Space. How far is Home?

Categories: Nonfiction

Do you recall where you were on January 28, 1986 at about 11:40 a.m.? I do. I was watching the space shuttle Challenger takeoff. If you remember that date and time, then you remember the Challenger Disaster and the seven astronauts who died on it. The explosion occurred seventy-three seconds into the flight as a result of a leak in one of two solid rocket boosters that ignited the main liquid fuel tank. Then about seventeen years later on February 1, 2003, ten astronauts were orbiting the earth and seven were headed back on the space shuttle, Columbia. The seven never made it and the three men left behind found themselves Too Far From Home by Chris Jones. This was originally an award-winning article for Esquire, where Jones is a contributing editor. This is the story of those three men-two American astronauts, Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox and a Russian flight engineer, Nikolai Budarin and how they lived daily life and survived on the International Space Station. This book captures the dangerous realities of space travel. Find out how long they lived in space and if they made it back to earth.