Titan

Angel pushed the red button again. ‘APU temperature this time.’

‘There’s nothing we can do about that,’ Lamb said briskly. ‘Let’s position for entry.’ He grasped his control stick again, and pushed.

Under the control of her RCS jets the orbiter somersaulted gracefully forward, briefly as graceful as a 2001 space clipper. Earth wheeled, the cabin light shifting, until the planet showed before the front windows.

Columbia was facing forward now, her nose pitched up at an angle of about thirty degrees. Earth was spread out below the cockpit, a glowing blue carpet, subtly curved. The orbiter was the right way up, and descending.

Suddenly, it started to feel like a landing to Benacerraf.

‘Houston, Columbia. We are in entry attitude.’

‘Copy that, Columbia. Looking good at this time. Are you ready for your entry switch checklist?’

Lamb grinned at Angel. ‘Just like the other five times I’ve done this, Joe.’

‘I’m glad it’s you up there, Tom, if we’ve got to have a bad day.’

‘Wish you were here too, Joe. Okay, Bill. Cabin relief A and B enabled. Antiskid on. Nose wheel steering off. Entry roll mode off. Throttles full forward …’

‘Okay,’ Lamb said. ‘Loading the entry software.’ Confidently, as Benacerraf watched, he punched in OPS 304 PRO. Angel said, ‘Throttle to auto. Pitch, roll, yaw auto. Body flap to manual.’

‘Columbia, Houston. Rog. Moving right along, Tom. Nice and easy does it. We’re all riding with you.’

‘Roger that … Paula. Don’t miss the view.’

Benacerraf leaned forward and peered through the picture windows. She could see no stars, and Earth was a carpet of city lights below the prow of the craft.

She saw flashes of colour, red and green.

Angel grinned. ‘The lights of the reaction engines, reflected from the upper atmosphere. Pretty.’

‘Yes.’

Lamb said, ‘Houston, Columbia. Entry interface.’

Four hundred thousand feet, Benacerraf thought. The informal gateway to the atmosphere.

Home again.

The burn had knocked Columbia out of its orbit. But they were still more than five thousand miles from Edwards, still moving with a near-orbital velocity of Mach 25, and from now on without engines. After all they’d been through already – with a disabled engine system, and power units and RCS motors in an unknown condition – the key entry steps had still to come; the orbiter still had to shed most of its kinetic energy, and glide on home.

Now Columbia, with a rattle of reaction control solenoids, levelled its wings, and tipped up to a new angle of attack.

‘Columbia, Houston. Ready for loss of signal.’

‘Yeah. See you at Mach 12, Joe.’

A pinkish glow gathered beneath the windows, diffuse and pure, then deepening to orange. The orbiter was colliding with the thicker layers of air. The orange glow brightened, and turned white. In the corners of the windows, Benacerraf could see some kind of turbulent flow, swirls of superheated plasma. It looked like drops of rain on a car window.

Now, for the first time in sixteen days, Benacerraf felt a feather-touch of gravity, a soft pressure pulling her down into her seat.

The altimeter was steadily clicking off.

The telemetry on the controllers’ consoles turned briefly to garbage, then blanked out. A static hiss filled the air-to-ground loop.

All around the room, Fahy saw the posture of her controllers shift, subtly. They sat back from their terminals, from the suddenly empty screens, and stared at the big TV images of Edwards Air Force Base at the front of the room.

The plasma shield building up around the orbiter would soon block all transmissions, voice and telemetry, between the orbiter and the ground. The blackout would last twelve minutes, on a nominal entry anyhow. During that time the ground would have no way of influencing events on the damaged spacecraft.

And it was during the blackout that Columbia would become reliant on her aerosurfaces. It was entirely possible, Fahy thought, that if the power units failed now, Columbia wouldn’t emerge from her blackout at all.

It was going to be a long twelve minutes. Fahy felt past and future hinge around her.

It just shouldn’t be like this, Marcus White thought. We should never have built the Shuttle for the money they allowed us. We should have just refused.

When McDonnell’s DC-X experimental rocket project came along – a step towards a new generation of launch systems – White had just grabbed onto it.

He liked working with the McDonnell boys again. It was a relief after NASA. McDonnell had built both Mercury and Gemini, and it was on Gemini that White had cut his teeth. And with the DC-X, just like with Gemini, the guys at McDonnell had rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. They built their prototype for just sixty million bucks: less than the cost of two replacement microgravity toilets on Shuttle, for Christ’s sake. White liked to say that the DC-X’s liftoff weight was less than that of the paperwork required for each Shuttle launch. And so on.

But that had all changed, when the original McDonnell project ran out of money in 1993, and the DC-X was moved into the suffocating embrace of NASA. McDonnell had been forced to take the bird back to the factory at Huntingdon Beach, and bolt in all kinds of fancy modifications, like a new graphite epoxy hydrogen tank, a lox tank made from some kind of goddamn Russian aluminum-lithium alloy, and an oxygen-hydrogen reaction control system that used excess fuel from the main tanks.

It was all typical NASA. Not one of these ‘innovations’ had upgraded the bird’s performance, as far as White could tell; but they had all increased costs, reduced reliability, and sent the testing schedules spiralling off to eternity.

White wasn’t surprised when, at the end of a test flight in 1996, they let the damn thing fall over and blow up.

White just couldn’t understand it. To him, things were simple. You built ships, and you flew them. And you took the risks that went with it. That was all. He couldn’t see why the hell things should be any different.

The truth was – in White’s view – the US government was scared of developing cheap launch systems.

An SSTO, a single-stage-to-orbit new-generation bird, would come up against a lot of vested interests. It took an empire of nine thousand people to launch the Shuttle, and a lot of money went flowing out of NASA to the contractors. That was a lot of turf to be defended.

What if it was possible to demonstrate that you really only needed a launch and maintenance effort of a few per cent of NASA’s huge investment? What if it was demonstrated that every country in the world could afford its own SSTO launcher, flying out of existing airports?

The optimists said there would be an explosive expansion into space. Huge industrial efforts up there, new multinational stations, a fast return to the Moon. Blah blah. The military analysts said that von Braun visionary stuff was for the birds. What would be the military consequence of every tinpot country in the world having access to space? How about another Saddam Hussein?

Private launch contractors weren’t pushing too hard either. One or two SSTOs could mop up the whole of the world’s launch capacity, and force all the existing commercial operators out of business.

Nobody wanted SSTO. And that was why – as far as White could see – it was NASA’s job to kill programs like the DC-X: to kill it with bureaucracy, with study groups and change review boards and new, ineffective technologies.

NASA’s purpose, consistent over three decades, was to block access to space, not to build for it. Which was why Marcus White’s good buddy Tom Lamb was up there now, hanging out his hide trying to save a thirty-year-old piece of shit called Columbia, risking his life for a monumental lie.

It wasn’t good enough, for Marcus White.

As angry as he’d felt in years, White made a decision.

He marched out of the viewing area, and round into the FCR, and went straight up to Barbara Fahy. He’d been all the way to the Moon with Tom Lamb, he said, and now he was going to capcom Tom all the way home.

Benacerraf was forced deeper into her seat as the orbiter shed velocity.

Under the control of its guidance software, the orbiter tipped itself up, to change its angle of attack, and then banked slightly, to increase its sink rate into the atmosphere. Right now, the orbiter was flying blind, its external sensors overwhelmed by the plasma. Lights flickered over a panel ahead of Lamb, showing how the orbiter’s software was working the RCS jets.

The idea of the antique, crippled spacecraft doing its level best to survive, to bring home its human cargo, was somehow touching, to Benacerraf.

‘I got ten psi,’ Lamb said now. ‘Roll thrusters off. Here we go, twenty psi. Pressure climbing fast. Pitch thrusters off. Elevon control. Three hundred thousand feet.’

‘Maximum heating,’ Angel said. ‘Our leading edges are up to three thousand degrees.’

Columbia was already too deep in the atmosphere, now, to manoeuvre like a spacecraft with its reaction thrusters. From now on the orbiter had to fly like an aircraft: elevons, flaps in the trailing edge of the wings, would now control the craft’s pitch and roll. If the hydraulics worked.

The sky was a rich, deep royal blue. Looking out, she could see the curve of Earth, and the closed curvature of the horizon. She could make out the whole of the western seaboard of the USA, it seemed, from San Francisco to Mexico.

Columbia broke into sunrise, abruptly. Earth was still dark below, and the plasma glow was fading back to orange. Against the black landscape, she could still see the plasma glow, but where the sun was rising, there was a blue stripe on the horizon before her. For a second she was looking through the atmosphere at the sun, and shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards her. But then the cabin was flooded with light, forcing Benacerraf to shield her eyes.

… She’d felt like this once before. She rummaged through her memories.

1969. A wonderful family holiday, up in the woods of British Columbia; she was ten years old, the perfect age to be a child. She hadn’t wanted to come home, to climb back down.

She had the grim feeling that she would never, quite, get over the memory of all this wonderful light, and lightness.

The Gs continued to mount, impossibly heavy. The deceleration pulled her down into her chair, and she felt as if she couldn’t keep her neck straight, as if her head was a huge, heavy box filled with concrete.

The master alarm clamoured again.

Lamb punched it off. ‘What now?’

Angel checked. ‘We’re losing hydraulic pressure, Tom. Shit.’

And suddenly the orbiter dropped like a stone.

‘Flight, Egil. I got you a diagnosis on the APU situation.’

‘Go.’

‘We think we got a fire back there, Flight. In fact the system signature is looking a little like STS-9.’

STS-9 had been John Young’s last flight. During the final landing approach on that flight, the power units had caught fire; all but one had failed on the way to the ground.

Egil said, ‘Probably we have a hydrazine leak from one of the APUs. If that’s the case, we’ll have volatile hydrazine spraying over the hot surfaces in there.’

‘STS-9 was survivable,’ Fahy said. ‘The crew got down safely and walked away.’ That was true; the power unit fire – even a subsequent explosion – hadn’t been detected until the orbiter was back on the ground.

‘But on STS-9 the leak occurred just before touchdown. Here, the leak came a lot earlier, during entry …’

‘Flight, Prop. If we have had some kind of rupture of the OMS fuel lines, maybe that’s linked to these APU problems. The position of the APU tanks, in the tail section –’

‘Save it for the board of inquiry. Egil, Flight. What’s the worst case?’

‘That we’ll be looking at an APU loss scenario. We’ll have to recommend a ditch, Flight.’

Fahy remembered, now, that the orbiter on STS-9 had been Columbia.

For long seconds, it was like a roller-coaster ride – what the controllers called a phugoid mode – as the control system tried to stabilize the trajectory. When the oscillations stopped, the orbiter was still deep in blackout.

Lamb flexed his gloved fingers, and closed his hand carefully around his hand controller. ‘Let’s see how this mother flies.’

Benacerraf knew it was time for the first big manoeuvre in the atmosphere, a wide, banking S-turn. On a nominal descent, the automatic systems were generally allowed to fly the orbiter most of the way home. Today, it looked as if Tom Lamb wasn’t going to trust the automatics any more than he had to. Looking at the broad back of Lamb’s gloved hand wrapped around the control stick, Benacerraf felt obscurely reassured.

‘ADI rate switch to high. Roll/yaw switch to the control stick …’ Lamb clenched his hand. He pulled the stick to the left.

The orbiter banked to port. The Pacific tipped up, a glittering blue skin in the morning light. Shadows shifted across the cabin, sending complex highlights from the instrument surfaces.

The master alarm sounded. Angel killed it. ‘We lost another APU, number three. Number one still online.’

Lamb leaned into his control, and the orbiter pitched over further.

‘I’m only showing seventy degrees bank,’ Lamb said. ‘It’s all I can get.’

‘You figure the elevons are screwed?’

‘It’s that low hydraulic pressure. Or maybe the last APU is going down. God damn this. I’m at the edge of the envelope, here.’

Now, at Mach 18, Columbia rolled to the right. Below the prow, Benacerraf could see the coast of California, a brown line coalescing along the misty horizon, tipping up as the orbiter rolled.

‘– Houston. Columbia, Houston. Can you hear me, Tom?’

The blackout was over. Benacerraf felt a surge of relief, illogical, profound.

Lamb said, ‘Columbia, copy. Holy shit, Marcus, is that you? How do you read?’

‘Columbia, Houston. We read you fine. Tom, we read you low on energy, and off the ground track.’

‘Tell me about it. I went phugoid back there and came out low energy. Houston, we’re down to one APU up here, and I think we may be losing hydraulic press. The elevons aren’t responding too well. Going into the second S-turn.’ Lamb leaned to the left, dragging the control stick.

‘Copy that. We see you rolling right. We have you at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, Mach 9. Looking good. Just like barnstorming old Copernicus, huh.’

‘Like hell,’ Lamb said dourly. He pulled back on the speed brake handle. That opened flaps on the vertical stabilizer at the back of the orbiter; Benacerraf could feel the increased drag. ‘Brake indicator shows a hundred per cent. Initiating third roll.’ He pulled the stick across to the right, and the orbiter tipped again.

The coastline of America fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, impossibly quickly.

Bill Angel said, ‘What a way to visit California.’

Voices crackled on the air-to-ground loops of the PA.

There was a ragged cheer from the press stand. The blackout had seemed to last for ever, but here was physical proof that the orbiter was back in the atmosphere, at least.

Now four big rescue helicopters went flapping over the press stand. They were like metal buzzards, Hadamard thought.

A couple of people had climbed out of the press stand and had tried to get over closer to the runway. A NASA car was patrolling back and forth, keeping them back.

Hadamard began to calculate what the fallout would be, depending on how this damn thing worked out.

There were a number of scenarios: the crew could survive, or not; the orbiter could survive, or not.

If everything came through more or less intact there would be a lot of bullshit in the press about NASA’s incompetence, and Hadamard would be able to come down hard on whichever contractor had screwed up this time, and the whole thing would be forgotten in a couple of days.

At the other end of the scale – if he was looking at another Challenger, here – Hadamard expected to be facing some kind of shutdown. There would be inquiries, both internal and external, forced on NASA by the White House and Congress. And Hadamard himself would be thoroughly fucked over in the process, he knew.

But in between those extremes there were a whole range of other contingencies. If the crew walked away from this, then you were looking at an Apollo 13, not a Challenger. And that could give him a lot of leverage. Hadamard had always thought NASA threw away the bonus of Apollo 13’s world attention and PR, a real gift from the political gods if ever there was one.

Hadamard wouldn’t waste a similar opportunity, if it was presented to him. He began to calculate, figuring which of his personal goals he might be able to advance on the back of the events here today.

Someone pointed up towards the zenith.

Squinting, Hadamard could make out a tiny white spark, trailing contrails. Chase planes closed in on it, streaking across the sky.

‘Flight, Egil. Number one APU is still online. But I can’t give you a prediction of how long for.’

‘All right. What else? Fido?’

‘We’re in good shape for a contingency landing, Flight. We’re well off the runway, but we’re flying down into a lake bed, after all …’

‘Inco?’

‘No problems, Flight.’

Fahy allowed a seed of hope to germinate. Maybe she could get through this after all, without losing her ship.

‘Fido, Flight. You got a recommendation?’

The Flight Dynamics Officer – FDO, Fido – had the role of recommending intact abort options. The controller – fat, young, sweating – turned to face Fahy across the FCR. ‘We ought to egress, Flight. As soon as possible; the orbiter has to hold steady during the egress manoeuvre, and if that last APU goes down that won’t be possible.’

Egress. He meant, abandon the orbiter.

Fahy suddenly felt faint, and her senses seemed to be fading out; she grabbed onto the edge of her workstation, as if holding onto reality.

Egress. The crux of history. On this moment, on her decision now, she sensed, pivoted her own life, the destiny of the mission, maybe the future of the space program.

‘You’re sure about that, Fido?’

‘Flight, get them out of there.’

At bottom, Fahy did not want to become the first Flight Director to lose an orbiter since 51-L, Challenger. But she knew Fido was right.

Hope died.

‘Marcus. You may instruct the crew.’

Emerging from the blindness of the blackout, Columbia was now able to use external sensors to confirm its state vector, its map of its position and trajectory.

To Benacerraf, now that the alarms had stopped sounding off, Lamb and Angel seemed tense but calm. Suddenly, it was like the sims once more.

… But now the capcom was saying: ‘Columbia, Houston. We, ah, we recommend you prepare for egress. Emergency egress.’

Angel stared at Lamb.

‘Say again, Marcus.’

‘Recommend you prepare for egress. The status of your APUs –’

Lamb said, ‘We’re bringing this bird home yet, Marcus.’

‘Tom, I’m instructed to remind you that an orbiter ditching is not survivable.’

‘And landing on the Moon without a fucking radar is not survivable either, and we did that,’ Lamb said. ‘Ninety thousand feet. Speed brake back to sixty-five per cent.’

‘Copy,’ Angel said.

‘Tom,’ the capcom said, ‘you must make a decision at sixty thousand. A decision on the egress. We’ve little confidence in that last power unit holding out through the landing. Tom? Do you copy that?’

The deceleration mounted; Benacerraf was forced forward, against the straps of her harness.

‘God damn it,’ Lamb growled. ‘Yeah, I copy, Marcus. But we ain’t at sixty thou yet. Fourth roll reversal.’

For the last time, Columbia banked over. When the orbiter straightened up, Benacerraf could see Columbia was flying over the town of Bakersfield, the bleak landmark at the fringe of the Mojave.

Almost home, Benacerraf thought. They were flying through the atmosphere of Earth. Egress – abandoning the orbiter now – seemed absurd.

But the ground was approaching awfully quickly. And they were miles off track.

Lamb checked his altitude. ‘Sixty thousand feet. God damn it all to hell. Bill, Paula, get down to the mid deck.’

‘Tom –’

‘Move it, Bill! You’ve got ninety seconds. I’ll configure the computer mode for egress, then follow you out. Do it, guys.’

Angel stared at Lamb for maybe five seconds. Then he unclipped his harness and stood up, shakily.

Benacerraf, her heart pounding, unfastened her lap belt. She had to lift her harness back over her head, and disconnect her oxygen tube from her thigh, and unhook the hose bringing her cooling water. She stood up, cautiously. She started to hunt for the egress cue card.

Now the decision was made – now that Lamb, up there in the hot seat, had actually concurred – Fahy began to feel a little calmer.

On the open loop, she said, ‘All right, everybody. Let’s keep things nice and tight, now. This is STS-143, not 51-L. And we’re still Black Gold Flight, remember. In a couple of minutes we should have our crew out of there. Let’s follow the book, and bring those guys home. Capcom, you want to start Tom on his checklist?’

White said, ‘Rog, Flight.’

‘Guidance, DPS, let’s get that bail-out software mode loaded and running in the GPCs.’

‘Affirm, Flight.’

‘Fido, get a good hack on the trajectory. I want no mistakes during the egress …’

As Columbia went subsonic, it hit Mach buffeting. The orbiter shuddered, like a car going over a gravel road, as the airflow over its wings adjusted.

Leading the way, Benacerraf clambered through the narrow interdeck opening on the left of the cabin. Her legs felt shaky, microgravity-attenuated, but they held her up, despite the rattling of the orbiter.

She scrambled down the ladder to the mid deck area. The four mission specialists – Chandran, de Wilde, Gamble and Reeve – were sitting in their orange pressure suits, strapped into their fold-away metal and canvas seats. They looked at her through their big bubble visors. There was only fear in their faces, none of the forced banter she’d endured on the flight deck.

Phil Gamble – an orbiter systems specialist, tall, slim, bald – had thrown up, Benacerraf saw; the vomit had splashed against the lower half of his visor, and was pooled inside his helmet, at his neck.

The mid deck – brightly lit by fluorescent floods behind translucent ceiling panels – had been roomy living quarters during the flight. Now, with the return of gravity, it seemed cramped, awkward, crowded out by the airlock and the big avionics bays at the back, full of metal angles and places to bang her knees. She felt an odd stab of nostalgia, for the days she had spent safely cocooned here, on orbit.

‘Egress,’ she said briskly. ‘Chandran, you’re the jump master.’

Sanjai Chandran was sitting in the leftmost forward seat, in front of the big bulge of the airlock. He was around fifty but looked older; his lined face and grey moustache peered out at her, full of concern. He tried to smile. ‘Yeah. But I didn’t sign up for this.’

‘Who the hell did? Come on, Sanjai –’

Chandran released his restraints. He reached down to the floor, lifted a cover and pulled a T-handle. Benacerraf heard a sharp pyrotechnic crack; a valve had blown to equalize air pressure. Then Chandran hauled on another T-handle set in the floor. More pyros exploded around the hinge of the big circular wall hatch. The noise was violent, startling, and for an instant the mid deck was filled with dense smoke. But then three small thrusters blew, pushing the severed hatch out and away from the orbiter.

The hatchway became a hole, through which Benacerraf could see the sky. Wind noise forced its way into the crew compartment, drowning any other sound. The opened hatchway was like a wound, cut into the side of the cosy den of the mid deck.