wasn’t much Fahy could do about that, any more than she could manage down her own stress levels. And behind her, she could hear the MOD manager talking quietly into his microphone. The mission operations directorate manager was a link from the FCR to NASA and JSC senior management.
It all continued to unravel.
Fahy tried to get a handle on all of this, to make some decisions.
None of her training, her experience, her orderly approach to contingency management, seemed to be helping her think her way through this. The problems here weren’t to do with her control, or with her team, but with the crummy technology which was falling apart in front of her. Even so, she was aware that she wasn’t handling this well, that Tom Lamb, with his fast decision to go for the reaction control burn, had actually achieved a lot more in this crisis than she had. With that action he might have saved the mission, in fact.
Multiple failures would always get you; it was impossible to plan for every contingency.
But maybe, she thought sourly, if the orbiter mission preparation process hadn’t been cut back to the bone, somebody might have caught this problem, before it blew up in their faces.
The master alarm sounded again.
Marcus White, Tom Lamb’s commander from his Apollo mission, was at JSC that day, for a Gemini fortieth anniversary dinner. When he heard what was going down over in Building 30, he came over fast. Now, he stood in the viewing gallery at the back of the FCR and watched as Barbara Fahy and her team of kids struggled to understand what was happening.
Unlike Lamb, Marcus White had long since retired from NASA. After his Moon landing he was passed over for the Skylab missions and ASTP. He went into training for the Shuttle flights. But when the development delays started to hit, and the first flights were pushed back past the end of the 1970s, he got a little pissed off at kicking his heels around JSC.
So he retired from NASA. At least his wife was pleased about that. He joined McDonnell Douglas out at Long Beach, and watched from outside as NASA and Rockwell between them royally screwed up the Space Shuttle program.
If Columbia failed today, it would be a horror, but not a surprise, to Marcus White. He hated Shuttle; he always had. Its flaws went all the way back to the compromises that were involved in its design in the first place, back in the ’70s. You put solid rocket boosters on a manned ship, you’re going to get a Challenger. You turn your spacecraft into an unpowered glider for the entry, you’ll have this, a Columbia. His only regret was that now, in its final failure, Columbia might take Tom with it.
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
