, not cowering. And in every morning light that pierced the darkness of her private hell, she clenched her fist up at Fate and swore anew that she would triumph.