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Heaven & earth: only when something goes terribly wrong are we reminded that astronauts live two lives--one heroic, taking them on the world''s most dangerous commute, the other mundane, involving the hopes and fears and workaday tasks so familiar to us all.

Article Excerpt
A BLOCK OR SO AWAY from the main entrance of the Johnson Space Center, in Clear Lake City, is a McDonald's whose exterior is crowned with a hovering fiberglass astronaut. The astronaut is thirteen feet high. His left arm is outstretched, and in his open hand he is holding an order of fries.

When the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry on February 1, I was in the middle of writing a novel about astronauts and the people who train them, and this fast-food monument on NASA Road I had become for me a strangely important imaginative locus. The book, as I was beginning to understand it, was less about spaceflight than about the consequences of ambition, about the tension between the compulsion to voyage beyond the atmosphere and the normal human obligations owed to those who count on you to stay at home.

I had set a scene in this McDonald's. One of my main characters, an astronaut who has not yet been assigned to her first mission, takes her six-year-old son there for a Happy Meal after he has suffered an asthma attack at school. As she watches her vulnerable child crawl through the restaurant's playscape, chronic fears seep into her mind, and she finds herself helplessly thinking about another astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, whose death in the 1986 Challenger explosion left her children motherless. When I was writing the scene, Challenger was real enough in memory but no longer, at least for most of us, painfully raw; it seemed harmless enough to appropriate the tragedy as literary ballast for my character. But the immediacy of the Columbia disaster momentarily blew the walls off my fictional world and called into question the worth and seemliness of creating imaginary people in the shadow of so much flesh-and-blood suffering.

In coming to know those imaginary people, though, I had come to know a little about their real-life counterparts and the world they inhabit, a world that is at once distinguished by an exalted purpose without parallel in human history and grounded in homely workaday particulars. For me, it was the McDonald's on NASA Road 1 that somehow best exemplified the gravitational pull of normal life in a company town whose business is sending people beyond the reach of gravity itself.

CLEAR LAKE CITY, THE WORLD headquarters of manned spaceflight, is at first glance the world headquarters of nothing much. Along with a number of other communities--Friendswood, League City, Webster--with which it has indistinguishably merged, it marks the southeastern extremity of metropolitan Houston. You might find a "Watch for Alligators" sign or two poking up from the sluggish bayous that meander around the margins of Galveston Bay, but except for such tokens of primeval mystery, Clear Lake is a straightforward exurban landscape of...

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