Titan (24 page)

Light gushed out of the test stand in a ball, flaring; steam billowed furiously. He thought he could feel the heat of the bang on his face, even across a mile of desert, even through the toughened glass. It was like a nova, White thought, a star exploding on the Earth.

The explosion lasted no more than a second. Then the test stand shut itself down, cutting off the flow of kerosene and oxidant to the failed engine.

The light faded, leaving the test stand exposed, huge clouds of steam still billowing up out of the flame deflector.

Baylor lifted his glasses and rubbed his face; White could see that his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, glossy with water. The eyes of an old man.

“Fuck,” said Baylor. “See what I’m saying about the instability.”

All around them, in the viewing bunker, the technicians and managers were moving out, with much gloomy talk and shaking of heads.

Now’s the time for a bit of inspiration, Marcus. This is why you’re here. Sprinkle a little of the old Moondust on them, and get them all fired up to go out there and take that motor to pieces, and go over it again and again until they get it right.

Like they used to in the old days.

But right now, damn his soul to hell, he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Outside, around the ruined test stand, the steam clouds continued to billow out of the flame deflector. Mojave sand was scattered around the test stand in rays: dead straight and maybe thirty feet long, reminding him of the raying on the lunar surface, around his LM descent stage, after the landing.

T
his wasn’t like preparing
for any other flight, Siobhan Libet found. This wasn’t just routine, just another element in the assembly-line of Shuttle missions.

It wasn’t just that it was the last. With this flight, she was entering realms of mythology. People
looked
at her differently.

And everywhere she went she faced the classic, unanswerable question.
What’s it like to fly in space?

She went up to Boeing’s Shuttle orbiter assembly facility, at Palmdale, California.

Libet tried to remain inconspicuous as Billy Ray Jardine of Boeing conducted his tour. That wasn’t too difficult at first; the little ten-strong group, of astronauts, NASA Shuttle and Titan program managers—including Libet and Barbara Fahy—were anonymously clad in bunny suits, long, crisp-white coats and hygiene-conscious caps. They looked, Libet thought wryly, like a group of food hygiene inspectors descending on a McDonald’s.

The Palmdale assembly facility was huge, cavernous, a place of light and rectangles. The floor was a layer of some blue-gray resin, utterly flat, threaded with yellow demarcation lines and scarred with rubber skid marks from the little electric carts that rolled everywhere. The walls were painted with corporated red, white and blue stripes and huge Stars-and-Stripes. Around the edge of the floor were big, cuboid offices, like independent buildings spawned inside the gut of this monster, and the floor was littered with massive, anonymous machinery.

Billy Ray Jardine was the President of Boeing’s space transportation division. Jardine looked every bit the corporate senior executive, with his gray suit jacket stretching over his ample, comfortable belly. He would have fit in just about any era since the Second World War, Libet thought; his type had been running the country for much longer than she had been alive. Only the full-color images cycling across the surface of his softscreen tie—of old successes in space, Rockwell’s Saturn V second stage, Apollo, Shuttle itself, not to mention Boeing’s own Saturn V first stage—gave any concession to modernity.

The facility was clean, bright, every metal surface shining and unscuffed. The assembly and manufacturing equipment around her looked state of the art. Here—by Rockwell, before the Boeing buyout—all five of the billion-dollar spacecraft of the Shuttle fleet had been assembled, from
Columbia
to the
Challenger
replacement
Endeavour
, which had first flown in 1992. And Boeing had evidently maintained this facility to the highest standard. Any time NASA had asked for a revival of the Shuttle construction program, Boeing would have been able to respond, ready to accept all those fat billion-buck NASA contracts once more.

But Libet felt depressed by all this sparkling readiness. Because this facility was never going to be used to build an orbiter again.

In fact, Boeing had adapted its facility to tear spacecraft apart.

The party was taken to a metal balcony which overlooked a sectioned-off part of the assembly area floor. Here, the Shuttle orbiter
Atlantis
had been brought for its hasty modification. The orbiter’s boattail—the aft fuselage assembly—was facing Libet, with the nozzles of the three big main engines thrusting out of the scaffolding. The rest of the orbiter, foreshortened by perspective, was encased in scaffolding and protective sheeting. A little swarm of white-coated workers was busy all over the spacecraft; the air filled with the whine of drills and the ozone stink of oxy-acetylene burners.
Atlantis
looked, Libet thought, as if it was being deliberately crippled.

At first glance, the orbiter itself still looked much as it had done before. But, slowly, Libet made out differences.

For instance, the crew cabin—the nose of the orbiter—had been dismantled. Now, a simple aerodynamic cone fairing was being fixed to the orbiter’s frame. And
Atlantis’s
payload bay had been lengthened, into the space vacated by the crew compartment, to more than eighty feet: a third more than the baseline design of the Shuttle system. The boattail, with the main engine assembly, was being left almost unmodified. But the smaller engines of the orbiter’s orbital maneuvering system had been removed. Those engines brought the ship out of orbit at the end of its mission. And there was no need for a system to bring
Atlantis
home again.

And
Atlantis
had no wings.

Atlantis
no longer needed wings, or a tailplane, or retro engines.
Atlantis
was no longer an orbiter. She had been reduced to a Shuttle-C Cargo Element, a so-called SCE, consisting of little more than a payload carrier bay and an aft fuselage, with engines. And SCEs were expendable.
Atlantis
would never again carry a crew. No effort would be made to return
Atlantis
to Earth after her final flight; its cargo delivered to orbit,
Atlantis
would be slowed by its reaction control thrusters, and allowed to burn up over the Pacific.

Libet could see the big delta-shaped wings, their leading edges battered by their multiple reentries, taken away from the orbiter hulk and stacked against a wall of the facility. Looking at the severed joint of each wing she could see their internal structure; the wings were just a skin of stiffened aluminum alloy over a framework of internal ribs and stringers. Detached from the orbiter, the wings looked crude, primitive. Something Howard Hughes might have recognized. The wings had been manufactured by Grumman, at their Bethpage plant in New York. Grumman had been the people who had manufactured the Lunar Module for Apollo. She wondered what the old-timers there thought of this day’s work.

“… Of course,” Billy Ray Jardine was saying, “what you have here is an extension of the original Shuttle-C concept, which would have relied on the manufacture of wholly new SCEs—Shuttle-C Cargo Elements—rather than their adaptation from existing orbiters. Not that the manufacture of new SCEs would have presented in any way a challenge. But you have to understand that we have to pretty much take apart each orbiter to adapt it to serve as a Shuttle-C SCE. Naturally the modification of the old test articles is generally somewhat simpler than the flight articles.

“We have to make required modifications to the shroud and stringback, a new aluminum skin, and enhanced stringer and ringframe construction. We will deliver a fifteen feet by eighty-two feet usable payload space, of which fifteen by sixty is capable of changeout on the pad. Avionics and guidance, navigation and control systems are adapted from those on the orbiter; systems relating to manned life support, long duration orbit, descent, and landing are deleted…”

Jardine’s accent was Texan, his voice brisk, clipped and competent; it depressed Libet even more to think that this man could show equal professional enthusiasm about taking apart his orbiters as assembling them.

Barbara Fahy was standing beside Libet. “That smooth corporate bull does have a way of putting you to sleep, doesn’t it?” Fahy pushed back her hat and scratched her forehead. “Damn this thing.”

“You don’t look too happy,” Libet said.

Fahy fixed her hat back in place. “Should I be? I looked up the original proposal for Shuttle-C, from the 1980s. They were asking for five years to complete the development, including six months for proposal evaluation and contract award, four years of design, fabrication and assembly, a comprehensive test program, and a couple of test flights before going operational. For better or worse Boeing is rushing through the modifications in half that time. And we’ll be going straight to operational, without a chance for a single test flight. The same is true of the Saturn refurbishment program. I’m a big supporter of this program, Siobhan, this vision of Paula’s to get us to Titan. But we just aren’t giving this damn thing enough
time.”

“We don’t have much choice. The bad guys are closing in, remember. In fact, Boeing is already behind schedule.” It was true; it was the reason for their visit today.

“I know, I know. But all we need is one of these flights to fail, just one, and we won’t have the lift capacity we need. And I might be the person who has to deliver one of those flights. And carry the can when it blows apart.”

They were taken to the floor of the facility now, and walked underneath the still-graceful chin of the orbiter. The smooth, shaped surface of
Atlantis’s
belly loomed over Libet, dark and sheer, and she could see the complex mottling of the tiles and blankets of the thermal protection system.

Those tiles, all thirty thousand of them, had absorbed thousands of man-hours of development and testing. And then every one of them, shaped for a particular location on the orbiter’s complex surface, had had to be fitted individually, by hand. It was a monumental, medieval labor.

But now, teams of technicians were again working on the belly of
Atlantis.
They were on movable platforms, and they reached up and scoured and painted and dug; each of them looked like Michelangelo working in the Sistine, she thought vaguely. But what they were doing was far from creative: they were detaching those painfully-applied tiles, one by one. All in the interests of saving weight; on her last mission,
Atlantis
didn’t even need her thermal protection any more.

Discarded tiles lay around on the floor of the facility, some of them streaked and discolored by
Atlantis’s
final atmospheric entry.

The tiles on the underside of the craft were coated with a black, reflective glass patina. The shaped surface returned complex highlights from the bright working lights of the Boeing facility. The effect of the ceiling of tiles above her, with its subtle contours, was quite beautiful, she thought; it was like the roof of some modern church.

Libet shook her head. “My God. It’s an act of vandalism. We’re taking fully operational spacecraft, all this mature technology—national treasures, for God’s sake—and stripping them down to serve as garbage scows.”

Fahy smiled at Libet. “We’ve been through this. The only alternative to Shuttle-C is to turn the damn things into café bars, like the Russians did to
Buran.
You can’t tell me you’d prefer that.”

“Hell,” Libet grumbled. “It’s just—”

“What?”

“It’s just, being an astronaut is all I ever wanted to do. Flying in space, traveling to new worlds. To Nimbar, or Vulcan, or Bajor, or through that damn wormhole… But here in the real universe I got nowhere to go, except Titan, and that’s a lethal ice-ball, and we’re having to burn up everything to get there. I keep on feeling I was born in the wrong universe.”

Fahy laughed. “But you’re lucky, Siobhan. At least you are heading out. And there ain’t nobody who’s going to follow you, not in my lifetime, or a long time afterward.”

The party moved on.

They were taken to a balcony overlooking another area of the assembly facility floor. Here—Libet hadn’t been expecting this—Boeing employees, maybe a couple of hundred of them, had gathered. They were standing in their white coats and plastic overshoes, looking up at their visitors.

Jardine started giving them a pep talk. “… We’re scheduled to begin power-on systems testing in a couple more months,” he said. He beamed out at his workers from under the brim of his white hat. “And that puts us significantly under budget and only a month behind schedule, which we
will
recover. I attribute that to a mature Shuttle program expertise, careful planning and foresight by Boeing and NASA, and, most importantly, the hard work of thousands of people. I mean you people, right here, and I have never worked with a better bunch of quality workers in all my years in this business…”