Déjà Vu (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Rockets are precise. They’re marvels of engineering. Failure doesn’t come out of nowhere. Any exploding rocket is jokingly referred to as an unscheduled rapid disassembly. Given the rigorous testing of every nut and bolt, failure isn’t random. If a rocket explodes, it goes boom for a reason. There’s a cascade of components that have to fail before there are any fireworks. Disasters unfold sequentially. Based on the examples they showed me at the academy, there was generally a second or two of abnormal behavior before anything went bang. Our entire flight is abnormal. I’m hoping our version of abnormal is the new norm and we’re going to get lucky.

  “Just hang on a little longer,” I whisper to the engines driving us on toward space.

  Clouds rush past the windows.

  Adrian keeps his arm out. His gloved hand is positioned over the T-shaped translation control. Once we’re in orbit, it’ll be used for docking. While we’re launching, though, it’s tied into the abort system. If Adrian twists that anti-clockwise, we’re blowing this party wide open. The escape rocket on top of our capsule will ignite and—in theory—launch us away from the exploding carcass of the Saturn. And explode it will. Without the aerodynamic point of our capsule, the blunt leading edge will destabilize the rocket. At any altitude below 100,000 meters, the fuel tank will crumple like a coke can. If it ain’t already a fireball, it will be within a fraction of a second.

  The rocket pitches, slowly leaning over as it lines itself up for orbit. Adrian taps the glass cover on the gyroscope, encouraging it to move on from its dead-flat position. Rather than soaring upwards, it now feels as though we’re going sideways—and we are. The rocket beneath us needs to push us fast enough to reach orbit, or we’ll fall back to Earth somewhere downrange. Landing in the middle of the Atlantic without a recovery ship isn’t appealing. Coming down over Africa is even worse. We have no idea if there are any humans there. We could end up being the only two people on the continent.

  “Staging,” comes over the radio. I look at the mission clock. Two minutes and forty-five seconds have passed. I’m hoping for a smooth transition. The first stage burns out. Explosive bolts fire, separating the stages. The rocket begins to stall. Fractions of a second seem like hours. Come on, Victory—don’t let me down. Whoosh! There it is. The second stage engines fire, kicking like a goddamn mule. My helmet is thrown back against the headrest.

  We’re over the ocean. I can see what was once the North American coastline stretching into the distance. Clouds dot the sky below us, which is something I never tire of seeing. Compared to the raging inferno beneath us, they’re calm and serene.

  As we clear the lower atmosphere, the ride becomes smoother.

  I look past Adrian, staring out the far window. The sky is dark, threatening to go black.

  There are a few splutters from one of the engines. The rocket surges for a couple of seconds, with the thrust coming in waves. I tense up, anticipating the worst. I’m expecting the whole crazy thing to die. If it does, we’ll experience weightlessness for a few seconds before plunging back to Earth like a cannonball. Given how far we’ve traveled downrange, it’ll be a case of, Hello, Morocco!

  Coming down on land instead of in water is gonna hurt. A lot. Our parachutes will slow our descent to that of a car crash. Then there’s a question of where we hit. During an abort, our parachutes will automatically open at 10,000 feet. Given we have no way of seeing the terrain beneath us, we have to trust the process. As Neil Armstrong noted during Apollo 11, the Atlas mountain range in western Morocco reaches a staggering 13,600 feet. Miss those and we’ll be okay. Hit and, well, we won’t even know we’ve hit.

  Landing on the side of a dune would be all right. If our parachutes get snagged in a bunch of trees, we could end up suspended above the ground. The prospect of colliding with a cliff face or rolling down a hill does not appeal to me.

  Three minutes twenty and the escape tower is gone, rushing off ahead of us. From here on out, any abort procedure will have all the grace of a baseball flying through the outfield.

  I’m not happy. We’re low. Too damn low. I don’t think I’ve ever been this low in orbit except during reentry. We’re so low, the curvature of the planet is barely noticeable. Earth appears like a massive blue wall beside us. The Atlantic is impossibly big. There’s no sign of land. Rather than being in orbit, it feels as though we’re grazing the side of the planet. The blue tinge of the atmosphere is visible as a haze on the horizon. Beyond that, there’s nothing but darkness.

  “Come on, baby,” I whisper.

  Low Earth Orbit

  We swing around into the shadow of the planet. It’s sad to look out at the darkness and not see any signs of civilization. The spider web of lights I’m used to seeing stretching between towns and cities is noticeably absent. A quiet Earth turns beneath us. Clouds swirl over the ocean. The coastline of Africa is visible. We’re crazy low, much lower than I was when working on the Intrepid.

  To my horror, the engines come to an abrupt halt. We’re still too low. At this combination of speed and altitude, we’ll fall back to Earth. My heart sinks. I float weightless, feeling dejected, unable to say anything.

  Adrian says, “Staging.”

  The third stage ignites beneath us, pushing us into the night. I’m used to a two-stage hop into orbit. In my day, interplanetary and interstellar spacecraft were assembled like pieces of LEGO in space. Crew launches never included flight equipment. Apollo’s an all-up approach, demanding that third stage oomph!

  “Copy that,” I say, even though I’m only replying to Adrian and he’s sitting right next to me.

  We don’t have any communication satellites. There’s no global network of ground-based radio transmitters. Our contact with Mission Control is limited to line-of-sight. We can talk with Victory while we’re overhead, but that’s only for a few minutes during each orbit. I find it unnerving to be out of contact with anyone on the ground. We are very much alone up here.

  The third-stage engine cuts out after about a minute. I feel the wonderful sensation of being weightless again.

  Adrian says, “And we’re in orbit. Just on a hundred and ninety kilometers up. Traveling at 28,400 kilometers per hour. We’ll complete our first orbit in just under an hour and a half.”

  “Nice,” I say.

  We’re still stupidly low by the standards of my day, but we’re high enough that we’re not coming back down any time soon. Our first test has passed.

  Adrian seems to feel it too—a sense of overwhelming relief. He busies himself with a printed checklist.

  “Okay,” he says, removing his helmet and gloves. “Let’s review our flight status.”

  He’s right. Staying busy is good. I remove my restraints and stow my gloves and helmet. Protocol demands we remain suited up until after our Trans-Lunar Injection burn during our second orbit. For now, it’s a case of shaking down the core systems, making sure everything’s online and operating as expected. For someone who’s never been in space, Adrian is focused.

  I remember my first flight. I was glued to the window. After years of rigorous training, and even with strict goals and a carefully managed schedule, I giggled like a school kid when we hit orbit. Being weightless, I felt a little sick. It was more like reflux than a desire to vomit, and it didn’t overwhelm the novelty of spaceflight. I’d done parabolic arcs in the vomit comet, but that was more like a rollercoaster. Pushing zero-gee in an aircraft would only last for twenty seconds. Floating in space is like falling into eternity.

  For me, being in orbit is like snorkeling in air instead of water. It’s too much fun to ignore. I pull a quick summersault for kicks. Ah, it’s nice to be back in space again.

  “Do you want to take a look?” I say to Adrian, floating beside one of the windows.

  He barely looks up from his clipboard.

  “I’m good.”

  Oh, he’s so not good. His cheeks have lost their color. Adrian positions his feet beneath the armrest of his seat as he drifts within the cap
sule. He’s trying to keep the same orientation and avoid nausea. Smart. I want to say something, but drawing attention to the way he feels won’t help. Instead, I nod and start checking systems. Adrian reads off the list. He ticks off each item as I float around the control panel, working with the readouts.

  Given the amount of testing we did on the ground and the fact we’re repeating the same checklist in orbit, we get mainly positive results. The handful of failures Adrian notes aren’t critical. My problem is situational blindness. Retesting things that have already been tested might seem thorough, but I think it’s dumb. If a test passed once, it’ll pass again. I’m more worried about the things we haven’t thought of as that’s where the real danger lies. Our challenge is to avoid overconfidence. The testing we’ve already done is meaningless if there are obscure issues we’ve missed. NASA had an army of scientists and engineers and a history of successful crewed flights with Mercury and Gemini. We’re on the maiden launch of a revised Saturn. The single most expensive line item on the original Apollo manifest was testing. We’ve conducted a sum total of one crewed flight. It’s impossible to say if it’s a success as we’re still right in the middle of it.

  Ideally, we should have a crew of three, but Victory opted for just the two of us. Adrian’s the Command Module pilot. I’m the Lunar Module pilot. I get to land on the Moon all by myself. Victory had options. She had three crews in training before I turned up. We’re the guinea pigs, I guess. Knowing Victory kept a third crew member from our team gives me a fair idea about the odds of success as she sees them. Oh, she told us we were more than capable of handling the mission, but it seems to me she’s cutting her losses. As the landing is the most technically challenging aspect of the mission, I suspect she’s only prepared to lose one astronaut on the first attempt. Oh, I’ll be mourned. I’ve made enough friends among the support teams to know that. I’ll have a control room named after me, or perhaps a launchpad. They’ll take the learnings and try again.

  The funny thing is, I don’t begrudge her in the slightest. She’s made a smart, calculated decision. Victory weighed the risks against the benefits. For her, it would have been no different from a decision about fuel load times or suit design. I could see it in her eyes before we hit the stairs on the launchpad—the sense of resignation, the weariness, the feeling of inevitability. There was neither joy nor sorrow as she hugged each of us. By then, we’d been cocooned in our suits for over an hour, breathing pure O2. It felt strange hugging someone through the thick, stiff, multi-layered suits.

  We never talked about the aliens of Procyon Alpha after that first night at dinner. I suspect Victory never stopped thinking about them, but what else could she do? The way she told me to, ‘Be careful up there,’ suggests she was worried about more than mechanical failure.

  After wishing us well, Victory turned and walked away, leaving us at the bottom of the stairwell, ready to climb the metal tower. The concept of an elevator never stuck on New Earth. We had to leg it up thirty flights of stairs with the wind howling through the open support structure. Our personal life-support system was carried by some poor sap behind us. Even so, I was breathing hard by the time I reached the White Room on the gantry outside the capsule. My boots felt like lead weights. I’ve never been so relieved to slump into a flight couch.

  The radio crackles with, “—acquisition? I repeat, Romeo, do you have radio acquisition? Over.”

  Adrian replies, “This is Romeo. You are coming through clear, Mission Control. Starting the transfer of system logs. Manual checks are a hundred and eighty out of a hundred and ninety-three checks. No critical failures.”

  “Copy that. One-eighty passes out of one-ninety-three checks. Victory says you are Go for Trans-Lunar Insertion.”

  “Ah, Mission Control,” I say, talking through the thin microphone built into my Snoopy cap. “Do you have updated timing for the burn?”

  The reply is almost instantaneous.

  “We have you scheduled to conduct TLI at mission elapsed time two hours and fifty minutes.”

  “Copy that, Houston,” I say, but they have no idea who or what Houston is. They must be scratching their heads down there. “Ah, please run the burn numbers again and confirm. Over.”

  There’s silence. Adrian looks at me with raised eyebrows. When no reply is forthcoming, he switches off VOX transmit so we can talk alone.

  “What’s up?”

  “I just want them to be sure,” I say. “We’re about to swing back around the night side of the planet and lose comms again. We’ll be lighting this candle in the dark. I want to make sure the Moon’s going to be there at the other end to grab us. The idea of sailing past and into some other crazy orbit doesn’t exactly thrill me.”

  He nods. “We’re on a free-return trajectory, right?”

  Adrian’s awesome, but he trusts other people too much. I trust the math. I trust the science. It’s nothing personal, but everyone gets double-checked.

  “Yes,” I say. “But that relies on us zipping in front of the Moon at just the right distance to be drawn into its gravity well. We need that to swing back around toward Earth. Miss that window, and we’ll become million-year popsicles. We’re aiming at a narrow corridor. Anyone of a number of factors could have changed since we launched.”

  “Okay,” he says, flicking through the handwritten flight manual.

  Adrian returns to the VOX broadcast setting and says, “Mission Control. While we have line-of-sight comms we’ll walk through the TLI with you. Please let us know when you’ve confirmed those numbers.”

  “Copy that.”

  We’ve got about six minutes of clear comms so we race through the procedure.

  Just before we lose radio contact, Mission Control says, “Romeo, we confirm TLI at mission-elapsed time two hours and fifty-one minutes. Your burn will last three hundred and sixty-eight seconds. Over.”

  “Copy that,” I say, writing down the numbers. “Plus two hours fifty-one for a burn duration of three hundred and sixty-eight seconds.”

  “Godspeed, Romeo.”

  Even though there’s almost an hour to go, we both retrieve our helmets and gloves and strap in for the burn.

  Given we’re a male/female crew, Victory settled on the module designations Romeo and Juliet for our modules. She thought it was a fitting tribute to historical figures. I didn’t have the heart to tell her they were fictional characters. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, they’re both dead, but no one on New Earth knows that. I sure as hell hope that ain’t an omen.

  For now, we need to focus on our next burn. If I dwell too long on the entire mission, I find it overwhelming. By tackling each phase as it comes, I can manage. The third stage has already performed beautifully. There’s no reason it won’t do that again. This is a low-risk maneuver. If the burn fails to complete, we’ll be thrown into a highly elliptical orbit that ends up back at our current altitude. All we’ll have to do is time a splashdown in the Atlantic and someone will be waiting for us.

  Clock watching was never my forte. Sitting here strapped in with the burn program ready to go is like watching a kettle boil. Adrian and I chat idly, but we both know this is it. Once we punch that button, we’re leaving behind the only planet capable of sustaining life. If anything goes wrong in a low Earth orbit, we can drop back to Earth within about an hour. Light this fire and we’re committed. Even if we forgo a landing, it’s a six-day round trip on the free-return trajectory. There’s a helluva lot that can go wrong in six days. If I remember correctly, at least one Apollo mission didn’t make it to the Moon. I don’t think anyone died, but I’m pretty sure the mission was scrubbed and they barely made it back alive.

  “Try not to think about it,” I say.

  “About what?” Adrian says as I realize, to my horror, I was admonishing myself out-loud.

  “Nothing.”

  Sweat

  Our six-minute Trans-Lunar Insertion burn is flawless, committing us to a minimum six-day round-trip. We’re far from th
e calm, clear waters and warm shores of the Carolinas.

  It’s time to wake Juliet. We talk through the procedure with Mission Control. There’s a dedicated process to initiate separation from the upper stage of the rocket. Like the Apollo missions before us, we’ve flown into space with the Lunar Module stowed behind the Command Module. We need to get it out in front of us. To do that, we’ll have to drift forward, turn around, and dock with the Lunar Module as it sits inside the third stage of the Saturn. From there, we’ll head to the Moon ass-backward. The Service Module will lead the way with its engine bell facing forward. As counterintuitive as it seems, that aligns us for a Lunar orbit insertion burn. Without that, we’re going so fast we’ll fly a figure eight, looping around the Moon and curling back toward Earth on our free-return trajectory.

  “And we are Go for separation,” Adrian says. Somewhere behind us, explosive bolts fire in silence. The flaring protecting the Lunar Module breaks open, separating like the petals of a flower. We’re deaf and blind to this, feeling little more than a slight push as we sit in our flight couches. For the first time, the Command Service Module floats free of what’s left of our Saturn launch vehicle. We’re now truly a spacecraft.

  I’ve got the checklist, watching as Adrian applies a deft touch to the reaction controls. Tiny thrusters fire on the Service Module positioned behind our capsule.

  “Ten meters,” he says, reading off the radar. “We’re drifting slightly off-axis. Correcting… and coming up on twenty meters separation. Bringing Romeo to a stop.”

  Stop is a relative term in space. Everything is in motion. Although it feels as though we’re floating stationary, we’re hurtling toward the Moon at the rate of seven miles a second. If we were able to fly low over the coast back on Earth, it would be a case of “Blink and you’ll miss us.”

  “And pitching,” he says as I watch our orientation and rate-of-change on our instrument panel. Adrian is one cool character. Being a neurosurgeon, he’s relaxed under pressure. He handles the joystick like a pro, touching lightly on the controls. No anxiety. No rush. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was a veteran of space flight. Seven seconds later, he brings us to a gentle stop. We’re now facing Juliet as she sits in the third stage S-IVB of the Saturn V.