And when I finally did get to talk to Don, he was still hopeful that they were alive. PETTIT: Because we have spacesuits, we have parachutes, if the spacecraft breaks up, possibly someone could parachute down to Earth. PETTIT: But he hadn't seen what we had seen, the footage from, you know, the Texas television channels of the breakups that had been seen in the sky. And so I had to make him understand that that was not going to happen. I don't know if I was mean or not. I might have been. I said, Don, don't you get it? And his voice changed, and he said, of course I get it, Micki. They're my friends. PETTIT: Willie McCool and I were really close. And he helped me a lot in my earlier training days. And then we both loved to play chess. And so we were playing a ship-to-ship game of chess where he was making moves and I was making moves, and we each had our little chess set that could be folded flat. And I still have that chess set, and the pieces are still in the same location that they were at that time.
ROSENBERG: Who was winning? PETTIT: Willie. ROSENBERG: With the shuttle program now on hold, Don, Ken and Nikolai weren't stranded on the space station. They had a backup craft, a Russian Soyuz capsule that they could take down and land in Kazakhstan. And both Don and Micki said they had a great deal of confidence in the Soyuz. Prior to Columbia, its track record was about as good as the shuttle's. But on the flip side, its track record was about as good as the shuttle's. PETTIT: And in some respects, each time you fly, you're rolling dice with the universe. The only way for us to get home is to roll the dice one more time, and we knew that was the name of the game when we started this mission. ROSENBERG: After six months in space, Don, Ken and Nikolai all piled into the Soyuz and departed from the space station while Micki watched from mission control in Moscow along with Ken Bowersox's wife, Annie, and the head of NASA, Sean O'Keefe. PETTIT: It really looked more like a theater. Like, the stage was way down below, and you sat above it. And I also remember it was very dark because it only put lights on where you needed LED High Bay Light . And we could hear Nikolai's voice communicating. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) NIKOLAI BUDARIN: (Speaking Russian). ROSENBERG: This is Nikolai's voice from that re-entry. It was recorded by Don, actually, from inside the capsule. PETTIT: And we're told that there would be this period of non-communication. And that's the most intense because they're going through the atmosphere. They're going to burn up. They're going to do it then.
ROSENBERG: Meanwhile, back in the Soyuz, Don was still recording. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Everything OK over there, Don? PETTIT: Yeah. That was a nice kick in the pants, you know. And then when you hit the upper atmosphere, your spacecraft separates into three pieces. And Sox was excited. Sox was saying - because this was all happening in Russian - I see our propulsion unit burning up. And I looked out my window and, ah, I see our living habitat burning up. ROSENBERG: What did Nikolai say? PETTIT: He was quiet.