Brown, Dale - Independent 01

by Silver Tower (v1. 1)

  This was her place, all right. Free. Open. The thought of being cooped up, strapped in, locked in place seemed scary, repugnant.

  She had reached the top of the small rise, and abruptly found herself a few hundred yards from a tall fence illuminated every fifty yards by powerful searchlights. A concrete guard shack blocked the road in front of her. Air force security guards with rifles and dogs patrolled the fence; the dogs were barking, straining against their leashes, their super-sensitive noses picking up the intruder.

  Three miles beyond the twelve-foot-high fence stood a massive structure, brilliantly illuminated and clearly visible in spite of its distance. It looked like a skyscraper sitting in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred yards from the building was a squat, ungainly shape dwarfed by the skyscraper, surrounded by open-skeleton towers on two sides and also illuminated by large banks of super-powered spotlights. She was looking at the ultimate, the rebuilt space shuttle Enterprise. And the skyscraper-like building to the right of it—the one she had first seen when she had come over the rise—was the new Vandenburg Vehicle Assembly Building. There was movement of the men near the front gate and the concrete guard shack but it didn’t register in her mind. Her attention was all on the ungainly, squat machine sitting on top of a tall concrete pedestal in the distance.

  From a distance it looked so small. She had seen many shuttles, of course. She had been in Enterprise numerous times on dry-run rehearsals, emergency egress training, orientation walkarounds. From up close at the shuttle’s base or on the access tower the thing looked huge. She had never felt confined or claustrophobic around the shuttle—until now. From this vantage point it looked like a toy model.

  And she was going to strap herself in that toy and let someone ignite four million pounds of propellants and rocket fuel under her, blasting her at twenty-five times the speed of sound hundreds of miles into the sky. Was she crazy?

  Even crazier was that she had had to work to get aboard that thing. She had to apply, be interviewed, beg, plead, cajole just to be considered. After that there had been months of waiting, then six months of training, study, simulators, tests, exercises, presentations—all so she could live hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface, breathing recirculated air, eating irradiated food, drinking chemically produced water and coping with microgravity.

  She was so caught up in conflicting emotions that she didn’t notice the air force security police jeep drive up alongside her. It was the heavy breathing of a huge Doberman pinscher that pulled her back.

  “This is a restricted area,” one patrolman said as he approached, shining a flashlight into Ann’s face, his M-16 automatic rifle at port arms. “Identification. Now.”

  She absently reached into a right thigh flight-suit pocket to retrieve her ID card. It wasn’t until she had unzipped that the guard recognized her.

  “Dr. Page?” He took the ID card from her, scanned it, handed it back. “Saw your picture in the paper. You’re going on this morning’s flight ”

  “Yes, right,” she said, hoping she sounded more official than she felt.

  The guard handed the dog to an airman beside him, looped the rifle back onto his right shoulder. “You shouldn’t be out here alone....” He stopped and looked at her. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes. I was just a little impatient to get to the pad so I decided to walk....”

  “From the main base?”

  “I... I ended up jogging. It felt good, peaceful....”

  “Yeah, I guess it would,” he said. “I’d probably do something like that if I was going to ride that candle.... I’d want to take one last look at ol’ Mother Earth before leavin’.... Well, I’ll have to take you to the Shuttle Flight Center, Dr. Page. You can’t be walking around out here by yourself. I’m surprised someone didn’t pick you up when you left the main base.”

  She scarcely heard him, had withdrawn into her thoughts again. What was it that was bothering her? Was it fear of death? She had never confronted death before. Even in shuttle training, even through all the briefings and classes, she had never thought about dying. Besides, that was a no-no, everybody knew that.

  She let herself be led to the jeep, rode with the security guard commander, nodding absently at his comments.

  No, damn it, she wasn’t afraid to die. She knew it was possible, knew it could happen any moment without any warning. But, to coin a cliche, it went with the territory, and it was a territory she badly wanted.

  As her attention drifted back to the security guard, she heard him saying he’d always wanted to go up on the shuttle but didn’t have any specialized degree beyond a B.S. Besides he was only an enlisted man...

  “All you need is a technical degree and you can be any rank. Doesn’t matter. Hey, I don’t have any rank. I’m a civilian. They need technical degrees and volunteers willing to dedicate themselves to the program. Back in the seventies and eighties they wanted experienced flyers and senior officers. Now, they need crewmembers for a whole range of jobs....”

  Ann realized she sounded like a NASA recruiter. Was she really as enthusiastic as she sounded? Was it really so simple? Right now she needed to believe that this flight into space was at once routine and a chance of a lifetime. That’s the only way she’d get through this thing.

  As the jeep pulled up in front of a low steel-and-concrete building, the Vandenburg Shuttle Flight Center, she took a final look overhead. The ebony sky was brightening to azure blue, closing off the vastness that would soon enclose her.

  SPACE SHUTTLE ENTERPRISE

  Three hours later the crew of the Space Shuttle Enterprise stepped into the elevator in the service tower and rode it to the orbiter entry level. They walked across the service arm and into the “white room,” where white-suited, surgical-masked technicians used vacuum cleaners to remove any bits of dirt and gravel off their boots and uniforms that could accumulate in the crew compartment during microgravity flight. Then, one at a time, they walked toward the circular side hatch into the shuttle.

  When it was her turn, Ann stopped and shook hands with one of the techs.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly. They barely knew each other, but the emotions were the same. No more words were necessary.

  Originally, Enterprise had been built for landing tests. In 1977 it had been released off the back of a modified Boeing 747 carrier plane to test its ability to glide to a landing with no power. It was never intended that Enterprise ever be launched into space.

  The Challenger accident in 1986 had changed that. It had been far less expensive to refit Enterprise for space flight than to build a new orbiter, so the refitting process began late in 1987. Enterprise inherited much of the new 1980s technology in space shuttle design. The first difference was obvious as Ann stepped towards the entrance hatch—the absence of the thermal protection system’s insulation tiles. Instead, the shuttle used a smooth fabric blanket made of carbon-carbon—lighter, stronger and less expensive than the silica tiles on Columbia and Atlantis. Earlier, only the shuttle’s nosecap and wing leading edges had the extreme high-heat protection of carbon- carbon alloys—now the entire surface had it. Whereas the old exterior had looked rough and scaly, like a lizard’s skin, the new exterior was pure white, smooth and glassy.

  Ann was helped through the entry hatch and into the middeck area of Enterprise's crew compartment, where she looked down at the storage compartments, personal hygiene station, and airlock hatch. “Weird,” she said, “I’m standing on the wall, like Spider Woman.”

  Captain Marty Schultz, the Enterprise's payload specialist, was just stepping up the ladder to the upper flight deck. “Wait till you get into orbit on Silver Tower,” he said. “Walls, ceiling, up, down—all gone. Silver Tower is another world.”

  She crawled up the ladder behind Schultz, who was now standing beside three seats on the flight deck, and looking high “above” herself, saw Air Force Colonel Jerrod Will, the mission commander, and Marine Colonel Richard Sontag, the Enterprise's pilot, in their seat
s. They looked “down” as she crawled into the flight deck and pulled herself up.

  “Crawl across the seats and take the right side,” Schultz said. She maneuvered herself across the flight deck and onto the right-hand mission-specialist seat. A technician walking on marked areas on the payload control panel in the back of the flight deck helped her strap in and handed her a “Snoopy’s hat” communications headset, which looked like an old college football helmet with wide ear cups.

  “Your portable oxygen system is on your right here,” the tech told her as Ann strapped herself in. He talked her through a preflight of the portable oxygen system, POS, and her comm panel while Schultz and Kevin Baker, the gray-haired designer of the Silver Tower Thor interceptor missile system, crawled into their seats. Ann felt more normal after she was strapped in, but the sight of technicians standing sideways on the walls while she was seated facing up was still disorienting.

  “I can see why some people get airsick on the ground,” Baker said.

  Marty Schultz gave the older man a reassuring look. “As I just told Ann, once they close the hatch we’re in a new world. The first time I rode the shuttle the transition from earth-normal to space-normal was really bizarre. 1 felt like I was sitting on my back two hundred feet above ground.”

  Ann could feel her toes grip the front of her seat as Schultz went on. “But you get over it. Now I look forward to the switch. Everything’s a lot freer in microgravity, including your imagination.”

  Colonel Sontag glanced over his shoulder at the three mission specialists. “All strapped in back here?” he asked over interphone. All three said they were.

  Sontag gave them a thumbs-up. A moment later: “Enterprise, this is Vandenburg Launch Control, radio check on a/g channel two. Over.”

  Colonel Will: “Good morning, Control. Loud and clear, channel two.” The radio check was repeated several times on a variety of frequencies.

  “Enterprise, we are T-minus eight-zero minutes, mark. Launch advisory check.”

  Over Will’s right shoulder Ann could see a large red light marked “ABORT” snap on, grow dim, blink off. “Abort check OK, out.”

  Minutes later a white-clad technician flashed one last thumps-up through the entry way access, then ducked below, and the heavy main entrance hatch closed with a thump.

  “Enterprise, side hatch secure.”

  “Roger, copy,” Sontag said. “Crew, cabin pressurization coming up. Pressure on your ears.” Commander Will flipped switches, and Ann could feel her ears pop as the cabin pressure was increased to check for leaks or an unsecured hatch.

  “Control, this is Enterprise. Cabin pressure normal, one-six point seven p.s.i. Over.”

  “Roger, Enterprise. Out.”

  “Ann, you’re cleared for power on your payload monitoring panel,” the pilot, Sontag said. “Check out your baby back there and report any problems when your check is completed.”

  “Roger.” Ann flipped a guarded switch marked “PL MON ONE” and watched as the instrument panel to her right came to life. Except for a few miscellaneous supplies, the Skybolt laser she had developed was Enterprise's only cargo on this trip, and it was her job to check the systems on the forty-thou sand-pound laser module to be sure there was no damage that might cause contamination or a hazard during launch.

  The exhaustive check of the laser module’s five separate sections took longer than she had expected. Finally she reported back. “Payload monitor power off, Colonel. Check complete. Everything’s in the green. Ready for launch.”

  “Control, this is Enterprise. Ready to resume countdown. Over,” Sontag reported.

  Colonel Will, with six years flying space shuttles, turned to the computer keyboard, punched in “SPEC 99 PRO” and the computer monitor on Sontag’s side changed from a blank screen to a pictorial representation of the Enterprise's launch trajectory. Will checked the display. In case of a malfunction of all three of the general navigation computers, the GNCs, he would fly the Enterprise manually into orbit using the computer display as a road map. He keyed his microphone. “Control, this is Enterprise. Flight plan loaded and checked. Over.”

  The checklists ran faster and faster. From T-minus twenty minutes to T-minus five minutes, Will and Sontag worked furiously. Their main job was to start the three auxiliary power units, the APUs, which supplied hydraulic power to Enterprise. During launch the APUs would make sure the Enterprise's aerodynamic surfaces were in their streamlined launch position; during landing or during an emergency the APUs would supply hydraulic power to the surfaces to allow the shuttle to be flown like a conventional airplane.

  After T-minus five minutes Will and Sontag could do little but watch the computers on Enterprise and acknowledge status checks from Vandenburg Launch Control.

  “T-minus two minutes,” Launch Control reported. “H-two and O-two tanks pressurized, Enterprise. You are go for launch. Over.”

  “Copy, Control. We’re go for launch.” Sontag looked over his shoulder once more at Page, Schultz and Baker.

  “Here we go....”

  “Put the pedal to the metal, Colonel,” Schultz said and immediately regretted it. Pretty callow stuff, he told himself. The others indulged him by ignoring it. Ann settled herself as far as possible in her seat and pulled her seat straps tight as she could stand it. The air felt electric—not stuffy or humid but super-charged with power. Far below she could feel the rumble of another piece of equipment—the solid rocket booster’s ignition APUs. The thought of six million pounds of thrust about to be let loose made her eyes shut tight.

  “T-minus ten seconds ... nine... eight....”

  She nearly jumped out of her seat as she felt a gentle touch on her left hand.

  “Relax.”

  It was Marty Schultz, nodding. “It’ll be fine, relax.”

  She took a deep breath, feeling as if it was the first she’d taken in hours.

  “... Six ... five. .. four.... ignition sequence start... main engine one ignition... two ignition ... three ignition.. ..” Sontag wasn’t talking over the interphone—he was screaming out loud cross cockpit: “... Manifold pressure good all three engines... three in the green ”

  One hundred feet behind Ann, the three main engines were cranking out one-and-a-quarter million pounds of thrust, but almost no noise or vibration could be felt. Ann did feel a twang, the sway of the orbiter towards the external tank as the main engines moved toward full thrust, but even that wasn’t too noticeable.

  She knew from endless simulation what came next. She could just make out the ABORT light on the front instrument panel It hadn’t come on, thank God. When the orbiter realigns itself after the twang it meant—

  It felt as if a freight train had just rumbled out of nowhere right beside her—from near-quiet to ear-splitting sound—as the solid rocket boosters ignited. She couldn’t help letting out a gasp as the solid rocket boosters, the SRBs, exploded into action. In three seconds the thrust beneath her had been multiplied by a factor of five; now the fury of over six million pounds of thrust was alive, and Enterprise had not yet even left earth.

  Suddenly a huge hand pressed against her chest, causing her to involuntarily expel air in a grunt. Stars clouded her vision, but she could see the launch service tower drop from view.

  Airborne.

  “Enterprise, you have cleared the tower. Engines look good.” Ann was surprised to see Will and Sontag reaching up to their forward instrument panels; she tried to raise her hand against the “g” forces, found they were light but building. Soon even lifting one hand took effort.

  “Control, this is Enterprise. Main engines at sixty-five percent. Over.”

  “Roger, Enterprise. Standing by for max Q.”

  Ann clutched the armrests of her seat. Here came one of the most critical moments of the launch—the moment when all of the dynamic pressures affecting the shuttle were—

  “Max Q, Control. Main engines one hundred percent.”

  “Roger, people. Very pretty launch. S
pectacular. Out.”

  That was it? No earth-shaking rumble, no squashed face, no blasts of Vulcan heat? The “g” forces were noticeable, but Ann had felt worse lots of times.

  “Coming up on SRB burnout, Control.”

  The solid rocket boosters burned out and were jettisoned precisely on schedule, under computer control. Enterprise was now several hundred miles west of Mexico on its southern pole-to-pole trajectory. The SRB motor casings, each floating to earth under three one- hundred-fifteen-foot-diameter parachutes, would be retrieved over the Pacific Ocean.

  Enterprise's ride was somewhat different from other shuttle flights. First, Enterprise was following an eccentric elliptical polar orbit instead of a circular equatorial orbit. And second, Enterprise was climbing to an altitude of one thousand miles so that it could rendezvous with Silver Tower as it traveled in high orbit. Because of fuel limitations, previous shuttle flights had been limited to a maximum altitude of about seven hundred miles above earth.

  It was several hours before Will finally announced: “Welcome to space, crew. OMS bum is complete. We are in orbit.” Relief washed across everyone’s face.

  “We’re within a few miles of Silver Tower’s orbit,” Sontag reported over interphone. “We saved ourselves a few hundred pounds of fuel on that bum, so we have a small safety margin. I’m estimating linkup with Silver Tower in two hours—it’s about fifteen thousand miles ahead of us, but we’re gaining.. .. Marty, you’re clear to open the cargo bay doors. After that you’ll all be cleared to unstrap to begin system checkouts. Kevin, check the middeck for any damage or anything out of place.”

  Schultz and Baker acknowledged Sontag’s call and began to unstrap. Ann looked on as Schultz’s straps began to float around his vacated seat before he resecured them.

  “Remember,” Schultz said, “even though you’re weightless up here in orbit, your body still has mass that you need to overcome, which means stopping yourself after you get moving.”

  “So I noticed,” Baker mumbled after he’d unstrapped and promptly collided head-first with the ceiling.