original Mercury seven, Cocoa Beach had been party central for the astronauts, a slightly seedy strip of hotels and bars and T-shirt shops stretching along a spit of land trapped between the Banana River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Jack knew the strip well, from the Tokyo Steak House to the Moon Shot Bar. Once he had jogged the same beach where John Glenn used to run. Only two years ago, he had stood on Jetty Park and gazed across the Banana River at launchpad 39A. At his shuttle, the bird that was supposed to take him into space. The memories were still clouded by pain. He remembered a long run on a sweltering afternoon. The sudden, excruciating stab in his flank, an agony so terrible he was brought to his knees. And then, through a haze of narcotics, the somber face of his flight surgeon gazing down at him in the ER, telling him the bad news. A kidney stone.
He’d been scrubbed from the mission.
Even worse, his future in spaceflight was in doubt. A history of kidney stones was one of the few conditions that could permanently ground an astronaut. Microgravity caused physiologic shifts in body fluids, resulting in dehydration. It also caused bones to leach out calcium. Together, these factors raised the risk of new kidney stones while in space—a risk NASA did not want to take. Though still in the astronaut corps, Jack had effectively been grounded. He had hung on for another year, hoping for a new flight assignment, but his name never again came up. He’d been reduced to an astronaut ghost, condemned to wander the halls of JSC forever in search of a mission.
Fast-forward to the present. Here he was, back in Canaveral, no longer an astronaut but just another tourist cruising down AlA, hungry and grumpy, with nowhere to go. Every hotel within forty miles was booked solid, and he was tired of driving.
He turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and headed for the bar.
The place had been spiffed up considerably since the last time he had been here. New carpet, new barstools, ferns hanging from the ceiling. It used to be a slightly shabby hangout, a tired old Hilton on a tired old tourist strip. There were no four-star hotels on Cocoa Beach. This was as close as you came to luxury digs.
He ordered a scotch and water and focused on the TV above the bar. It was tuned to the official NASA channel, and the shuttle Atlantis was on the screen, aglow with floodlights, ghostly vapor rising around it. Emma’s ride into space. He stared at the image, thinking of the miles of wiring inside that hull, the countless switches and data buses, the screws and joints and O-rings. Millions of things that could go wrong. It was a wonder that so little did go wrong, that men, imperfect as they were, could design and build a craft of such reliability that seven people are willing to strap themselves inside. Please let this launch be one of the perfect ones, he thought. A launch where everyone has done their job right, and not a screw is loose. It has to be perfect because my Emma will be aboard.
A woman sat down on the barstool beside him and said, ‘I wonder what they’re thinking now.’
He turned to look at her, his interest momentarily captured by a glimpse of thigh. She was a sleek and sunny blonde, with one of those blandly perfect faces whose features one forgets within an hour of parting. ‘What who’s thinking?’ he asked.
‘The astronauts. I wonder if they’re thinking, “Oh, shit, what’d I get myself into?”’
He shrugged and took a sip of scotch. ‘They’re not thinking anything right now. They’re all asleep.’
‘I wouldn’t be able to sleep.’
‘Their circadian rhythm’s completely readjusted. They probably went to bed two hours ago.’
‘No, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. I’d be lying awake thinking up ways to get out of it.’
He laughed. ‘I guarantee you, if they’re awake, it’s because they can’t wait to climb on board that baby and blast off.’
She looked at him curiously. ‘You’re with the program, aren’t you?’
‘Was. Astronaut corps.’
‘Not now?’
He lifted the drink to his lips, felt the ice cubes clink sharply against his teeth. ‘I retired.’ Setting down his empty glass, he rose to his feet and saw disappointment flash in the woman’s eyes. He allowed himself a moment’s consideration of how the rest of the evening could go were he to stay and continue the conversation. Pleasant company. The promise of more to follow.
Instead he paid his bar tab and walked out of the Hilton.
At midnight, standing on the beach at Jetty Park, he gazed across the water toward pad 39B. I’m here, he thought. Even if you don’t know it, I’m with you.
He sat down on the sand and waited for dawn.
July 24
Houston
‘There’s a high-pressure system over the Gulf, which is expected to keep skies clear over Cape Canaveral, so RTLS landing is a go. Edwards Air Force Base is seeing intermittent clouds, but that’s expected to clear by launch. TAL site in Zaragoza, Spain, is still current and forecast go. TAL site in Morón, Spain, is also current and go. Ben Guerir, Morocco, is experiencing high winds and sandstorms, and at this time is not a viable TAL site.’
The first weather briefing of the day, broadcast simultaneously to Cape Canaveral, brought satisfactory news, and Flight Director Carpenter was happy. The launch was still a go. The poor landing conditions at Ben Guerir airport was only a minor concern, since the two alternate transatlantic-abort landing sites in Spain were clear. It was all backups within backups, anyway; the sites would be needed only in case of a major malfunction.
He glanced around at the rest of the ascent team to see if there were any new concerns. The nervous tension in the Flight Control Room was palpable and mounting, as it always was prior to a launch, and that was good. The day they weren’t tense was the day they made mistakes. Carpenter wanted his people on edge, with all synapses snapping a level of alertness that, at midnight, required an extra dose of adrenaline.
Carpenter’s nerves were as taut as everyone else’s, despite the fact that the countdown was right on schedule. The inspection team at Kennedy had finished their checks. The flight dynamics team had reconfirmed the launch time to the second. In the meantime, a far-flung cast of thousands was watching the same countdown clock.
At Cape Canaveral, where the shuttle was poised for launch, the same tension would be building in the firing room of the Launch Control Center, where a parallel team sat at their consoles, preparing for liftoff. As soon as the solid rocket boosters ignited, Houston’s Mission Control would take over. Though thousands of miles apart, the two control rooms in Houston and Canaveral were so closely interconnected by communications they might as well have been located in the same building.
In Huntsville, Alabama, at Marshall Space Flight Center, research teams were waiting for their experiments to be launched.
One hundred sixty miles north-northeast of Cape Canaveral, Navy ships waited at sea to recover the solid rocket boosters, which would separate from the shuttle after burnout.
At contingency landing sites and tracking stations around the world, from NORAD in Colorado to the international airfield at Banjul, Gambia, men and women watched the clock.
And at this moment, seven people are preparing to place their lives in our hands.
Carpenter
