The astronauts are NASA's best barometer, its most vital sign. The agency's history can be read in their changing numbers and faces and CVs.
In 2000, there were 149 astronauts lodged into their offices at the Johnson Space Center a record number, plucked from the military and national laboratories to fill spots on dozens of shuttle flights and long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Today, only around sixty astronauts remain. More than twenty have left the agency in the last year alone. They want to rocket into space more than anything else in the world, and they know that NASA won't get them there anymore.
NASA has recruited its astronauts in classes. Years might pass between the waves. The last group arrived in 2009: NASA Astronaut Group 20. There were fourteen recruits in that class all mission specialists. For the first time in its history, NASA didn't include any pilots in an incoming class. It didn't include any pilots, because NASA would soon not be in the piloting business anymore. NASA needed passengers.
When Atlantis returns from orbit in a little more than a week, the shuttle program will be over. In its place nothing, really. Russia will be the only country capable of ferrying men and women to the ISS, which it will now do on NASA's behalf. For more than $50 million per seat, NASA will pay the Russians to send something like six astronauts into space each year. They'll launch from Kazakhstan, on Soyuz, a rocket that was first hurled into space in 1967.
They'll return on Soyuz, too, in a capsule that drops back to earth in a ball of fire until a series of explosions, like machine-gun fire, releases an orange-and-white parachute. When Atlantis slips out of orbit for the final time, it will be the last that space sees of wings, at least for the foreseeable future. American astronauts won't fly anymore; they'll fall.
Each NASA class is given a nickname by the class that preceded it. There have been the Snails and the Penguins and the Peacocks. NASA Astronaut Group 20 is known as The Chumps.
The Sardines, NASA Astronaut Group 16, arrived in Houston in 1996. It was a different time. There were forty-four recruits packed into that class hence their name. Ten of them were pilots.
There's a good book to be written about the Sardines. They were among the most optimistic of the incoming classes, sharing a limitless horizon. They couldn't know that a handful of them had darker fates awaiting them.
All but three of them flew into space. (Gus Loria blew out his back; Frank Caldeiro died of brain cancer; Yvonne Cagle is the only member of the class still with NASA who didn't make it into space.)
Another three of them were tragically unlucky: Willie McCool, Dave Brown, and Laurel Clark died in the Columbia disaster.
Don Pettit, a fellow Sardine, was on the ISS when Columbia was lost; he'd been playing email chess with McCool in the days they were both in orbit.
Lisa Nowak the love-struck would be kidnapper sat in those same classroom seats.
Mark Kelly husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and his twin brother, Scott, were also Sardines. Together they made it into space a combined seven times.
NASA's last two pilot recruits, Randolph Bresnik and James Dutton, came aboard in 2004. They've each flown only once, and each of them only just made it into space, with six and four missions to go, respectively. For them, seven flights is someone else's gift. For them, seven flights is a dream.
But for the Sardines, there was a wider range of possibility. Back then, in 1996, the future of the American space program seemed guaranteed. There were still political and budgetary hurdles; there almost always had been. But of course, we would still launch these astronauts into space; that was our contract with them and their contract with us. The first segment of the ISS would be sent into orbit only two years later. Suddenly, there was another star in the sky. The space shuttle program would end endings are inevitable but there would be something new, something better, to follow it. That's how the universe worked.
The Sardines even spoke about which of them would be the first man or woman on Mars. The resourceful Don Pettit was an early favorite.
Pettit has not made it to Mars.
After Columbia, and Pettit's extended 2003 stay on the ISS because of it, he and Ken Bowersox became the first Americans to return to earth on a foreign vessel, when they also became the first Americans to fall back to earth on Soyuz. A software glitch pushed them into something called a ballistic descent. Rather than a gentle return to earth, they were jammed into a straighter, harsher trajectory. They choked on their tongues before they landed well off-course, on the featureless brown steppes of Kazakhstan. For hours, nobody knew where the men were. They had vanished from radar screens. They had disappeared.
Finally, a Russian fighter jet spotted them. Along with their Russian commander, Nikolai Budarin, they were lying in the grass, looking up at the sky, watching white birds fly over their heads. They wondered when they would get the chance to return to space. That's how astronauts have always thought: They've always thought in terms of next.
Like so many of his colleagues, Bowersox's next meant leaving NASA, part of today's unprecedented talent drain. He's now with SpaceX, one of several private companies working to develop their own rockets, their own ships for hire.
Pettit chose to stay with NASA. He is scheduled to return to the ISS at the end of this year, among the first astronauts with a seat on Soyuz, among the first of the new American passengers.
He's lucky that he's not very tall. Unlike the shuttle's relatively expansive cockpit, the Soyuz capsule is small and cramped. Old technology, like our new space reality, has its limits.
For the foreseeable future, NASA doesn't need pilots. It doesn't need the thousands of men and women who helped send the shuttle into orbit.
And it doesn't need any astronauts taller than six-foot-three.