In the Quick

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Space is cruel to the human body. We aren’t machines, rockets with metal skin and polymer bones, rovers with microchips for guts. Our bodies are full of fluid and soft tissue. We aren’t built for space. Our thoughts, the things we know, are sturdier in zero gravity, but they originate in gray matter. They change shape, even disappear in the face of disorientation, dehydration, oxygen deprivation. Because ideas require bodies too, hands, lips, a tongue, ears. Otherwise they’re about as useful as dust motes drifting in the air.

When I was twelve years old and watched test rockets spark through the sky outside my aunt Regina’s house, I imagined their destinations—perfectly round planets colored red and pink and white. I pictured spacesuits, puffy and bright against a black expanse. It didn’t occur to me to think about the bodies inside those suits, the brains inside those helmets.

Not until a frozen day in November when the news came that the Inquiry explorer was in trouble. It was on a six-year mission, the first of its kind, to travel farther in our solar system than any manned mission had gone before. Inquiry was special; more than a decade of research at the National Space Program had gone into building the explorer, and it was manned by four of the most talented astronauts in the world.

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