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wondered whether they might never leave the ground. They wondered whether this whole big, crazy thing wasn’t meant to come off. Now Bowersox stared at the lockers in front of him and tried to push aside the last of his own wonder, about whether they should have changed their mission number after all.
    “Looks like we’ve got a good vehicle and good weather tonight for you,” launch director Mike Leinbach radioed the crew after they had been strapped in, the same as before, all over again. “Have a great flight and I hope you have a good turkey dinner packed for Thanksgiving.”
    “Thank you very much,” Commander Wetherbee replied. “From the bridge of
Endeavour
, we’re ready to set thundering sail.” At least they were going to get to try.
    And in that moment something miraculous happened, the same miracle that always happens to the insides of astronauts. In that moment they go from being the only construction on earth more complex than their vehicle to the most simple. They become stones. There is no more thinking, no more emotion, no more remembering
Challenger
, no more wonder or dread. Instead, they slip into a kind of trance, quiet, serene, their minds wiped as clean as those of the last, brave members of a cult. The calm is a by-product of their years of training. It also springs from some small, remarkable part of them that they were born with. Mailer called it iron; Tom Wolfe called it the right stuff. But there is a lie in that poetry, because it makes that special something sound more exclusive than it is. The truth is, it’s not just the dominion of astronauts. It’s in all of us. There are millions of stories of ordinary people tapping it whenever they are trapped in extraordinary situations, whenever they might have otherwise seemed done for: when an engine on their plane’s wing starts belching smoke, or when they’re standing on a beach watching a hurricane blow in. Suddenly all that’s left is their faith. Their bodies give them no other choice but to believe that everything might still work out, and, should it look like it will not—should things take a turn—next they find a way to believe that it was never meant to be. They think of everything that brought themto this moment, every step and side road in the history of their lives, and they see reason; they see, looking back at that long, crooked course, an artful conspiracy. Each of them comes to accept that in some profound way, we’re all just passengers, and in the end, it’s the universe that lives in us, not the other way around.
    Like those millions of ordinary people, seven astronauts switched over to their own automatic pilots, leaving the worry for someone or something else to shoulder. All of the things that might have gone wrong or been mistaken—all of those parts, all of those hands—became remote, abstract, almost hypertheoretical. There were too many layers to sift through. There was too much for them to take in. And so they took in none of it. They settled back in their chairs, and they looked at their checklists, and they smiled to themselves. In the way that all of us will come to understand the facts of it, each of them already had: sometimes, our fates are no longer ours to decide, and we can only grip our fists until our knuckles turn white and hang on for the rest of the ride.
    ·   ·   ·
    There was not a lot of conversation. The laughter and joking had stopped. The men of Expedition Six could follow along with their scripts, but they weren’t to interrupt the rigid, technical dialogue flowing between upstairs and control. The only one of them with any sort of role was Bowersox, who, in the leftmost mid-deck seat, could reach the buttons that would allow him, in case of dire emergency, to open the hatch and deploy the wire-basket slide that would carry the crew, two at a time, down to the armored tank. If his services were required, more than likely they were seconds away from becoming corpses. Pettit,