Less than fifteen minutes before, he and the others had all been sitting on bleachers on the tarmac of the three-mile-long landing strip at the Cape, watching the big media-friendly countdown clock as it ticked down the seconds to the shuttle's arrival. He sought out his eight-year-old son and went and stood by him. He shut off the television and returned to the rest of the group. Over Dallas, she would be about two hundred thousand feet above the surface of the earth. He watched the trail trifurcate against the blue sky, performed some rough calculations in his head. The television told him that the video came from a news crew on the ground in Dallas. The screen showed a bright blue sky with a single trail of plasma scratching across it, becoming then two trails, then three trails, then more. He ducked into the office and closed the door. Jonathan Clark had the key to the flight surgeon's office because he himself was a flight surgeon, had worked six shuttle missions in the past, though for the current shuttle mission, STS-107, his only role was that of an anxious spouse waiting for his wife to return from space. The job of the flight surgeon is to monitor the health of the astronauts from afar. And so he slipped out the first chance he got and walked down the hall and unlocked the door to the small office that typically is used by whichever ground-based flight surgeon is assigned to the current shuttle mission. They wouldn't answer any questions, just stood there grim and silent. The escorts had hustled them from the landing strip to the briefing room shortly after it became clear that the shuttle had missed its scheduled arrival time. His son and the other children, along with the other husbands and the other wives, were down the hall, in the large briefing room where their NASA escorts had told them to wait. He was alone when he discovered she was gone.
Published in the August 2012 issue of Esquire
#Redbull space drop update
UPDATE (October 14, 2012): So, the Man Fell to Earth - Does It Matter?
#Redbull space drop full
To see balloonist Robert Harrison's full photos from space, read this and more stories on overcoming the impossible in Esquire's August 2010 issue
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