Hearing Transcript
LAMAR: Do you require a Bible?
HUNT: No, thank you.
LAMAR: Please raise your right hand. Do you solemnly affirm that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
HUNT: I do.
LAMAR: I understand you have information that is relevant to the work of this commission. Is that correct?
HUNT: It is.
LAMAR: Please present your testimony.
HUNT: Where should I start? From the day of the accident?
LAMAR: No, from the beginning.
Baikonur—August 4, 2021, 16:43 GMT +5
Nate Hunt was waiting for his wife. Lucy was running late.
“Dad, I’m bored,” whined their daughter, Eliza. Nate was holding her in his lap. The girl’s hair had been rubbing against his sweater, creating a static charge. It tickled Nate’s nose.
“Yes, I know.” He sighed. “You’ve already told me.”
Nate was bored too. The ceremonies, the excursions, and the press conferences—all of it seemed never-ending. Nate was also terrified. These two emotional states might seem incompatible, but they definitely weren’t. He was last here eight years ago and the same thing had happened. But that time, he had been on his own. He hadn’t needed to mentally rehearse what he would tell their child if something went wrong. Now he couldn’t find the right words. Perhaps there simply weren’t any.
“When will Mom come?” asked the little girl.
“Soon,” he replied.
“How long is soon?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Do you want a candy, little girl?” asked the woman sitting next to them, speaking Russian. She smiled invitingly at Eliza and rustled a bag of hard candies. But Eliza didn’t feel like talking to strangers. She turned away from the woman and buried herself into her father.
“Sorry, she’s sleepy,” said Nate, smiling apologetically. He had picked up his Russian incidentally. He had helped Lucy revise for her Russian exams so many times that various phrases had stuck in his mind. His favorite Russian word was pochemuchka—a person who asks too many questions. It fitted Eliza to a tee.
The woman nodded understandingly. Most likely, she’d also been up since dawn. Nate wondered how many times she’d been through this. Was it her third or fourth time? She wasn’t showing any sign of nerves—quite the opposite; her broad smile never flagged. Maybe it was because, besides the candies, her handbag contained a packet of tranquilizers.
“Let’s play a game then,” suggested Eliza.
go first.”
Nate scanned the room. It looked like a classroom or a dentist’s waiting room: harsh fluorescent lights, beige walls with faded posters, rows of plastic chairs, and sickly-looking plants on the windowsill. What differed was the thick plexiglass barrier that divided the room into two. On the other side of it stood a long table with three microphones, each labeled with a name written in the Russian alphabet at the top, then repeated in the Latin alphabet underneath. Anton Kovalyov. Lev Zaytsev. Lucy Poplaski.
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with m,” whispered Nate.
“Is it map?” asked Eliza.
“No.”
“Mat?”
He shook his head.
“Microphone?”
“Yes. Your turn.”
The little girl twisted and turned, totally oblivious that she was digging, first with her elbow, then her knee, into her father’s stomach. The people gathered in the room—other families, dignitaries, and journalists—waved and smiled at her. But Eliza ignored them completely. She was focused on the game. Eliza approached all competitive activities extremely seriously. Once, when she came second in a sack race at a school event, she spent the rest of the day in tears. “Eliza is a very ambitious little girl,” the teacher had said to them at pickup time. Her tone of voice suggested that perhaps Eliza was too ambitious. “She gets it from her mom,” Nate had replied, without thinking twice.
“I spy with my little eye something beginning with r,” said Eliza.
“Ribbon?”
“No.”
“Hmm . . .” Nate rubbed his chin. “A ring?”
“No.”
“Rack?”
“Nope,” said Eliza, shaking her head with evident satisfaction.
“I give up then.”
“A rocket!” said Eliza triumphantly.
Nate looked out the window. The rocket pointed skyward amidst an expanse of sun-scorched grass. Surrounded by a halo of milky white vapor, it peered out from behind a crisscrossed scaffolding framework. It was an anomaly in this scenery: the faded pale steppes of Kazakhstan, the crumbling dilapidated buildings, and the howling of stray dogs. It looked like a relic of an extinct alien civilization. In a way, it really was—the Baikonur Cosmodrome was built by the Soviet Union. The decision to locate the cosmodrome at this site had been influenced by two key factors. First, its position in the southernmost part of the Soviet Union, closer to the equator, facilitated reaching the required orbit. Second, if anything went wrong—for example, if a rocket exploded shortly after liftoff—the risk of flaming plates of metal falling on someone’s head was relatively low. All around, as far as the eye could see, there was only grass.
Nate had witnessed an explosion like that once. He was six years old at the time and on a visit to family in Florida. By chance, NASA’s repeatedly postponed space shuttle Challenger flight was imminent. His parents took him to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch live; they wanted Nate to see it because the crew included a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, who would give a lesson from space. Nate remembered it the way a child does, as if he had taken some random snapshots with a camera—badly framed, blurred images, overexposed by emotion. He was given a paper cap with the NASA logo on it, but it kept slipping down over his eyes, which made him very sad. In the stands, they took their seats just behind a man in a cowboy hat. The hat completely blocked his view, so little Nate was frustrated and at odds with the world. His father lifted Nate onto his shoulders to give him a better view, ignoring the protests of the people in the row behind. Then came a blinding flash and a roar; Nate felt the blast of hot air blow his hair back. Vibrations spread throughout his body, making his teeth chatter and his skin tingle. The rocket sped upward, drowning the cheers, spurting out flames, faster and faster until it turned into a tiny dot in the sky. Then, the dot flared up and changed into several smaller specks. Some of them started to fall, while others traced fancy swirls and flourishes in the air. For a fraction
of a second, Nate thought that that was how it was supposed to be, that these were cosmic fireworks like the Fourth of July, and he was delighted. His glee didn’t last long; the sobbing, screaming, and chaos that followed would haunt his sleeping hours for years to come. Despite this, he still chose space for his path in life. Boundless space fascinated him, terrified him, and sucked him in.
A murmur rippled through the room; camera shutters whirred as they were released over and over again. At last, thought Nate with relief. On the other side of the plexiglass barrier, a door opened and the crew of the Soyuz entered the room—Lev, Anton, and Lucy. The cameras were all pointing at Nate’s wife—she was undoubtedly more photogenic than the Russians. With her dark curly hair tied up in a ponytail, broad smile, and upturned freckled nose, she looked like the friendly girl next door, someone you’d be pals with in no time at all. Plus, she was going to be one of the last Americans to take off for space from Kazakhstan. At last, after over a decade, the United States once more possessed their own means of transport to take them into orbit: Dragon space capsules built, in true American tradition, by an eccentric billionaire. The first flights had been successful. NASA was already negotiating a new, more extensive contract that would put an end to the United States’ involuntary reliance on Russian assistance. Soon, joint flights out of Baikonur would be a thing of the past.
Yuri Rybkin, the director of Roscosmos, a gray-haired, well-built man wearing a cream-colored blazer, took the stage and gave a speech in Russian.
“What’s that man saying?” asked Eliza.
“Nothing interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“We’re approaching the end of a beautiful chapter in the history of the friendship between our nations; however, a new chapter is beginning.”
“What does that mean?” asked Eliza.
It means that, soon, the Russians will no longer be able to cash in ninety million dollars for a place in a Soyuz, thought Nate. That, without these regular cash injections, Roscosmos will teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.
That these declarations of readiness to continue working together mask envy, grudges, and resentment. Instead, Nate told his daughter, “It means that we will travel into space together, but separately.”
The Russian bigwig finished his speech and Steve Ayers, the NASA representative, took the mic. Ayers was the deputy director for crewed space flights—a stocky, balding man with Coke-bottle glasses. Yet more bombastic platitudes, good wishes for a successful mission, and government-agency newspeak. Finally, it was time for Anton, Lev, and Lucy to say goodbye to their families. Nate and Eliza sat down opposite Lucy; they were separated by the plexiglass, surrounded by strangers yet coerced into intimacy in front of the cameras. Nate wanted to tell Lucy a whole stack of things: he was damn proud of her, he would miss her, he was happy for her, he was worried for her . . . But he couldn’t overcome his reticence, not in the midst of this crowd.
“Hi! How’s your morning been?” It was Lucy who spoke up first.
So, it was to be platitudes, empty words. But even empty words can be infused with significance, conveying things beyond their literal meaning. The timbre of their voices, the pauses, the looks passing between them. In this way, they told each other the things they couldn’t say in words.
“Fine,” answered Nate. “Isn’t that right, Eliza? All fine?”
“When will you come back?” asked Eliza. It was an accusation as well as a question.
“You know the answer to that! In six months’ time.”
“You’ll miss my birthday.”
“I’ll be there, sweetheart,” answered Lucy, smiling sadly. “I’ll be there more than once.”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember? The space station orbits the Earth once every ninety minutes. If your party lasts three hours, I’ll fly over our home twice during the party, and I’ll think of you then. OK?”
“That’s not the same.”
Lucy put her hand up against the plexiglass. It was a poor substitute for real contact, but the astronauts were in quarantine.
“I know, darling.”
“So why are you going there?”
next in half a year’s time. If all went well.
Baikonur—August 4, 2021, 18:52 GMT +5
The decorative golden threads in the Orthodox priest’s vestments had glittered in the light of the camera flashes. The aspergillum had traced a wide arc through the air and holy water ran down Lucy’s cheeks like tears. Yet another tradition, yet another superstition. For the Russians, every stage of the flight preparations—and there were many stages—had to be accompanied by a ritual, and after each expedition new rituals were added. There was more folklore than at a village wedding. Every person on the flight had to lay flowers at the memorial to Yuri Gagarin, hoist their country’s flag up the pole, plant a sapling along Cosmonauts Alley, put their signature on their Baikonur hotel room door, and, the day before the launch, watch a Soviet movie from the seventies called White Sun of the Desert. On top of all this, it went without saying that there was no choice but to accept the clergyman’s blessing regardless of their personal preferences or faith, and not just once, but twice over. It was as if the Russians believed the success of the flight depended on the will of capricious heavens, which had to be won over with ceremonies that lasted for weeks, rather than on the laws of nature and mathematical equations.
Lucy boarded the bus taking the crew to the launch pad. She was already wearing her made-to-measure Sokol spacesuit with its numerous ties, zips, and fasteners—a real cosmic corset! It took almost two hours and required the assistance of several technicians to put it on and, since it was hermetically sealed, each crew member was also equipped with a portable ventilator—a small blue case—to stop them being boiled alive.
Once the bus moved off and Lucy was at last, at least temporarily, beyond the reach of the cameras and microphones, she rested her forehead against the window and closed her eyes. She had risen at four o’clock in the morning, and it was now approaching seven in the evening. Ahead of her, she still had a several-hours-long flight to the International Space Station in a capsule the size of an elevator, so she needed to take any opportunity she could to rest. The Russians were already asleep.
However, Lucy couldn’t get to sleep. Her thoughts kept wandering back to Eliza’s question. Why? What for? Naturally, she had answered this question hundreds of times: first, during the never-ending interviews for the role; later, in media interviews, public appearances, and private conversations. But in those situations, she had said what was expected of her, the things one ought to say, the things other astronauts had been repeating for decades: it was her contribution to the development of science, the exploration of space was a critically important mission for the human race, she wanted to inspire young girls all around the world, and so on and so forth. But they were all lies. Had somebody administered a truth serum to her (if one really existed), her reply would have been less lofty. Why? Because nothing gave her such a kick and such a thrill as flying at a speed of thirteen thousand kilometers an hour. Because it was an incredible adventure. Because others weren’t able to, but she could. Because it confirmed that she was the best.
All this meant that the resentment and reproach in her daughter’s voice hurt Lucy all the more. It wasn’t just about Eliza’s birthday. Lucy was hardly ever at home. She had lived out of a suitcase for the last four years, flying between Washington, Houston, Toulouse, Moscow, and Cologne to attend endless training courses, practical sessions, preparations, and examinations. Every hour—no! every minute—of the mission had to be planned and rehearsed in multiple practice runs at least a year in advance. Lucy had to know every safety procedure by heart; study and assimilate all the lists of instructions and technical diagrams; know the names of every single screw, switch, and cable—in Russian, as well as in English. If she had really been doing all of this for the good of humanity, she might have been able to justify it to herself and to appease her guilty conscience. But she wasn’t. Lucy wondered whether her male colleagues also had such thoughts and regretted missing their children’s first steps and words, or whether only the women were doomed to suffer these pangs of conscience for the sake of their ambition.
Another thing was bothering her as well. The previous day, she had attended a meeting with Deputy Director Ayers. It hadn’t been planned, it didn’t appear in any timetable, and the phrases she’d heard in the meeting . . . well, you could comb all the press reports without finding a single one. Rising tensions. Clashes at the highest levels. Fears it might
escalate. Hard to believe something like that could happen in the twenty-first century, and in blood-soaked Europe too. Deputy Director Ayers had meant every word. Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon.
The International Space Station was born of the optimism of the nineties. Freed of Cold War tactics, the Russians and the Americans no longer had to race each other among the stars; they joined forces for the good of humanity. They pooled their resources and, with the help of Europe and Japan, constructed a laboratory that orbited around the Earth—for a mere hundred and twenty billion dollars. It was a symbol of a new age of shared aspirations and putting the past behind them. Naturally, the high-flown pronouncements masked pragmatic calculations. The Americans wanted access to Soviet technology; the Russians needed money to keep their space program going in all the chaos of perestroika, and only the Americans had the resources to cover the sums required. Both parties got what they wanted, and everyone was happy.
But now, over two decades later, the sums no longer added up. Roscosmos no longer had any technical expertise to offer the Americans; it still relied on Soviet solutions from the sixties. Also, China had emerged as a superpower and was ready to fund Roscosmos without asking awkward questions about human rights, democracy, and freedom of the press. In other words: the marriage of convenience had started to fall apart, but they were still sharing a matrimonial home in space.
The bus came to a halt in the middle of nowhere, a few kilometers away from the rocket; the chirping of crickets resounded across the steppe. Oh yes, it was time for one last ritual. Lucy got to her feet. Anton motioned for her to pass him in the aisle with an extravagantly gallant gesture. Broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and short blond hair, he wasn’t bad-looking. Only his nicotine-stained teeth spoiled the overall effect. Anton and Lucy had served together during her first tour of duty on the International Space Station eight years previously. They knew each other well, and that was why she avoided him.
“Ladies to the left and gentlemen to the right,” ordered Anton once they were standing on the baking-hot asphalt. Lev followed one pace behind Anton; he was a head shorter, an introvert, with a salt-and-pepper moustache as bushy as his eyebrows. Lucy had met him at joint training sessions and took to him. He was an old-fashioned type—sincere and devoted to the cause. He earnestly believed that
the chasm between East and West could be filled in or, at any rate, that from the perspective of space, the division was meaningless. Lev was the personification of the Soviet ideal: hardworking, rational, and convinced that the future could be better than the past. This was to be his last mission, his farewell to space. He looked as if this was already making him sad.
A moment later, you could hear the rip of released Velcro and the swish of zippers. The Sokol spacesuits, which, not even an hour ago, had been meticulously fastened by a swarm of technicians in latex gloves, cotton caps, and plastic overshoes under the gaze of the families and journalists, were now breached. Of course, everybody, including the hardworking technicians, knew that this would happen. Because in 1961, on April 12, in exactly this spot, Yuri Gagarin had asked the bus driver to stop. The man who was about to become the first person to break free of the chains of gravity was grounded by the most mundane of human needs: he had to pee. Since Gagarin then flew out and returned in one piece, all cosmonauts who followed in his footsteps now stopped here too—just in case! As usual, the men had it easier. Women fulfilled the requirements of this tradition by bringing a small plastic bottle of their urine with them. Lucy tipped the contents of her bottle onto the bus’s back tire and, copying a gesture she had observed the priest making during the blessing, she shook out the last drops with a decisive flick of the wrist.
Baikonur—August 4, 2021, 19:12 GMT +5
“The Grass at Home,” the official cosmonaut anthem, blared out from the loudspeakers, announcing that the crew was now inside the rocket with less than two hours until liftoff. Steve Ayers wondered how many times he had heard this nostalgic song, how many times he had stood here on the viewing terrace of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Was it the twentieth? Or the twenty-fifth? He had no idea. He had seen so many missions depart from here that they all merged into one another; his passport was covered in Kazakhstan stamps. But this phase, the last stretch of the race, still raised his adrenaline levels. Very shortly, they would send humans into space. There was no way you could get used to that; it never ceased to amaze him. A few more
photos and speeches, a teleconference with the mission control center in Moscow, and then the bigwigs went out onto the viewing terrace.
“One era ends and another begins,” said Director Rybkin as he leaned against the railing. The day’s program, folded into quarters, stuck out of the back pocket of his trousers. Rybkin had an army background and it was obvious he hadn’t been a paper pusher. His eyes gave it away: they were vigilant, focused, continually in motion, trained to spot the enemy and scan for traps. This habitual alertness might eventually come in useful. His predecessor had been dismissed less than a year ago, mired in scandal, accused of corruption that could lead to a long term in a forced-labor camp. Nobody stopped to wonder whether he was guilty or not; you could work it out by the ostentatious jewelry worn by his much-younger wife. A more interesting question was why the prosecutor’s office had turned its attention to him at that point. In other words, what had he done to disappoint his superiors? What expectations did he fail to meet? What had changed behind the thick walls of the Kremlin?
“It doesn’t have to end,” retorted Ayers. They were speaking in English; it made it easier to communicate.
“Aha—so you do want to buy a seat on the next flight after all?”
“Yes, if you beat the competition on price.”
“Ah yes . . . the free market,” said Rybkin, grimacing. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be possible.”
“There are other projects.”
“Like?”
Ayers demonstratively lifted his gaze toward the sky. The sun had already set and the moon was peering out from behind the clouds. It was over fifty years since the last time a human had set foot on the Moon. There had been many plans to return, but there was a shortage of enthusiasm and money—and legitimate reasons. In the course of his long career with NASA, Ayers had repeatedly witnessed projects to return to the Moon making their way to the shredder. At the point when he was slowly losing hope that anything would come of them and that humans would again fly beyond the Earth’s immediate environs in his lifetime, the situation changed completely. SpaceX—a private company, a start-up that, only a dozen years ago,
had been the butt of jokes among veterans in the field—showed it was possible to fly more cheaply, more frequently, and further than anyone had dared dream before. Now the ambition wasn’t just to fly back to the Moon, but to stay there. It wasn’t exactly clear—in economic terms, at least—what the purpose of permanent human presence there would be, but it was already evident that very few patches of the lunar surface could support it. Continuous sunlight and water—meager amounts of it, but still—could only be found at the rims of several perfectly located craters. And though international agreements specified no nation could claim a celestial body or any part of it as their own, good luck pitching camp next to your enemies. It was either another go at collaboration . . . or a race.
“We’ll find another partner,” said Rybkin. He moved away from the railing and folded his arms behind his back.
“China?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“China won’t make a good partner.”
“And have you been one?”
Ayers didn’t reply immediately. He sensed that, from now on, he ought to weigh every word.
“I’d like to think so,” he answered.
The Russian looked away toward the rocket. Bathed in the floodlights, picking it out from the dark night of the steppe, it looked like a gigantic monument erected to honor . . . What did it honor? Human curiosity? Power? Arrogance?
“Do you know how much we pay Kazakhstan to use the Baikonur Cosmodrome?” asked Rybkin after a pause.
“The data is publicly available.”
“Say the figure out loud. Let’s refresh our memories.”
Ayers paused. He didn’t like the tone Rybkin was taking with him, but wasn’t surprised. The Russians were increasingly confrontational lately, as if they were looking to pick a fight. “One hundred and fifteen million per annum,” he said.
“A hundred and fifteen million what? Rubles?”
“No. Dollars.”
“Exactly, dollars,” said Rybkin, nodding his head.
“Is that a lot of money or not?”
“For me? It’s a lot.”
“Exactly! And how much money did Kazakhstan invest in the construction of this cosmodrome that they now so graciously let us use? Are those data also publicly available, Mr. Ayers?”
“You’re trying to lure me into a discussion about politics, whereas I—”
“Just tell me. How much?”
Ayers looked straight into Rybkin’s eyes. He was trying to work out where the conversation was going and what Rybkin wanted to achieve. Was this just about old grievances, or something more? “Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union at the time,” he replied diplomatically.
“So it was. And what was it that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union?”
“I’m not sure that’s relevant to our conversation.”
“It’s relevant to every conversation.”
“Well, let’s say opinions are divided on that one.”
“Yes, they are very divided,” agreed Rybkin. “Mine is that our partner gave us a helping hand. The same partner who has just taken away half of my budget.”
“Private companies are simply cheaper. That’s not our fault.”
“Huh! I feel as if I’ve gone back in time to the nineties,” snorted the Russian. “Why don’t you spin me a yarn about the invisible hand of the market?”
Whoa, thought Ayers. It’s time to change the subject. “It seems to me that our discussion has taken an unconstructive turn,” he said with a warmhearted smile of the kind only an American can glue to their face.
“Really?” Rybkin wasn’t prepared to let go. “In my opinion, our conversation leads to an inevitable conclusion.”
Announcements in Russian crackled through the loudspeakers: “Ignition . . . Preliminary . . .” The scaffold towers swiveled away from the rocket, and the umbilical cables were cast aside; it looked as if a flower were opening its petals.
“Ten! Nine! Eight!”
“May I ask what that conclusion is?” inquired Ayers.
“Seven! Six! Five!”
“That all this”—Rybkin gestured toward himself,
then at Ayers—“was a mistake.”
The light from the flames flooded their faces.
Soyuz—August 4, 2021, 20:13 GMT +5
A plush toy dangled just above Lucy’s head—a puppy with pink fur, a black nose, and huge eyes. It weighed exactly twenty-three grams and was an important item of the Soyuz’s equipment. It reminded Lucy of a souvenir that Nate brought back from a conference in Edinburgh: a stone set in a frame with the inscription Scottish Meteorological Station. If the stone was hot, the sun was shining. If the stone was wet, it was raining. If you couldn’t see the stone, it was foggy. An instruction manual for the puppy would read as follows: If the puppy isn’t moving, you haven’t yet launched; once the puppy starts to tremble, the engines have been switched on; when it bounces around, you’ve left the ground; and when the puppy floats in the air, you’ve reached orbit. If the puppy bursts into flames—something is seriously wrong!
The plush toy started to shake. So did Lucy’s arms, legs, stomach, tongue, eyes, and brain—the vibrations radiated throughout the capsule. Lucy sat, or rather lay, to the left of Anton, curled up with her knees pressed right up to her chin, fitting snugly into a recess created using a plaster cast of her body; all three of them had swallowed a massive dose of painkillers to enable them to endure several hours lying in this position. Every cubic centimeter of the Soyuz capsule’s cramped interior had to be put to use, so just above Lucy’s head, in its protective bubble of plexiglass, luggage bulged out of bays, which were crammed full right up to the edges. As the capsule commander, Anton was responsible for loading the bays. If the weight was unevenly distributed, if there was as little as half a kilo more on one side than the other, the vehicle would deviate from its planned course. That could never be good news when traveling through the boundlessness of space.
“Carrier rocket parameters: nominal,” declared the voice in her headphones.
Lucy could feel a colossal force pressing her down and squeezing the air out of her lungs. Underneath her, forty thousand kilograms of rocket fuel were ablaze. She glanced at the screen: the gravity load was at two g, two-and-a-half, three, three-and-a-half. . . . She wanted to laugh, cry, and shout with joy. At last, after eight years of waiting, working, dedication, and sacrifices—her own and other people’s—she was once more breaking away from the Earth. However, she stifled these feelings as efficiently and dispassionately as if she were flicking a switch or pressing a button on a control panel. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
