Going Home

I tried to imagine what it would feel like. Getting inside the cramped capsule, the heavy hatch closing, strapping yourself in, going through the endless checklists. Waiting for the moment of separation; the sense of floating free of the station. Looking back at the place that had been, for a while at least, both home, sanctuary, and lonely outpost at the summit of the sky. Watching it fall away.

And then the ride back down: the capsule ablating, losing layers of itself as the machine dissipated all that heat, the hypnotic glow of ionised air outside the window, the thermobaric slipstream of re-entry. The return of gravity like an immense weight of water pushing at her body, the great rotund mass of the Earth exacting its heavy tithe. The vehicle shaking like an old cabin in the woods buffeted by a thunderstorm, as if it might fall apart at any moment.

The speed of the descent both incomprehensible – how can anything travel that fast and not disintegrate? – and terrifying. The unwelcome thoughts – what if the parachutes failed to open, or even if they did what if the retro rockets failed to fire? Because this wasn’t a splashdown with the gentle sea waiting to cushion the blow: no, this was a hard landing in every sense, more of an impact – a near ballistic collision – with the Kazakhstan tundra, enough to rattle your bones and compress the spine.

But – and here’s one of the many miracles that occurred during that mission, that occur during any spaceflight – it all worked the way it needed to. So she – the first Briton in space – could climb out of the capsule and slide down the curved hull to walk upright once more. That strange sensation of placing your feet on a hard surface. Ambulating. An oddly Victorian sounding word, with its associations of a stroll along a seaside pier on a Bank Holiday weekend. I’m back, she must have thought to herself. Back on Earth. Breathing unrecycled air. The sunlight a welcome presence on her upturned face.

Her gaze for a moment lingering on the sky, and by extension – up there somewhere  – on the space station that had been her home for six astonishing remarkable days.  

[Thirty-five years ago, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space: her mission successfully concluded on 26 May 1991 with her safe return to Earth.]

Images courtesy of: RKK Energia, RIA Novosti/Science Photo Library, UK National Space Centre..