Page 123 of Atmosphere

The shuttle ignited, her bones vibrating as the ship came to life and began to quake. And it was a great relief to her—to shake like that.

She’d barely been able to sleep the night before—adrenaline running through every limb of her body. But the morning had been so slow, so methodical. She could not rush or indulge her excitement. Each item had to be checked off one by one, cross-referenced with Launch/Mission Control.

The difference between the outside of her—so controlled—and what ran inside her—such thrill—was jarring and hard to reconcile.

Until, now, finally, the outside was matching the inside. Joan felt an intense sense of equilibrium for the first time in days.

“…four…three…two…one…zero…and liftoff of the space shuttleDiscovery.”

The ignition of the rockets hit her like a bang, her body hurling into the air.

Joan tried to think of how to explain the feeling to Frances. It was like being dragged through a hurricane, all the blood in her brain rushing to the back of her skull.

Discoverydropped its solid rocket boosters. And as the ship ascended higher and higher, going over seventeen thousand miles anhour to fight against gravity, Joan felt an intense lift in her belly. They hit main engine cutoff, and then there were two loud blows, which she knew to be the dropping of the huge external fuel tank, now emptied of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Then everything went quiet and still.

The cacophony, the quaking of the ship, the pressure—gone. Replaced with an eerie sense of calm.

Joan’s body started to catch the air and she felt suddenly, excruciatingly alive—somersaults overtaking her chest and lower body. She detached from her seat.

“And we are in orbit,” she heard Commander Donahue say.

Joan’s stomach was in her feet, her head in her chest. She took off one of her gloves and let it go, remembering just in time to grab the tether attached to it as it began to float away. She removed her helmet and took a deep breath.

She tried to swim to the window, to look out across the expanse of space to spot the terminator line, dividing dark from light across the Earth’s surface.

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.AndI’m worried I’ve spent my entire life hoping for something it turns out I can’t stand.AndI 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.”

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