Titan (30 page)

Deeke stepped out of the van. Outside, light was starting to leak into the sky.

Deeke walked across the tarmac to the X-15. Inside the pressure suit it took some effort just to move his legs forward, and by the time he got to the bird he could feel his lungs dragging at the oxygen fed to him by the suit.

He climbed the ladder to the access platform over the open cockpit. The roomy cockpit was dominated by the big ejection seat. He could see the seat’s folded-up fins and booms, designed to bloom out after ejection, and the big beefy handles pivoted around the arm rests that would lock his arms and upper body in place in case he had to eject. He’d always found the massive seat terrifying; he’d never had to trust himself to its crushing, over-complicated embrace, and hoped he wouldn’t have to today.

He slid on in. Suit techs began to strap Deeke in, pulling harnesses around him and hooking him up to his bailout kit, the aircraft’s breathing oxygen supply, and the suit pressurization and cooling gas.

The seat wasn’t adjustable. He had to have pads for the seat, back and armrests.

As he looked around the little cabin, he felt his heart thump. The cockpit equipment had the bolted-together look of every test airplane Deeke had ever flown. Its hard-wired analogue instruments struck him as startlingly old-fashioned, though, in this age of glass cockpits. And the whole thing was generally scuffed and worn, despite its refurbishment. This X-15 model had been the first to fly in the test program, and the last. And it showed.

But now, sitting in this familiar cocoon, it was as it thirty years had fallen away from him; he felt young again.

He was surrounded by control panels. The front panel, dominated by a big eight-ball attitude indicator, was encrusted with barometric instruments to help with control and guidance. But for most of the flight the X-15 would be outside the sensible atmosphere, and such instruments were useless; he would have to rely on inertial data, computations performed by the onboard processor.

For atmospheric flight there were control rudder pedals and a control stick to his right-hand side, which moved the aerodynamic control surfaces. There was also a center stick, but in the course of the flight program it had become a macho thing never to touch that center stick but to rely on the side stick and pedals. And then on the left-hand instrument panel was mounted another hand controller, to operate the manual reaction controls: the little rockets which controlled attitude outside the atmosphere.

X-15 was built to fly like an aircraft when it had to, and as a spacecraft when it had to.

The crew closed the canopy.

The canopy was a solid box, save for a mailbox window to the front and the sides. Deeke was sealed in, inside this little bubble of nitrogen, unable even to lift his faceplate to scratch his nose. All he could smell was the cool oxygen in his helmet; all he could hear were the intermittent crackles of radio voices. Deeke was in a world over which he had complete control. He could make it hotter or cooler, brighter or dimmer; if he wanted he could even shut out the radio voices with his volume control. He was secure in here, safe. He felt himself receding deeper into the recesses of his own mind, his memories, and it was a nice place to be, excluding the complexities and doubts of the murky future outside.

Now the bomber’s engines started, and Deeke could feel the deep thrumming transmitted to him through the connecting bomb shackles.

The B-52 began its taxi to the duty runway. He could hear little of the noise of the plane’s big engines, the nearest just feet away from his head. Ground vehicles drove alongside, eight or ten of them, their headlights making great elliptical splashes of light over the dark tarmac. It was a rough ride for Deeke, with a lot of hard, jarring vibration to his spine. Probably the wheels of the B-52 had got out of the round during the long wait.

The control crew called out a brisk takeoff clearance.

The B-52 began its takeoff roll. It soon outstripped the ground vehicles, and the runway lights whipped away to either side of Deeke.

Then the lights fell away beneath him, and the ride smoothed out.

In the Flight Control Room in JSC’s Building 30, Barbara Fahy stood up behind her console, and surveyed her controllers. As they waited for the point, eight seconds into the ascent, where they would take over the management of the flight, the controllers cycled through their displays and spoke calmly on the loops to each other, to their back room teams, and to her. There was an atmosphere of competence, of calm.

Each of the controllers had a little plastic Stars-and-Stripes on his or her console, a memento of the mission, America’s last manned spaceflight, in this year of Our Lord, 2008. The STS-147 mission patch was high on the wall of the room, a big disc bearing a stylized planet Saturn with a Shuttle orbiter looping through the rings. It was only the second mission patch not to bear the names of the crew: the first was
Apollo 11.

The launch events unfolded, eroding away to the moment of ignition.

There were no malfunctions, no holds. She tried to put aside her gnawing anxiety.

Jackie Benacerraf was almost late for the launch.

She’d flown into Orlando and stayed overnight, and then driven out to the Cape straight along Interstate 50. But that was the wrong way; she was turned back by a guard on the road, and she had to go over a bridge to the south and drive north along Merritt Island. Then, for the first time, she got caught in traffic.

The commentators had predicted a big turnout to watch this last Shuttle launch. It would be
Apollo 17
all over again, the old-timers predicted. The nostalgia factor. Well, there was some heavy traffic here, but nothing like the density she’d expected.

But there were some roadside parties, young people glittering with image-tattoos, writhing to arrhythmic rock, draped in softscreen flags. They looked like beings from the future, she thought, brought back in time to this site of monumental 1960s engineering.

Maybe it really is over. Maybe people really don’t care any more, she thought.

At last she got into the Space Center, by Security Gate 2 off U.S. 3. There was an orderly demonstration here, mounted by a creationist group from Texas called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Here was Xavier Maclachlan himself on a soapbox, all jug ears and ten gallon hat, steadily denouncing the manned space program for the sake of the cameras.

At an office at the gate, after queuing, she picked up her orange STS-147 media badge.

She parked in the big lot at the foot of the stupendous Vehicle Assembly Building. When she got out of the car, with her camera around her neck and her softscreen rolled up under her arm, she heard the voice of the public affairs officer drifting across the lot, from the big speakers close to the press stand…
T minus Jour minutes and counting. As preparation for main engine ignition the main fuel valve heaters have been turned on. T minus three minutes fifty-seven seconds and counting; the final fuel purge on the Shuttle main engines has been started in preparation for engine start…

Four minutes. Jesus, she’d cut it close.

She spent a moment looking up at the VAB: that gigantic block, taller than a twenty-story tower, was as impressive, still, as when it had been built back in the 1960s. But it was showing its age, like the rest of the space effort. Its exterior was stained by the weather, and the big Stars-and-Stripes, painted on the building’s flank during the Bicentennial, was faded and had run.

She locked her car and hurried past the network TV buildings, with their glittering glass carapaces, to the press stand. The faded wooden bleacher was no more than a third full, last mission or not. There were a couple of guys in the front row doing radio feeds. A hundred yards away there was a portakabin press office, but it turned out that the mission timelines and info packs hadn’t arrived yet.

Her mother had fixed her an invite to the grander family viewing area, on the roof of the administration building. She’d decided she’d rather be here, in this battered old press stand, with working people, rather than drink with faded celebrities.

She sat near the front of the stand. She was looking east. The sky was overlaid by lumpy, broken gray cloud. Before her was a big old-fashioned TV monitor showing a grainy image of the interior of the orbiter flight deck—an image of her mother the astronaut, for God’s sake—intercut with shots of the Firing Room here at the Cape containing the controllers who would run the first few seconds of the launch, and Mission Control at Houston, who would take over later.

She looked around. The VAB was a big, visually dominating block over to her left. On a patch of grass before the press stand there were the press portakabins, a big rectangular digital clock, steadily counting down, and a flagpole. Beyond that was a stretch of water, the barge canal from the Banana River leading to the VAB. Behind the canal was a treeline, and beyond that, straight ahead of her, she could make out the two great launch complexes: 39-A to the right, forever empty now, and 39-B to the left, with
Endeavour.

The launch complex looked gray, colorless, like a piece of some industrial plant. Beside the gantry there were big hemispherical fuel tanks, and a water tower. And she could see
Endeavour
, the gleaming white of the orbiter against the orange of its External Tank and the battleship gray of the gantry. She could make out the orbiter’s tail, wings, windows.

It looked, she thought, surprisingly beautiful, like a 1950s vision of a spaceplane, somehow futuristic. The curve of the wing was especially striking at its joint with the body, the only curve in the mountain of engineering, graceful against the blocky industrial gantry.

To Jackie’s right there were more pads, stretching off to the south, towards what they called ICBM Row, a whole line of launch complexes facing the ocean. Among them were the pads which had launched the early Mercury and Gemini manned shots. Most were disused, dismantled. Already museum pieces.

She could have brought the kids today, but neither of them had been interested. Both of them had preferred to stay behind for some out-of-school trip to a Disney-Coke net Island.

That was fine by Jackie. She didn’t want to confront them with the reality of this. Her kids had been forced to say good-bye to their grandmother; what the hell could Paula expect from them?

Gareth Deeke was suspended beneath the wing of a B-52, high in the brightening sky over the Atlantic seaboard.

His head was enclosed snugly by the cockpit canopy. There was only just room for his helmet, and every time he moved, he brushed or banged his skull on a pad or the canopy structure. As the mailbox windows were right next to his head he had good vision ahead and sideways, but the widening fuselage beyond the windows restricted his downward vision. Because of the placement of the windows and the fuselage, he could see nothing of most of his airplane, the wings and nose, or indeed the ground.

On most planes, the airframe could be used as a reference platform. Not in the X-15. It was disconcerting, as if he was suspended in the air in this glass bubble, as if his controls were connected to nothing at all.

At twelve minutes to launch he started to activate the X-15.

Inside the B-52 an engineer was working a panel. “Okay, Linebacker, you want to reset your altitude? I’ve got just a hair shy of a thousand feet per second velocity and maybe three hundred feet up. Eleven minutes to launch.”

“Rog,” Deeke replied. “Attitudes look good.”

“Do you want to try your controls again, Linebacker?”

Deeke worked his stick. “Here’s roll, pitch, and rudder.”

“Try your flaps.”

“Okay, flaps coming down.”

“Confirm that.”

“And back up.”

“We see flaps up.”

“My aux cabin pressure switch is on. The inertial platform is going internal.”

“That’s nominal, Linebacker,” the ground called.

He went into a stability augmentation system check. Then a generator reset. A hydraulic press check. And an electrical press check…

His launch light came on.

Everything was looking good. By God, it looked as if not even a malfunction was going to curtail this incredible flight.

“Five minutes.”

The ground instructed the B-52 to turn further eastward. Thus tar the ground path had been a broad circle inland. Now, Deeke knew, the B-52 was going to line itself up with the ground path of the Shuttle, which, after launch, would be driving eastward towards its orbital path.

The B-52 crew called, “Two minutes.”

“Okay,” Deeke said, “data is on. Tape to fifteen. Push to test ball nose. Looks good. Alpha is still about one degree, beta is about a half degree right.”

“Calibrate, Linebacker?”

“Confirm, I got a calibrate.”

“One minute to go,” the B-52 said. “Picking up heading.”

One minute. Now he had to activate the engine.

“Emergency battery on. Fast slave gyro on. Ventral jet armed…”

Even now, Deeke half-expected to be called back.

The call didn’t come.

“Prime switch to prime. Igniter-ready light is on. Precool switch to precool.” Now the priming sequence had commenced, and the precool switch increased the flow of lox to the turbopump.

“Coming up on ten seconds. Pump idle.”

When Deeke pressed his pump-idle button, the rocket engine’s turbopump came up to speed and forced propellants into a small chamber called the first-stage igniter, where they were burned by a spark plug. The igniter acted like a blowtorch, firing the propellant and oxidizer into the main combustion chamber.

Deeke heard a deep, bass rumbling.

The X-15’s flight path today was based on the old high-altitude profile used at Edwards. The only powered portion of the flight was the short rocket burst at the beginning, just after launch from the B-52, driving the bird into a steep climb out of the atmosphere. Then would follow a ballistic, unpowered trajectory up to a peak altitude, and a steep fall back into the atmosphere.

Thus, Deeke would leave the atmosphere and would be weightless for several minutes. This flight was basically a short-duration spaceflight, comparable to the first suborbital Mercury lobs by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, but fully under Deeke’s control.