Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a constant, high-pitched whir, of environment control pumps and fans.

  Lamb, sitting in Columbia’s left-hand commander’s seat, punched the deorbit coast mode program into the keyboard to his right. Benacerraf, sitting behind the pilots in the Flight Engineer’s jump seat, followed his keystrokes. OPS 301 PRO. Right. Now he began to check the burn target parameters.

  Bill Angel, Columbia’s pilot, was sitting on the right-hand side of the flight deck. “I hate snapping switches,” he said. “Here we are in a new millennium and we still have to snap switches.” He grinned, a little tightly. It was his first flight, and now he was coming up to his first landing. And, she thought, it showed.

  Lamb smiled, without turning his head. “Give me a break,” he said evenly. “I’m still trying to get used to fly by wire.”

  “Still missing that old prop wash, huh, Tom?”

  “You got it.”

  Amid the bull, the two of them began to prepare the OMS orbital maneuvering engines for their deorbit thrusting. Lamb and Angel worked through their checklist competently and calmly: Lamb with his dark, almost Italian looks, flecked now with gray, and Angel the classic WASP military type, with a round, blond head, shaven at the neck, eyes as blue as windows.

  Benacerraf was kitted out for the landing, in her altitude protection suit with its oxygen equipment, parachutes, life-raft and survival equipment. She was strapped to her seat, a frame of metal and canvas. Her helmet visor was closed.

  She had felt safe on orbit, cocooned by the Shuttle’s humming systems and whirring fans. Even the energies of launch had become a remote memory. But now it was time to come home. Now, rocket engines had to burn to knock Columbia out of orbit, and then the orbiter would become a simple glider, shedding its huge orbital energy in a fall through the atmosphere thousands of miles long, relying on its power units to work its aerosurfaces.

  They would get one try only. Columbia had no fuel for a second attempt.

  Benacerraf folded her hands in her lap and watched the pilots, following her own copy of the checklist, boredom competing with apprehension. It was, she thought, like going over the lip of the world’s biggest roller-coaster.

  On the morning of Columbia’s landing at Edwards, Jake Hadamard flew into LAX.

  An Agency limousine was waiting for him, and he was driven out through the rectangular-grid suburbs of LA, across the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the Mojave. His driver—a college kid from UCLA earning her way through an aeronautics degree—seemed excited to have NASA’s Administrator in the back of her car, and she wanted to talk, find out how he felt about the landing today, the latest Station delays, the future of humans in space.

  Hadamard was able to shut her down within a few minutes, and get on with the paperwork in his briefcase.

  He was fifty-two. And he knew that with his brushed-back silver-blond hair, his high forehead and his cold blue eyes—augmented by the steel-rimmed spectacles he favoured—he could look chilling, a whiplash-thin power from the inner circles of government. Which was how he thought of himself.

  The paperwork—contained in a soft screen which he unfolded over his knees—was all about next year’s budget submission for the Agency. What else? Hadamard had been Administrator for three years now, and every one of those years, almost all his energy had been devoted to preparing the budget submission: trying to coax some kind of reasonable data and projections out of the temperamental assholes who ran NASA’s centers, then forcing it through the White House, and through its submission to Congress, and all the complex negotiations that followed, before the final cuts were agreed.

  And that was always the nature of it, of course: cuts.

  Hadamard understood that.

  Jake Hadamard, NASA Administrator, wasn’t any kind of engineer, or aerospace nut. He’d risen to the board of a multinational supplier of commodity staples—basic foodstuffs, bathroom paper, soap and shampoo. High-volume, low differentiation; you made your profit by driving down costs, and keeping your prices the lowest in the marketplace. Hadamard had achieved just that by a process of ruthless vertical integration and horizontal acquisition. He hadn’t made himself popular with the unions and the welfare groups. But he sure was popular with the shareholders.

  After that he’d taken on Microsoft, after that company had fallen on hard times, and Bill Gates was finally deposed and sent off to dream his Disneyland dreams. By cost-cutting, rationalization and excising a lot of Gates’s dumber, more expensive fantasies—and by ruthlessly using Microsoft’s widespread presence to exclude the competition, so smartly and subtly that the antitrust suits never had a chance to keep up—Hadamard had taken Microsoft back to massive profit within a couple of years.

  With a profile like that, Hadamard was a natural for NASA Administrator, in these opening years of the third millennium.

  And even in his first month he’d won a lot of praise from the White House for the way he’d beat up on the United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed consortium that ran Shuttle launches, and then on Loral, the company which had bought out IBM’s space software support division.

  Hadamard planned to do this job for a couple more years, then move up to something more senior, probably within the White House. The long-term plan for NASA, of course, was to subsume it within the Department of Agriculture, but Hadamard didn’t intend to be around that long. Let somebody else take whatever political fallout there was from that final dismantling, when all the wrinkly old Moonwalker guys like Tom Lamb and Marcus White got on the TV again, with their premature osteoporosis and their heart problems, and started bleating about the heroic days.

  Hadamard was under no illusion about his own position. He wasn’t here to deliver some kind of terrific new Apollo program. He was here to administer a declining budget, as gracefully as he could, not to bring home Moonrocks.

  There had been no big new spacecraft project since the Cassini thing to Saturn that was launched in 1997, and even half of that was paid for by the Europeans. There sure as hell wasn’t going to be any new generation of Space Shuttle—not in his time, not as long as a couple of decades’ more mileage could be wrung out of the four beat-up old birds they had flying up there. The aerospace companies—Boeing North America, Lockheed Martin—did a lot of crying about the lack of seedcorn money from NASA, the stretching-out of the X-33 Shuttle replacement program. But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn’t actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.

  The car turned onto Rosamond Boulevard, passed a checkpoint, and then arrived at the main gate of Edwards Air Force Base. The driver showed her pass, and the limo was waved through.

  He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

  They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

  He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

  Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR—pronounced “Ficker,” for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

  Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five percent. Visibility was eight miles. Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for land
ing.

  Everything, right now, looked nominal.

  She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial—and dangerous—phase.

  This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old US flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules…

  But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated—very nineties, done out in blue and gray, with a row of absurd pot-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

  Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS Helium press switches open…

  Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

  “Got the comms locked in there, Inco?”

  “Nice strong signal, Flight.”

  “How about you, Fido?”

  “Coming down the center of the runway, Flight, no problem.”

  “Guidance, you happy?”

  “Go, Flight.”

  “DPS?”

  “All four general purpose computers and the backup are up, Flight; all four GPCs loaded with OPS 3 and linked as redundant set. OMS data checked out.”

  “Surgeon?”

  “Everyone’s healthy, Flight.”

  “Prop?”

  “OMS and RCS consumables nominal, Flight.”

  “GNC?”

  “Guidance and control systems all nominal.”

  “MMACS?”

  “Thrust vector control gimbals are go. Vent door closed.”

  “EGIL?”

  “EGIL” was responsible for electrical systems, including the fuel cells. “Rog, Flight. Single APU start…”

  And so it went. Mission Control was jargon-ridden, seemingly complex and full of acronyms, but the processes at its heart were simple enough. The three key functions were TT&C: telemetry, tracking and command. Telemetry flowed down from the spacecraft into Fahy’s control center, for analysis, decision-making and control, and commands and ranging information were uploaded back to the craft.

  It was simple. Fahy knew her job thoroughly, and was in control. She felt a thrill of adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she laid her hands on the cool surface of her workstation.

  She’d come a long way to get to this position.

  She’d started as a USAF officer, working as a launch crew commander on a Minuteman ICBM, and as a launch director for operational test launches out on the Air Force’s western test range. She’d come here to JSC to work on a couple of DoD Shuttle missions. After that she had resigned from the USAF to continue with NASA as a Flight Director.

  As a kid, she’d longed to be an astronaut: more than that, a pilot, of a Shuttle. But as soon as she spent some time in Mission Control she realized that Shuttle was a ground show. Shuttle could fly itself to orbit and back to a smooth landing without any humans aboard at all. But it wouldn’t get off the ground without its Mission Controllers. This was the true bridge of what was still the world’s most advanced spacecraft.

  She’d been involved with this mission, STS-143, for more than a year now, all the way back to the cargo integration review. In the endless integrated sims she’d pulled the crew and her team—called Black Gold Flight, after the Dallas oil-fields close to her home—into a tight unit.

  And she’d been down to KSC several times before the launch, just so she could sit in OV-102—Columbia—and crawl around every inch of space she could get to. As far as she was concerned the orbiter was her machine, five million pounds of living, breathing aluminum, kapton and wires. She liked to know the orbiter as well as she knew the mission commander, and every one of the four orbiters had its own personality, like custom cars.

  Columbia, especially, was like a dear old friend, the first space going orbiter to be built, a spacecraft which had traveled as far as from Earth to the sun.

  And now Barbara Fahy was going to bring Columbia home.

  “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.”

  Lam
b 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.