Back to the Moon-ARC (23 page)

“We ready, Tony?”

“A-OK, Bill.”
 

“Roger that.” Bill tapped another icon on his checklist. “Auxiliary power units are running, and
Mercy I
shows solid rocket motor thrust vector control gimbal test is good.”

“T minus eighteen seconds. Ignition and hold-down bolts are armed and ready. We have sound suppression active and launcher flood is initiated.”
 

“Roger that, control.” Stetson pushed his body into his couch as best he could, preparing for the upcoming thrust.

“Launch inhibits are removed and vehicle is armed. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ignition!”

Bill and Tony held on and tried not to grit their teeth.
 

“We have liftoff! Start the clock as
Mercy I
clears the tower for America’s return to the Moon!” The launch director’s voice sounded excited and enthusiastic for a brief moment.

NASA was through simply sending astronauts around and around the Earth. It was finished sending only robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. Americans were going into space, and they were on their way to the Moon.

As the Ares I cleared the launch tower, it began its ascent into Earth orbit, and its characteristic vibrations began shaking the teeth of the two astronauts perched on top. During its design, engineers had discovered that the vibrations caused by the firing of the solid rocket motors would be jarring enough to cause brain damage in its passengers. After considerable effort, a system was devised to dampen the vibrations, making them merely annoying rather than lethal. To those riding on the beast, the difference was a matter of academic debate.

The solid rocket motors had just burned out when eighteen mini-explosions occurred—jarring the veritable heck out of the astronauts and causing them to fall forward into their chairs. The explosive bolts connecting the rocket’s first stage with its second stage had just fired. And the sequence was just as violent, as exciting, and as exhilarating as Bill had remembered from his previous two flights. Though still exciting, to Bill it was just another day at the office. To Tony, on the other hand, who had only participated in simulation flights thus far, it was all new and very scary. Very. Scary.

“Hang on there, Tony,” Bill said. “Second-stage engines are about to kick in, and it is a kick in the pants!”

“I’m hanging!” Chow shouted back—welcoming the pause in the nerve-wracking launch vibrations.

“Going for second-stage ignition,” Stetson radioed to mission control. The liquid engines of the second stage of the Ares I rocket fired, again forcing both Stetson and Chow back into their chairs at well over three gravities. There was very little piloting to be done in this phase of the flight. The computer controlled everything. Stetson monitored all the instruments just in case he disagreed with the computer and had to take over control. He was prepared, thanks to countless hours of training. But such an event was extremely unlikely. Bill kept an eye out anyway.

“Roger that,
Mercy I
. Telemetry shows second-stage ignition is good,” mission control replied.
Mercy I
was the name given to the mission in the hours before launch. Rescuing the trapped Chinese would someday be considered to be the most technologically complex act of mercy in human history. It was likely the most risky and failure prone as well.

“What an incredible view,” Chow exclaimed as he peered out the window to his right.

“I know it’s a great view, Tony, but you will have time for sightseeing later. Let’s keep an eye on the control panels. You and I are covering for Charles and Helen, and we’ve got to make sure we don’t miss anything,” Bill scolded the rookie astronaut. Though they were thoroughly cross-trained in the years prior to the flight, neither had really expected to be flying to the Moon performing the duties of their missing colleagues in addition to their own.

“Roger that” was all Chow could muster in response. Bill made a mental note to keep an eye over Tony’s shoulder for the time being until he was certain he was going to be good to go. Just another precautionary measure.
 

The second stage of the Ares I lifted the Orion capsule into a circular orbit just above two hundred and fifty miles high. At that point, the second-stage separation pyrotechnics fired, blasting the liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks away and allowing them to fall back to Earth and burn up on reentry. All that was left of the Ares I was the Orion spaceship and its two occupants. Thanks to the successful launch of the Ares V rocket, they were on track to rendezvous with the Earth Departure Stage carrying the lunar lander. After that, they would be on their way out of Earth orbit and moving toward the Moon.

Stetson had practiced the rendezvous with the lander several times in the last few days and thousands of times over the last few months. In about four orbits it would be showtime. Ignoring his own admonition, Stetson peered out the window to gaze on the beautiful blue planet beneath him. Scanning the surface to find a recognizable reference point, he quickly realized they were approaching the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean.
 

I never get tired of this,
he thought to himself as he snapped out of his reverie and back into the reality of flying a spacecraft traveling at five miles each second. At these speeds, errors could be fatal and unforgiving. And he could not forget the error that had occurred in this stage of the mission during the test flight.

Four orbits passed a lot faster than Bill had expected. It seemed only moments ago that they were on the launchpad and now the LIDAR was beeping away at the Altair lander recently launched by the mighty Ares V rocket. NASA had come a long way from launching rockets separated in time by at least a month or more to doing it with only hours or days in between. Designing for relative simplicity had helped a lot.

“Houston, we have LIDAR confirmation that the range to target is twenty-five hundred meters and closing,” Bill reported. “I am disengaging the automated rendezvous and docking system now.”
 

“
Mercy I,
please repeat,” said the monotone voice of the mission controller in faraway Houston, Texas.

“I said, I am disengaging the AR and D system and proceeding with a manual docking.” Though choosing to turn off the automated rendezvous and docking system was within his purview as commander and pilot of the flight, it was still unusual to do so in the absence of any sort of in-flight anomaly or failure. To Stetson, the failure that had caused him to assume command of the rendezvous during the test flight was reason enough to take control now. Besides, what were they going to do about it? Abort and ask him to come home? Not likely.

“Roger that,
Mercy I
. We understand that you are proceeding with a manual docking. There are some curious folks down here who want to know why. I’m sure you’ll fill them in.”
 

“Will do, Houston,” Stetson confirmed.

“All right, Bill, show me how a real astronaut flies a spaceship.” Chow smiled, not at all worried that his colleague and friend might screw up as they moved around the Earth every ninety minutes or so, waiting to collide—dock—with the rest of their lunar-exploration vehicle.

“Just hold on, Tony. Help me keep an eye on that delta-vee,” Bill replied matter-of-factly. “Two thousand meters to target,” Bill said.

“Relative velocity one hundred meters per second,” Chow told his pilot.

Stetson fired the forward thrusters to reduce the relative velocity between the vehicles. Stetson’s actions were just like in the robotic mission weeks earlier, but this time there was no obvious failure. He had done it then, and, in his mind at least, he was sure to do it again. This was what Bill was born to do.

Stetson again fired the thrusters to slow the Orion. Like the previous firings, inside the capsule they heard the
BANG BANG
of the thrusters. The sound was loud and annoying, but also comforting. For Stetson, it was the sound of him being in control. And he liked being in control.

“One hundred and fifty meters to target,” Chow said.

“One hundred meters.”

“Twenty-five meters.”

They both felt the bump as the Orion successfully mated with the Altair, making
Mercy I
a complete spacecraft. To Stetson, the resulting silence was deafening. His adrenaline was still pumping. Beads of perspiration were evident on his brow, and his ground-based physician was certainly monitoring his now-declining heart rate.

“Houston, this is
Mercy I
. We’re docked and beginning the Earth departure checklist.” Stetson was not about to take a break or relax while lives on the Moon were depending upon him.
 

“Tony, pull up the Earth departure checklist and let’s get started.”

“Roger that.” Chow smiled, himself not completely relaxed, and replied in his most professional voice for the benefit of all those listening to the exchange back on Earth.

Chapter 22

A few orbits later, Stetson and Chow, with support from mission control in Houston, determined that all systems on
Mercy I
were operational and ready for Trans-Lunar Injection, or TLI. It was at this point that the liquid-fueled engines of the Ares V Earth Departure Stage, or EDS, would reignite and give them the kick they needed to get to the Moon. Using essentially the same engines that powered the second stage of the Ares I, the Ares V EDS had fired first to place the vehicle and its payload into Earth orbit. Now that the rest of the spaceship had arrived and docked, they were ready to be reignited.
 

As with all phases of the mission so far, with the exception of the docking maneuver, the TLI was controlled by the onboard computer. Stetson and Chow watched with excitement and trepidation as the clock counted down to engine start. They were excited about their journey to the Moon but simultaneously worried at what they might find there. The Chinese crew was now experiencing the very cold lunar night, and no one could be sure there would be anyone left to rescue once
Mercy I
arrived.

With only a few minutes to go before the engines were to ignite, Chow reached up and turned off the radio transmitter so as to keep cabin conversation from being broadcast home.

“Bill, have you thought about what we are going to do if we don’t find anyone alive up there?”

“I try not to think about it. The Chinese ambassador requested that we bring the bodies home. But I’m not sure that would be the right thing to do. I think, if they are dead, that we should bury them on the Moon. They knew the risks, and if it were me, I would want to have the Moon be
my
final resting place. I’m not sure my wife would agree, but then again, she might. You?”

“I don’t know. It’s a shame we didn’t have time to really plan for that contingency. I mean, if we bury them there, shouldn’t they have some sort of marker or something?”

“Tony, these people are going to make it. We’re going to get there, and we’re going to get them home. No more of this dead and dying shit. We’ve got a rescue mission to make happen!”

“Right. I guess that’s the only way to think about it until we get different data,” Tony replied. “You got it.” With that, he turned the cabin’s transmitter back on.

The TLI burn was anticlimactic. Compared with launch and even the orbital-insertion burn, the boost that put them on a path to the Moon was fairly mild. The engines fired, changing the spacecraft’s roughly circular orbit around the Earth to an elliptical one with its highest point at the radius of the Moon’s orbit. If one were to look at the point in space at which the spacecraft would reach the Moon’s orbit at that very moment, then all that would be found would be empty space. The Moon would not yet have arrived there in its own orbit about the Earth. The boost was timed so that the spaceship would arrive at a point in space at precisely the same time that the Moon would arrive, allowing them to rendezvous and then land. Orbital mechanics was all about where to arrive and when.

For the next few hours, Stetson and Chow performed various maintenance and preparatory jobs, finished their evening meal, and settled into their wall-mounted sleeping bags for a well-deserved night’s rest. Neither felt the least little bit of space sickness. Stetson had experienced it on his previous flights, with less severity on each subsequent flight. For this flight, he hardly noticed it. Chow appeared to be one of those rare people who was unaffected by space sickness.

Chow struggled into his sleeping bag, taking comfort that the recirculating fans were humming in the background. He didn’t want to fall asleep, have the fans fail, and suffocate on his own exhaled carbon dioxide. With no external forces or wind, it might be easy for an astronaut to suffocate during sleep, with a cloud of stationary carbon dioxide accumulating around his head. This, like many other “gotchas,” was well understood by spacecraft designers. Chow did manage to get this thought out of his mind as he fell into a fitful sleep.

Gazing out onto the gray lunar surface, Chow was stranded in the lunar lander, waiting to die. He was alone. In his thoughts he was asking,
Where is Stetson? Why isn’t he here?
He knew that Bill had come to the Moon with him on the rescue mission, but he was nowhere to be found.
His panic began to increase until it finally reached a boiling point as he spoke to his wife, telling her goodbye from the Moon, when the alarm sounded and jolted him awake.

Momentarily disoriented, Chow looked around, trying to figure out where he was. For a moment he thought he was, like in his dream, on the Moon. He then concluded that he must be at home in his bed—
no, that wasn’t right, either.
Now fully awake, hearing the blaring of the klaxon, he realized he was on the Orion spacecraft on his way to the Moon. He looked quickly over at Bill Stetson, who was also being jolted awake.

“Bill, what’s going on?” he asked nervously.

“I have no idea.” Stetson quickly unzipped his bag and didn’t even bother to cover himself as he floated forward to check the status boards and find out why the alarm was sounding.