Download Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space AudioBook Free
An incredible, true-life adventure set on the most dangerous frontier of all—outer spaceIn the nearly forty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, space travel has come to be seen as a routine enterprise—at least before shuttle Columbia disintegrated like the Challenger before it, reminding us, once again, that the dangers are all too real.
Too Definately not Home vividly captures the hazardous realities of space travel. Each and every time an astronaut makes the trip into space, he faces the likelihood of death from the slightest mechanical error or instance of misfortune: a cracked O-ring, an errant piece of space junk, an oxygen leak . . . There are always a myriad of frighteningly probable events that would result in an astronaut’s death. Actually, twenty-one individuals who have attempted the journey have been killed.
Yet for a particular breed of individual, the decision of space will probably be worth the chance. Men such as U.S. astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on that which was to be a routine fourteen-week mission maintaining the International Space Station.
But then, on February 23, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. Despite the numerous news reports examining the tragedy, the public remained largely unaware that three men remained orbiting the earth. Along with the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home.
Too Definately not Home chronicles the efforts of the beleaguered Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow as they work frantically from the clock to bring their men safely back to Earth, ultimately settling on an idea that felt, at best, just like a long shot.
Latched to the side of the space station was a Russian-built Soyuz TMA-1 capsule, whose technology dated from the late 1960s (in 1971 a malfunction in the Soyuz 11 capsule left three Russian astronauts dead.) Despite the inherent danger, the Soyuz became the sole desire to return Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit home.
Chris Jones writes beautifully of the majesty and mystique of space travel, while reminding people how perilous it is to soar beyond the sky.
