The Glass Lady (48 page)

“Let's do it, Jacob.”

“Think I'm old enough, Will?”

Dozens of greasy hands reached into bowls of popcorn on the floor. The large hands belonged to adults but their voices and their eyes were those of children.

“Told you it was already on TV.”

“You were right, Emily. Let's just remember that the television people don't know everything.”

“Oh, I know that, Cleanne. I wish everyone would shush so we could hear about my daddy.”

The two women leaned toward the television in the airy, institutional family room. Outside, it was a dark winter evening.

“Dan, the day has certainly taken on a tone far different from this morning.”

“Yes indeed, Walter. There was that magnificent launch of the Shuttle Endeavor from Florida this morning. Even though we have seen Shuttle ride that pillar of fire other times, it is still awesome and the crowds still line Coco Beach to watch her go. Then that first-orbit rendezvous with the lost Intelsat-6 satellite and with the Russians sent up for this first truly international space repair operation . . .”

“And then, Dan, it became unglued this afternoon. Somehow, the whole thing just unraveled. And we know very little tonight. First we had Astronaut Parker going outside instead of Jacob Enright who was injured, mysteriously, inside Shuttle. Barely two hours ago, we were told that Parker's spacewalk had failed to secure Intelsat-6 to Shuttle. And then an hour ago: that terse announcement from NASA in Houston and from Moscow that Intelsat-6 had been destroyed, that a Russian cosmonaut was dead, and that a Soviet survivor was picked up by Shuttle.”

“Unraveled is the word tonight, Walter. From the day's dramatic turn of events, the sparse air-ground communications which NASA has relased to us, and then this sudden announcement less than thirty minutes ago that Shuttle is coming home at this very moment—all these events suggest that someone will have some explaining to do in the days to come.”

“Indeed, Dan. And Endeavor is coming down damaged, perhaps fatally . . . Eric?”

“Yes, Walter. Dan.” The white-haired retired journalist with the elegant Mount Rushmore face spoke with his wonderful voice. His upper lip never moved as his words flowed like warm honey.

“I think that the worst part of this strange day in space is the brevity of this mission not yet ten hours old. The suddenness of this flight and this now, life-threatening crisis announced with so little real information coming out of Houston has somehow cheated us, I think.

“The nation simply has not had time to get to know our brave men up there: Parker and Enright. Who even remembers that Colonel Parker flew the two-man Gemini spacecraft and then Apollo so long ago, back when we still called their tiny craft ‘capsules.'

“Before yesterday, no one really knew about this sudden rush to Intelsat at all. And I cannot help but wonder if anyone is even following this flight at home with us now?

“It's funny, you know, how an old reporter's memory works, Walter. Dan was too young, but you and I covered the state funeral for Franklin Roosevelt a lifetime ago. And all three of us covered the national pageant at John Kennedy's death.

“I just cannot stop thinking about the demonstration which would follow the tragic loss of those three men up there in Endeavor: Parker, Enright, and Karpov. At least the Apollo One astronauts who burned on the launch pad in 1967, Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee and Ed White, America's first spacewalker, all received a hero's funeral. The country had the sense of really knowing those three men. But no one knows Parker and Enright.

“Remember when the seven bodies were plucked out of the sea after the Challenger explosion? They could have gotten the national funerals on television. All seven of them; and especially the schoolteacher from New Hampshire. But they really did not. Almost as if NASA wanted everything to go quietly away—quietly into the ground and into fading memory.

“And, strangely, it is not the sadness which this old warhorse remembers, not the feeling of loss, not the mournful tattoo of muffled drums. I remember, instead, the saddest and the most austere sound of all: horses' feet falling crisply upon the street. That cold, stark sound. Even now, when a Manhattan or Boston mounted policeman rides by, I hear again that terrible sound, that sadly grand, manful sound which brings the chill to the back of the neck. Like Shuttle herself thundering into the sky, the sound of six great grays plodding slowly before a gun carriage is a sound which has flesh and which becomes a part of the flesh and the bone of all who hear it.”

The great stoney face frowned.

“Yes, Eric. Let us hope: Not again. The crippled ship Endeavor is out of radio contact now. She will remain so for about six more minutes. Out there, in the darkness, Parker, Enright, and Karpov, the Russian, will be firing their only maneuvering system rocket in one minute. As we have noted, they cannot fire Shuttle's three main engines, since the fuel for them left when the external fuel tank dropped off after the launch this morning. On our monitors here in New York, we can see Mission Control in Houston. We understand that the new United States Space Command in Colorado is also helping to bring Endeavor safely home to Okinawa, one of her secondary landing sites. As we look in on Mission Control, everyone looks rather quiet.”

Tristan Da Cunha, a tiny group of three South Atlantic islands, were dots on the large video plot board. Above their image, a little bug crept along its curved track line. At the base of the screen, digital numerics read TIG -30 SECONDS.

The big man in dress blues sat alone in his glass house. Sitting in his high-backed chair with his back to the erect Marine sentries, the Admiral slumped with his head bowed. As the clocks reached twenty seconds to single-engine ignition, the old sailor looked down at his thick hands folded in his lap.

“Fifteen seconds, firing command is in.” Parker pressed the EXEC key on the computer keyboard on the center console.

The AC's voice was calm. After all, he had returned to Earth from Out There three times before this moment.

“Proceed light!”

Enright's voice was brimming with excitement. As the launch 9 hours and 55 minutes earlier was his first ride of the sacred fire, so this was his first homecoming from the great silence.

Mother's green faces showed the first re-entry trajectory plot as her warm black boxes hummed confidently with computer program Major Mode 302.

“PAP at 360! Ten, nine . . .” Enright called.

The television in front of Enright's swollen face confirmed that the Pneumatic Activation Pressure in the gaseous nitrogen, firing mechanism in the OMS engine's propellant valves was at ignition pressure.

As Endeavor flew headsdown, tailfirst, and 10,520 statute miles southwest of her Okinawa target, the two fliers read aloud and together the seconds winking on the event timer.

“Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Ignition!”

“Fire in the hole! Looks good.” The copilot's voice was ecstatic.

As the 6,000 pounds of thrust from the single right OMS rocket fired against the momentum of the 200,000-pound starship, the deceleration was only a gentle nudge of the flight seats against the backs of the three airmen.

“Go, babe!” Enright shouted. “One minute down, four to go. NTO flow rate right on.” The nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer utilization was nominal on Mother's television.

“Much gentler than I expected, Skip.”

“Should have felt an SPS burn in Apollo. A real eyeballs-in maneuver.” Will Parker once rode Apollo's Service Propulsion System engine out of lunar orbit. In all the world, only 24 men could say that. Three more moon men in their crippled Apollo 13 mothership had no SPS engine after a near fatal explosion. They rode their Lunar Module engine home, instead, in 1971.

“Sorry, Will. I wasn't old enough then.”

The AC chuckled.

“Got a little out-of-plane building. Anything, Jack?”

The single engine on the far right corner of Shuttle's up-side-down tail labored to compensate for the off-center forces of its three tons of thrust. The flight director needles on Parker's instruments displayed a slight side-to-side error in trajectory.

“Negative, Skipper. Still fat inside the cross-range envelope. Hang tight. PC at 125. Oh, sweet, sweet bird!”

The OMS engine combustion chamber pressure was normal. Shuttle's cross-range landing capability allows her to land at a site nearly 1,000 miles on either side of her ground track. Any reasonable, cross-range error will be adjusted as she steers through the upper atmosphere at a velocity of twenty times the speed of sound.

“Three minutes; one to go, Will. OMS mixture ratio 1 point 65. Right on!”

The single OMS rocket continued its 298-second firing. The engine burned 14 pounds of nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer and 9 pounds of monomethylhyrazine for each one-foot-per-second change in Endeavor's speed. Gaseous, high-pressure helium forced the caustic propellants into the engine. Inside the engine's combustion chamber, the propellants burned at 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Seventy seconds to go, Will . . . 68, 67, 66. Positive nose RCS, now!”

Enright noted that with 66 seconds left in the OMS deorbit burn, an early OMS shutdown would not be fatal. After this moment, the additional rocket power needed to leave orbit could be provided by turning Shuttle around and firing the three, forward-firing, nose thrusters for 150 seconds. This is the maximum allowable continuous thrusting time for the reaction control system jets in the ship's nose. A 2½-minute burn of the three RCS engines firing together has the same impulse as one OMS engine firing for 66 seconds.

“Twenty seconds to go.”

The pilots watched Mother's green faces tick off the final seconds to automatic engine shutdown. They read the digital numerics from the screens together. Parker had his finger poised to manually give the stop command if Mother failed to pull the OMS plug herself.

“Five . . . Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Auto shutdown.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Enright said with reverence as he patted the glareshield above the instrument panels.

The instant the OMS engine stopped automatically, all three fliers floated out of their seats as far as their lap belts. They were still in orbit, still weightless. All the OMS engine did was lower their 130-nautical-mile-high orbit to a low point some 12,000 miles on the other side of the planet. Were there no atmosphere, Endeavor would remain in this new, very lopsided orbit for centuries. What would bring her home was the air which they would now intersect in another twenty-two minutes at an altitude of 76 statute miles.

“Looky there, Jack. Delta-V of minus 269. Right smack on the nose! What a lady!”

Mother's face told the crew that the five-minute OMS burn had slowed Shuttle's forward velocity by 269 feet per second. Slowing Endeavor by this 183.4 statute miles per hour would cause her to strike the solid wall of air in another 6400 statute miles of flight.

“And we're speeding up. Amazing, Will. So Kepler was right after all.”

At the moment the hot OMS engine stopped, Endeavor's reduced speed began to increase. The rearward firing of the rocket, by inserting Shuttle into a lower orbit, dictated that the ship's velocity must accelerate. Written three hundred years ago, Kepler's laws of orbital mechanics argued that bodies in lower orbits must travel faster than bodies in higher orbits.

“Endeavor: Configure AOS by Botswana. Doppler ranging confirms your de-orbit burn. Digitals look very close to nominal.”

Still headsdown, Shuttle flew over open sea 120 miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.

“With you, Flight. Good burn.”

“Copy, AC. Great news!”

“Okay, Colorado: Burn on time. TIG 09 hours 55 minutes 12 seconds. Burn time 298 seconds. Delta-V 268 point 3 plus point-2 left. We have nulled the residuals. Stable trim. And we aligned the balls a while back. Jack is now purging the OMS plumbing.”

From his right seat, Enright directed gaseous nitrogen through the outer nozzle cone of the OMS engine to clean out the fuel which had been circulated through it to cool the engine bell during the rocket firing.

“And Flight, computer Major Mode 303 now running for descent. We'll do the thermal conditioning in a minute for the aero surfaces.”

“Copy, Will. With you another 3 minutes.”

“Understand.”

Enright was directing warm hydraulic fluid into the movable control surfaces of the wings and tail. He warmed the complex plumbing to ready it for the re-entry heat load.

“Conditioning in progress, Flight. Vent doors closed.”

“Copy, Will.”

Mother had sealed the ten vent doors in the aft fuselage and payload bay to protect the closed bay from re-entry. Four vent doors in the cabin section, one on each wing and one in each of the two OMS pods also closed.

“Forward RCS pod not disabled. We'll dump forward propellants further inbound.”

“Understand.”

Ordinarily, this would be the time when the 16 thrusters in the nose should be turned off for re-entry and their propellant reserves dumped overboard. But the crew elected to use these jets to help the remaining 14 jets in the one surviving OMS pod aft. The RCS jets were only needed until the ship glided below 339,000 feet 2 minutes 41 seconds after slamming into the atmosphere. From there, the wings' flying surfaces would begin to take over the burden of steering.

“Traj One is up, Flight.”

“Copy, Will.”

The first of a series of re-entry plots was now on Mother's televisions. The object of the computers and the crew is to steer a graphic Shuttle-bug down the curved graphs. To fly ahead of or behind the power curve would be fatal.

Underneath Shuttle at 10 hours 03 minutes, Port Elizabeth in darkness passed for a final 45-second landfall as the ship rounded South Africa for her last time.

“Endeavor: Sunrise in 7 minutes at 10 plus 10.”