Titan (6 page)

“Capcom, tell the crew we have a go for deorbit burn.”

Lamb acknowledged the capcom. “Rog. Go for deorbit.”

The capcom said, “We want to report
Columbia
is in super shape. Almost no write-ups. We want her back in the hangar.”

“Okay, Joe. We know it. This old lady’s flying like a champ.”

“We’re watching,” the capcom, Joe Shaw, said. “Tom, you can start to maneuver to burn attitude whenever convenient.”

“You got it.”

Lamb and Angel started throwing switches in a tight choreography, working their way down their spiral-bound checklists. Benacerraf shadowed them. She watched the backs of their heads as they worked. The two military-shaved necks moved in synchronization, like components of some greater machine.

Lamb grasped his flight controller, a big chunky joystick, in his right hand. “Hold onto your lunch, Paula.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Lamb blipped the reaction control jets.

Columbia’s
nose began to pitch up. Benacerraf watched through the flight deck’s airliner-cockpit windows as Earth wheeled. The huge, wrinkled-blue belly of the Indian Ocean dominated the planet, with the spiral of a big swirling anticyclone painted across it.

Now
Columbia
flew tail-first and upside down.

“Houston,
Columbia.
Maneuver to burn attitude complete.”

“Copy that, Tom.
Columbia,
everything looks good to us. You are still go for the deorbit burn.”

Lamb replied, “That’s the best news we’ve had in sixteen days.”

Angel said, “The Earth is real beautiful up here, pal. I wish you could see how beautiful it was…”

“Okay, let’s go for APU start,” Lamb said. “Number one APU fuel tank valve to open.”

“Number one APU control switch to start. Hydraulic pump switches to off.”

“Confirm I got a green light on the hydraulic pressure indicator. Houston,
Columbia.
We have single APU start, over.”

“Copy that…”

The APUs were big hydrazine-burning auxiliary power units. They powered the orbiter’s hydraulics system. During the launch, they had swiveled the big main engines, and now they would be used to adjust
Columbia’s
aero surfaces during the descent. During its glide down the orbiter would be reliant on the APUs; without them, and without engines to provide power, it would have no control over its rail to Earth. The power units were clustered in the orbiter’s tail, beneath the pods of the OMS—rhyming with “domes,” the smaller orbital maneuvering system engines which would slow
Columbia
out of its orbit.

“Okay, let’s arm those babies,” Lamb said. “Digital pilot to auto mode.”

“Left and right OMS pressure isolation switches to GPC. Engine switches to arm/press.”

“Gotcha. Houston, OMS engines are armed, over.”

“Roger, you are go for burn countdown.”

Lamb scratched the silvery stubble on his cheek. He looked sideways at Angel. “What do you say? Shall we fire these old engines, or take another couple of swings around the bay?”

“Aw, I’m done sightseeing.”

Lamb pressed the EXEC button on his computer keyboard. “Five. Four. Three. Two.”

There was a jolt, and a remote rumble, and then a steady push at Benacerraf’s back.

The CRT displays cycled between a complex display of the orbiter’s horizontal position, and a burn status screen.

“… Hey.” Angel shifted; something about his body language changed. He was looking at a panel in front of him. “I got a warning on prop tank pressure, in the right OMS engine pod.”

“High or low?”

“High. Two eighty-five psi.”

Lamb grunted. “Well, the relief valve should blow at two eighty-six. Anyhow, we only need another few minutes.”

The burn continued.

Fahy’s controllers saw the excess pressure immediately.

“Flight, Prop.”

“Go.”

“I’ve got some anomalies in the right-hand OMS engine pod. The relief valve has just blown and resealed, the way Tom said. That brought us down to the operating range. But now I’m seeing a pressure rise again.”

“Will we get through the burn?”

“Uncertain, Flight. The trend is unsteady.”

“All right. Anyone else got anything in that OMS engine pod? EECOM, how about you?”

“Flight, EECOM. The temperature in there looks okay. I guess the heaters have been functioning.”

“You
guess
?”

“Flight, the data looks a little flat to me…”

That meant the environment control people thought they might be seeing some kind of instrumentation fault with the wraparound heaters which kept the fuel lines from freezing up.

Fahy wasn’t too worried by the anomaly, obscure as it was. At the back of the orbiter, in the OMS engine pods, was a complex, interconnected system of engines and fuel and oxidizer tanks. For safety the tanks were situated in the two separate OMS engine pods, on either side of the orbiter. But they could feed, through isolation valves and crossfeed lines, both the big orbital maneuvering engines and the smaller reaction control engines in either pod.

Even if there were a real tank defect of some kind in the
right
pod, it was highly unlikely that it could affect the
left
pod. The left pod’s tanks could then keep feeding both left and right OMS engines through the pod cross feed lines. If the defect were severe enough to kill the right OMS engine itself, the left engine could keep firing to complete the burn. And even if both OMS engines were lost, the smaller reaction control engines maneuvering jets could fire and maintain the burn, using up the excess OMS propellant.

There was a
lot
of redundancy in Shuttle.

It was a nagging worry, though.

She knew that those OMS engine pods, and their contents, were rated for a hundred flights; the pods flying today had completed eight and nine flights respectively. But the refurbishment schedule had been cut down in the last couple of years, by the United Space Alliance, the private consortium to which Shuttle ground operations had been outsourced.

She made a mental note to recommend the strip-down of that right OMS engine pod, maybe the left as well.

There were only a couple of minutes left in the burn anyhow. She watched the big mission clock on the display/control screen at the front of the FCR, counting down to the end of the burn.

That was when the master alarm sounded.

The flight deck was filled with a loud, oscillating tone. Four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

Lamb pushed a glowing button on a central panel, above a CRT; the lights and the tone died. “Now what the hell?”

Benacerraf heard her breath scratch in the confines of her helmet.

A master alarm.
Shit.

… But, she realized, the tone hadn’t been a siren, which would have been set off by the smoke detection system, or a klaxon, which would have meant loss of cabin pressure.

Whatever was coming down, it couldn’t be as bad as that, at least.

She tried to steady her breathing. She was supposed to be here to help, after all.

At the center of the cockpit consoles there was a forty-light caution/warning display. A small panel marked “right OMS” glowed red. The engine, then.

Angel said. “I think—”

There was a jarring bang, sharp and abrupt.

The orbiter shuddered; Benacerraf felt the rattle through her canvas seat, and she heard the creak of stressed metal. Long-wavelength vibrations washed along the structure of the orbiter, powerful, energy-dense.

She could feel it. The thrust of both OMS engines had died, halfway through the burn.

The master alarm sounded again. Now both left and right OMS lights on the caution/warning light array glowed red.

Lamb killed the noise with a stab at a red button. “Goddamn squawks.”

Angel seemed to have frozen; he turned to Lamb, his mouth open. “That bang was like a howitzer in the back yard. What was it, some kind of hard light?”

Lamb was pressing at an overhead panel. “Losing OMS pressure,” he barked. “Losing OMS propellant.”

Angel seemed to come to himself. “Okay. Uh, Houston, we seem to—”

“Houston,
Columbia,”
Lamb broke in. “We have a situation up here. We lost OMS.”

The master alarm sounded again; Lamb killed it again.

It was like the worst simulation in the world, Benacerraf thought.

Tell me this isn’t happening, Fahy thought. She stared at the numbers on her screen, at the flickering alarm indicators, unable, for the moment, to act—unable, in fact, to believe her eyes.

The capcom said, “Can you confirm that,
Columbia?”

“We lost both OMS, halfway through the burn.”

“Copy that.”

The capcom—a balding trainee astronaut called Joe Shaw—turned and looked to her for guidance, for instructions on what to say next.

Fahy tried to think.

“EECOM, tell me what you got.”

“I see a sealed can, Flight.”

EECOM was telling her that the spacecraft was intact; the crew still had a life-sustaining environment. That was always the first priority, in any situation like this. It gave her time to react.

“DPS, how about you?”

“We think there’s maybe a telemetry problem with a wraparound heater.”

“Where?”

“On one of the right OMS engine pod propellant lines.”

“EECOM, you got a comment on that? It’s your heater.”

“It’s possible, Flight. That heater might be down. We don’t have the data.”

In which case that fuel line could be frozen. Or melting, depending on the situation.

“All right. Prop, talk to me.”

“Prop” was the propulsion engineer. “I’ve lost nitrogen tet and hydrazine pressure in the OMS tanks,” Prop said miserably. Nitrogen tetroxide was the oxidizer, monomethyl hydrazine the fuel for the OMS engines. “If my telemetry’s right.”

“Which tanks?”

“Both.”

“What? Both pods? But they’re on opposite sides of the bird.” And besides, the OMS engines—because of their importance—were among the simplest systems in the orbiter. They were hypergolic; fuel and oxidizer ignited on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition system, unlike the big main engines. There was hardly anything that
could
go wrong. “How the hell is that possible?”

“We’re working on that, Flight.”

“How much of a loss are you seeing?”

“I’m down to zero. It’s as if the tanks don’t exist any more. There has to be some telemetry screw-up here.”

But we have that report from Lamb, she thought. We know the OMS have shut down. This is something real, physical, not just telemetry.

Another call came in. “Flight, Egil. I got me an unhappy power unit. Number two is in trouble.”

“What’s the cause?”

“We can’t tell you that yet, Flight.”

“Can you keep it on line?”

“For now. Can’t tell how long. Anyhow, performance should still he nominal with two out of three APUs.”

“Could that be linked to this OMS issue?”

“Can’t say yet, Flight.”

Christ, she thought.

“Flight, Capcom.” Joe Shaw, at the workstation to her right, was still looking across at her. “What do I tell the crew?”

For a moment she listened to her controllers, on the open loops. Every one of them seemed to be reporting problems, and batting them back and forth to their backrooms. Fido and Guidance were worried how the orbiter was diverging from its trajectory. EECOM was concerned about excessive temperatures in the main engine compartment at the rear of the orbiter. He was shouting at DPS, worrying about the quality of the rest of his telemetry following the heater defect. And Egil, in addition to his worries about the power units, thought the warning systems, pumping out their multiple alarms, were giving false readings.

Thus, most of the controllers seemed to think some kind of instrumentation problem or flaky telemetry was screwing their data. They couldn’t recognize the system signature they were getting. In such situations controllers had a bad habit of retreating into their specialisms, thinking in tight little boxes, blaming the data.

Except there had also been a crew report. Something real had happened to her ship up there.

Behind her, the FCR’s viewing gallery was starting to fill up. Bad news traveled fast, around JSC.

STS-143 was falling apart, and on her watch.

Another call: “Flight, Prop. I’m reading RCS crossfeed. It’s Tom Lamb, Flight. I think he’s going to burn his reaction thrusters.”

He’s trying to complete the burn, Fahy thought.

Lamb thumbed through a checklist quickly. “All right, Bill, I’m going to feed the RCS with my left pod OMS tank. I’m assuming I’ve still got some pressure in there, despite what these readouts say… Here we go. Aft left tank isolation switches one, two, three, four, five A, three, four, five B to close, left and right…”

Lamb was, Benacerraf realized, intending to burn the reaction control engines, without waiting either for the okay from Houston or even for burn targets. He was just, in his can-do 1960s kind of way, going ahead and doing it.

Angel was watching Lamb. He was working switches on an overhead panel. His gestures were hurried, careless, Benacerraf thought. His blue eyes were shining; he grinned, and his face was flushed. He was enjoying this, she realized, enjoying being stuck in the middle of a deorbit burn with two failed engines. Relishing a chance to show off his competence.

She felt a deep and growing unease.

Lamb grasped his flight control handle. “Initiating burn.” He pushed the handle forward, keeping his eye on his displays. “Houston,
Columbia.
RCS burn started.”

“Copy that.”

“Please upload burn targets for me.”

“We’re working, Tom. Hang in there.”

Benacerraf said, “Are we committed to the deorbit yet? Maybe we could just abort the burn and stay up a little longer.”

Tom Lamb glanced back at her, still holding down the flight stick. “The rear RCS bells are back in the OMS engine pods, remember. If something big has taken out the OMS, we don’t know how long we’ll have the RCS.”

My God, she thought. He’s right. We have to use the reaction control system while we have it, use those smaller thrusters to try to complete the burn. Because it’s all we have, to get us home.