Out of Orbit

I have a confession. I can’t bear to say it out loud. I haven’t yet, not even to myself, not even down here, with no one around to hear me.

I don’t think I’m cut out for this job.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? A job, I mean. This was supposed to be the pinnacle of my career. All I had worked for. I slaved away in academia, sluggish year by sluggish year, ascending the educational hierarchy one painful degree at a time. I burned out halfway through my Master’s and again in my PhD. Fascination drove me towards school, the complete and utter enthrallment of learning about the place I occupy in the universe, in space, in time. I left burdened by bureaucracy. I think that’s what really kills in academia. They don’t tell you that the paperwork only gets worse as you rise through the ranks. Or rather, that every paper comes with strings, and every string comes with commitments.

Still, I persisted, crawling my way through the sticky mud of grant applications and shit pay and condescending staff meetings that were too long yet covered too little. Finally, I applied, and I made it. I was selected as a candidate for the program. Reading that email was a spiritual experience. I could say, with relief, that it was worth it. It really, really was.

But I have to get off the DJL. My log says I’ve been down here for eight months and seventeen days. For all I know, years have passed. There’s no light down here, ever. None at all, except for the collection of little red and green lights on the dash and the viciously bright cabin lights. After the first few weeks, I stopped turning those on. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I am all too aware that lights, even the dim kind, are a beacon in the impenetrable darkness. Half the occupants down here don’t even have eyes, but I always felt my presence was known. That was half the horror for me—the bodies floating in the dark, listless and jelly-like, aware of me in ways I cannot be aware of them. Waiting, always waiting. Some of them have been waiting for eternities, and now I join them. Waiting endlessly, out here in the dark, slowly deteriorating. Just like them, I wonder if it is only the immense pressure holding me together, keeping my shape, keeping me from dissolving into nothing at all.

The guilt is killing me. I feel sick to my stomach, and I’ve barely eaten in the past couple of weeks. Pretty much since it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to make it to space. Despite all my mantras, I was just like the others. I’m not cut out for it. I’m not strong enough. I thought I was good under stress, but I am drowning.

I knew what I was getting into. I can’t blame anyone but myself, and that’s what hurts the most. No one wants to feel inadequate. And certainly, no one wants to feel inadequate with such a prestigious audience in the viewing booths. I understand how those astronauts must have felt now, why those missions failed, and why they moved the training simulations from land to the ocean. On land, the psyche can hide in the comfort of pretend, however intense that pretending is. The ocean offers no such compromise.

I was prepared for space. In some ways, I had been preparing for it my whole life—preparing to face the vacuum, the emptiness, the void. Some find it unsettling to exist in a place where there is nothing—or at least, mostly nothing—but I was captivated by it. It’s silent out there in the most profound of ways—there is nothing for the sound to traverse. My coworkers and I joked it was The Land of Peace and Quiet because my postdoc convinced me it did not exist on Earth.

Space travel isn’t what it was. We aren’t shuttling back and forth to designated stations anymore. They took the ISS out of commission before I even finished high school. Astronauts used to spend less than a year in space—now, they’re sending us out for half a decade or more. The political ambition around space drove rapid advancements, funding. Expectations of us were at an all-time high. Personally, I never understood the competitive aspect. Space travel doesn’t exist without scientists, and science is a collaborative medium. We build upon the findings of others—it’s one of the basic principles of the field. The “sharing is caring” philosophy doesn’t go down well with the suits, though. Good thing this is for my personal archive.

Bureaucracy aside, five years in space is a long time. But it’s worth it, right? For a chance to be a front-line excavator in man’s “final frontier”? To witness every piece of beautiful physics in action, all those stars burning merrily in the ether. I was ready. Instead, I’m stuck down here. Bottom of the god damn ocean.

I feel bad. I really do. Please know that I have grappled with these emotions for half the time I’ve been down here. I know this is once-in-a-lifetime. I know you could fill stadiums with scientists who would salivate at the chance to visit the DJL. I know, I know, I know.

But I’m not any of those people. I’m an astrophysicist. I studied stellar dynamics, not this. The ocean terrifies me. It's pitch black, and I can’t even comfort myself with the knowledge that there is nothing outside because that is far from true. There are many somethings out there, however far apart they may lie, and the truth is, we still know more about space than we do the ocean. Perhaps NOAA got more out of this collaboration than we did.

I know I’m rambling. I am both articulate and hopelessly lost. I’m slipping, just like all those astronauts before me. My imagination churns out all kinds of dread, defying logic and rationale. To top it off, the communication down here is primitive, at least compared to the system’s actual capabilities. I would have a better connection to the surface world in space than I do here. Mostly, I’m alone with my thoughts.

It’s bad. I’m plagued by intense headaches. I was never claustrophobic before but I think I’m getting there. My body protests despite my daily stretches and prescribed routine of exercises. I find myself keenly aware of the pressure, the sheer vastness of the water that has swallowed my little vessel. Every night for eight months, I stared at the ceiling, thinking of the miles between me and the world. These ships (and their training replicas, like this one) were built for space, but sometimes I wonder if the deep ocean is more formidable than even that.

I have gotten very good at clambering around my pod, even if it’s not particularly elegant. I would kill to just go for a walk. A normal walk, with a breeze and the rustle of tree branches and perhaps a passing pedestrian or two. A walk to anywhere. I fantasize about walking to the corner store, or the gas station. I want to buy an ice cream bar from 7/11. I want to drink a cold, frothy beer. I long for space to breathe. This air feels stale, like inside a coffin. At Control, we used to joke that DJL stood for Davey Jones’ Locker. Now that I’m down here by myself, it feels chillingly apt.

I promise I didn’t write all of this just to gripe. If anything, I’m anticipating the grief that will come next, all the overthinking and regret. I have to record this, my reasoning, lest my mourning in this decision blinds me. The reality is that I made it this far in science because I love it. The stress and pressure of this field, however, the endless sacrifice, overpowers the love all the time. It’s why so many of us burn out. Theory is exhausting, as is research. At times, stress consumed my routine, my career, myself. I see myself becoming disillusioned by my purpose, wondering if I’m merely fodder for scientific progress. It echoes in all I've been told, even jokingly: Science is sacrifice. Science never sleeps. Science before self, though this was only ever implied. And while I never said the last aloud, my actions spoke plenty. Maybe that’s more of a reflection of me than science. I never knew when to stop, or even slow down. Work has always felt urgent.

For all the tedious agonies of the field, however, I bring one more reminder, to no one but myself: the stress is born of the love, and that’s the fallacy. Stress means you care, in some capacity or form. In the end, I chose to pursue physics, and for all it pains me, I adore it. It’s beautiful. Even the hard truths we must confront: that the only answer to your questions will be more questions, that we may never live to see our questions answered. The hunger for truth is insatiable, and for that, I would gladly live this cycle a thousand times, in which I am broken down and built back up again by the chains of protocol and the ambrosia of discovery.

So here, sitting in my dimly lit pod, I think I can finally say what I’ve been dancing around. Or rather, write it. Saying it out loud seems rather Herculean to my fragile mental state right now:

Tomorrow, I will send the message back to Control that I will be resigning from the candidacy program, effective immediately.

I don’t know what that will look like. I don’t know what the legality of that is, or how contracts will be evaluated and waved around. I doubt this news will be received well. I'm trying not to care. All of that lives on the surface. And as of right now, until I’m told otherwise, I live down here.

Now that I have decided to leave, the ocean seems that much more beautiful. I’m staring out the small port-side window right now as I write this, out into the expansive dark. When I turn off all the lights I can see the bioluminescence shimmering through the void. I know they are creatures, but right now they are stars.

Tonight, I will dream of sharks migrating through the milky, black twilight, following cosmic trails with senses I will never know myself. Fish navigate detritus suspended in time, circling, like asteroids around my ship. The deep feels ancestral, much like space does. It is the place where all things return to. Even stars settle here, celestial carbon floating down from one plane to another. It is the parallel world on the other side of the mirror, living off the excess that slips from our own. Many times I have looked into the dark and feared what I saw, but they were never meant to be seen. They were always meant to be moments, a calling. A flash of light in the dark. I cannot paint this place as sinister without calling space the same. They are just houses for the inevitable—where things are lost and forgotten, born and reborn.

I wonder what will happen when Control comes to collect me. As I part with the pressure, I fear my body will unfurl, expanding and decomposing into something else entirely. As I ascend, I will look at myself and see someone even I do not recognize.

And when I finally see the night sky, I’m sure I will look twice, searching for the fish that swim between planets. I will not miss the deep; I have left things there I cannot retrieve. Someone else will find them for me. Someone else will go to see beyond the dark. I found what I needed to while I was here.

Signed,

Dr. Laura Fosstalt

(Soon-To-Be) Former Astronaut Candidate [ASCAN]