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
