by Jeff Pollard
(T+2:57) Rocket Control: Approaching MECO-2.
(T+3:00) Stage One Control: MECO-2.
(T+3:00) Guidance: Flight computer in second stage.
(T+3:01) Payload Control: Griffin has sensed MECO-2.
(T+3:02) Rocket Control: Stage one separation confirmed.
(T+3:04) Second Stage Control: Second stage online.
(T+3:06) Range Officer: Range confirm clean separation.
(T+3:13) Second Stage Control: Second stage at full power.
And just like that, the over 200-foot-tall rocket is now just a 70-foot-tall rocket. The first stage and its empty tanks, its nine turned off engines, and all that dead weight, falls away as the second stage and its single vacuum-optimized Arthur engine fires up. The second stage Arthur is essentially the same rocket as the ones that power the first stage, except that the nozzle is optimized to work more efficiently in the vacuum of space. The nozzle is much longer and wider, taking into account the extent to which the rocket exhaust will expand with no ambient pressure to compress it.
(T+3:55) Payload Control: Nose-cone separation.
Out of the atmosphere, the aerodynamic nose-cone covering the rather flat top of the Griffin capsule is no longer needed. Explosive bolts fire, shooting the nose-cone off, and the rocket will quickly accelerate past it as it falls back to Earth. The docking port and hatch of the Griffin are now the tip of the spear. Kingsley eyes a video feed on a monitor, showing the view from the docking camera mounted on the top of the capsule. It had been seeing nothing but the inside of the nosecone, and then suddenly it was seeing the curved blue atmosphere as it meets the blackness of space. They were above the sky.
(T+4:10) Second Stage Control: Second stage propulsion systems nominal.
(T+4:23) Guidance: Vehicle remains on nominal trajectory, vehicle is 148 kilometers in altitude, velocity of 3.2 kilometers per second, and downrange distance of 346 kilometers.
That's about 485,000 feet high, 7084 mph, and 215 miles downrange to you non-metric folks in the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
(T+4:40) Second Stage Control: Second stage propellant utilization is active.
(T+5:23) Guidance: Vehicle remains on nominal trajectory, vehicle is 182 kilometers in altitude, velocity of 4 kilometers per second, and downrange distance of 541 kilometers.
Put it another way, five minutes and twenty three seconds after liftoff, they're 330 miles away from the pad (not counting their altitude).
(T+6:00) Rocket Control: Second stage propulsion nominal
(T+6:01) Payload Control: Power systems nominal, good telemetry lock on stage 2.
(T+6:24) Guidance: Vehicle remains on nominal trajectory, vehicle is 200 kilometers in altitude, velocity of 4.6 kilometers per second, and downrange distance of 767 kilometers.
That's 655,000 feet in altitude, 10,180 mph, and 476 miles down range.
(T+7:31) Guidance: Vehicle remains on nominal trajectory, vehicle is 210 km in altitude, velocity of 5.6 km per second, and downrange distance of 1080 km.
(T+8:34) Guidance: Vehicle is now on terminal guidance
(T+9:10) Payload Control: LOS (Loss of Signal) Cape.
It takes the Eagle 9 just over nine minutes to travel so far away from the cape that they can't maintain a radio-link. The curved surface of the Earth is in the way.
(T+9:15) Second Stag Control: Approaching MECO-3.
(T+9:20) Second Stage Control: MECO-3
(T+9:21) Rocket Control: Shutdown confirmed.
(T+9:22) Guidance: Flight computer is in separation state.
(T+9:25) Payload Control: Griffin has sensed separation.
(T+9:30) Guidance: Vehicle is orbital. Perigee 215 kilometers, apogee 327 kilometers.
(T+9:45) Launch Control: Mission Control, this is Launch Control, Griffin is all yours.
(T+9:52) Mission Control: Copy Launch Control, thanks for the ride.
(T+9:55) Guidance: Griffin, switch to abort-passive.
“Roger, switching to abort-passive,” Travis Clayton says, flipping the switch that tells the computer to ignore abort commands.
“Roger, flight computer is in orbital mode,” Pilot Tim Bowe says. “What a ride,” Tim says, looking over to Kingsley. The three men shake hands. They are the first three people put in orbit by a private entity. “I gotta piss.”
“Checklist,” Travis says simply. The Griffin's solar panels were still hidden by exterior panels that protect them from the aerodynamic stress of launch. But before they could deploy them they would need to perform a very short burn using their Draco thrusters to ensure they get some distance between them and the second stage of the rocket which is still floating along a few meters behind them.
“Right,” Commander Bowe sighs. “Activate thruster pods.”
“Activating thruster pods,” Travis responds as he readies the four thruster pods on the sides of the Griffin capsule. Each pod has four Draco engines for attitude control and orbital maneuvers, plus a pair of Super-Draco engines pointed down to be used for launch abort and/or powered landing. Simple attitude control doesn't require much force, but powered abort and landing do require a lot of force, thus the eight Super-Dracos.
“Environmental?” Bowe asks, expecting Travis to immediately reply that all is well. Instead he is met with silence. “Environmental?”
“All good,” Kingsley interrupts the silence, “cabin pressure is steady, oxygen flowing, co2 filters are-”
“We've got a problem here,” Travis says. “I've got negative pressurization on three of the four thruster pods.” Each of the thruster pods is fueled by its own tanks of nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). Flight Engineer Travis Clayton just gave the order to pressurize the thruster pods which is supposed to open up valves and allow the NTO and UDMH from their four sets of tanks to feed into the thruster pods. But only one pod has come up to pressure, an event that is supposed to happen almost instantly. More worrying, the thruster pods are what perform a launch-escape burn, and thus it seems that Griffin 6 just launched without an abort capability. If this problem had cropped up during an attempted abort, they would have been stuck to their rocket.
“Did you try cycling it again?” Kingsley asks.
“I already tried three times. All four have good pressure on the UDMH, but the oxidizer on Pod 1 is at just a few kPa, 2 is reading zero, Pod 3 is green, Pod 4 is reading 10 kPa.”
“How is that possible?” Bowe asks. “Those are four independent systems, separate tanks, valves, pods.”
“Maybe it's a software problem,” Kingsley says worriedly.
Without at least two thruster pods, they cannot maintain control. The Griffin capsule begins a slow tumble over the Mediterranean Sea, not far from their spent second stage.
“Griffin, Control,” the call comes over the radio. “The Solar Panels are starting to get too cold, we're going to need to deploy them or they're going to freeze in the trunk.”
“Shit,” Travis says, looking to the Solar Panel screen. The panels are designed to withstand the intense cycle of going from direct sunlight to shadow many times a day. But they aren't designed to stay in their recessed position for long.
“How long do we have to deploy them?” Bowe asks.
“A couple hours,” Kingsley says, unsure. “Control, do we you guys have any idea about the thruster pods?”
“We're looking at it,” the call from Control comes back.
“Okay, well, let's wait an orbit to get distance from the second stage, then we'll go ahead and deploy the solar panels and then continue trying to bring the thruster pods online.”
“Then I'm gonna pee,” Commander Bowe says immediately, unstrapping from his seat.
Nobody would say anything about it, but with only one good thruster pod, it was unlikely that the Griffin would be able to perform a deorbit burn. Even if they could manage to perform such a burn with unbalanced thrusters, they would be hard-pressed to maintain attitude through re-entry. The shape of the Griffin could keep it
s heat shield pointed down-stream, but it needs to begin re-entry in roughly the correct orientation to do so. They might begin re-entry nose first, in which case the hatch over their heads would bear the brunt of re-entry heat, start to melt and then they would be exposed directly to the heat of hypersonic re-entry. It would be a bad day.
The good news was that they had 30 days of oxygen and thus quite some time to figure out the problem. But even if they were able to limp home, if they couldn't fix this problem and quickly, then NASA would not allow the next Griffin flight to go to the ISS. And with the Griffin line in the middle of switching to Griffin v1.1, they would not have another Griffin ready for quite some time. If they couldn't convince NASA that they knew what they were doing over the next few hours, SpacEx would go bankrupt and never be able to launch humans again.
While they wouldn't talk about scenarios like this, it was crystal clear to Kingsley that his first trip to Orbit may also mark the death knell of his space program. He may never get back up here again.
Flying over the United State as they about complete their first orbit, they decouple the shroud around the solar panels, sending them floating away effortlessly from the Griffin. At this orbital altitude, without boosting, the panels, or anything left up there, would experience slight atmospheric drag that would slow the object down until it re-entered in a couple of months.
This is one aspect of space flight that must always be considered; junk stays up there for a while. Given a high enough orbit, away from the fringes of the atmosphere, space junk can linger for centuries. The Vanguard 1, the fourth ever artificial satellite, launched in 1958, is still in orbit. It's the oldest man-made object in space. It's expected to spend around 240 years in Earth orbit. The solar panel covers are at a low enough orbit that they are expected to re-enter before long, and are light-enough that they will harmlessly burn-up. With some space hardware, re-entry won't reduce the junk to harmless pieces, and poses a danger for people on Earth. So for bigger things, like space stations, when they reach the end of their useful life, they can't simply be left to decay from orbit and land wherever they may, instead they try to deorbit the object intentionally, so they can send the falling space junk into unpopulated areas (like Australia).
Once the panels are exposed, they are deployed, unfolding from their recessed position on the side of the Griffin trunk.
“Panels coming open,” Travis says.
“Good, now we can give these batteries a rest,” Kingsley says.
“Hold on,” Travis says. “I'm not getting power from them.”
“Shit. Without those, we only have enough battery power for a few days,” Kingsley says.
“Maybe they're just cold, give them a second,” Travis replies.
“Griffin, Hawthorne,” Mission Control calls up.
“Go ahead,” Bowe replies
“We're thinking that the NTO valve leading to the pods are stuck closed,” Control says.
“Have we ever seen that problem on the ground?” Kingsley asks.
“No.”
“Okay, well, why would that happen?” K asks.
“We're not sure, but all the data indicates that we've got good pressure upstream from these valves and that they just aren't opening for some reason.”
“But we cycled them on the ground before we launched,” K says.
“Yeah.”
“But they're sticking now for some reason?” K asks.
“That's what the data says.”
“So let's isolate those valves,” K says. “Travis, let's try this just on just one pod.”
“Which pod?” Travis asks. With Pod 3 working, that made it important that they be able to bring up Pod 1 to balance out the thrusters. If they could only bring up Pod 2 or 4 in addition to 3, they would still have an unbalanced thruster situation.
“Let's do it on Pod 2, it's reading zilch anyway,” K says. “We don't want to screw up Pod 1.”
“Right.”
“Okay, close the valve at the NTO tank, then vent the pipe, there's a relief valve on there.”
“Got it,” Travis says. They watch as the pipe leading from the NTO tank to Pod 2 empties.
“Alright, now let's try bringing that pipe slowly up to pressure, see if we can open the valve gently,” K says. Travis does so, opening the NTO tank valve slightly with the press of a button. They watch the readings on Pod 2 to see if the NTO pressure comes up. It stays at zero.
“Alright, so opening it gingerly won't work,” K says. “That leaves one more option. We need to slam it open like a Heimlich maneuver.”
“How do we do that?” Travis asks.
“We'll need to build up pressure upstream of the valve, then release it so it slams into that stuck valve all at once, maybe that will jar it loose,” K says.
“I don't think I can do that from here,” Travis replies.
“No, we're going to need some new software, you got that control?” K asks.
“Copy that.”
“Here's what I want,” K says. “Write a software fix to create a sort of Heimlich maneuver to slam that valve open. Go get Griffin 7, cycle the thruster pods until you can replicate the problem we have up here. Once you get one stuck with these conditions, try the software fix and see if that will open the valve.”
“So what do we do while they're doing that?” Travis asks.
“We enjoy the view,” K says coldly.
The three men unstrap from their seats, floating away, weightless. It takes only a minute to release the pins holding the crew couches in their angled upright positions. The three men fold the crew couches down to the floor of the capsule, leaving them with a rather spacious 10 cubic meters of space, or 353 cubic feet. Imagine a cube measuring 7 feet on all sides, that's roughly the side of the interior of a Griffin. In space, it's all about volume. You would be surprised how spacious a capsule can feel when you have the extra freedom of movement that weightlessness provides.
The Griffin has four small circular windows along the sides of the capsule, as well as two windows in the front or roof of the capsule, useful for docking.
Kingsley and Tim head to the front windows, taking their first good looks of the Earth from space. In one moment, they can see from Turkey at sunset, across the Mediterranean Sea to Gibraltar. One of the most striking things about seeing the world from above, is the lack of lines and boundaries. We're so used to seeing maps, we begin to think of countries as being real geographic features.
Seeing the Earth as it is, without the influence of temporary, fleeting, human governments, is awe-inspiring and humbling. The feats, the tragedies, the struggles of man seem so insignificant, so petty, so short-lived. This glorious ball of blue and green has been here, spinning like a marble in the blackness of space, for something like four-and-a-half billion years. It's flown more than four billion laps around the sun, as the sun itself flies around the Milky Way Galaxy every two hundred million years. So the Earth has gone around the Galaxy twenty-some times. This spherical collection, put together by gravity, of gas and dust, made of old comets and asteroids, the leftovers of stars that long-since exploded, to see this blue ball floating, turning, seemingly eternal, makes one feel small, insignificant. But not insignificant in a bad way. It's an appreciation of just how grand the universe is. How enormous, how complex, how unlikely. For we live our lives in the time it takes the Earth to go round the sun fifty or a hundred times. Yet our journey is nothing more than a blink of an eye in the four and a half billion laps the Earth has done.
It gives one an immediate feeling in their gut, a real appreciation of geologic scale and cosmological time. What were simply ideas, words on a page, the Earth is this old, the universe is that old, the heavy elements are made in exploding supernovas, we are made of stars, these are only ideas, strings of words that we can hear and understand. However it's a completely different experience to feel these truths in your bones, bones which are made of calcium created in supernovas. These are feelings not easily attained without cl
imbing mountains, traveling in space, or taking some serious hallucinogens, all things Kingsley has done. And yet nothing had prepared him for this feeling. For those first few moments, he looked up at the Earth as the spacecraft traveled over the terminator, the line where day becomes night, passing over the cradle of civilization, he stared in awe, once more feeling like a boy, as he could just make out his native South Africa at the edge of the sphere.
“Well, at least I'm the first person to pee in a private space capsule,” Tim says. There is not much privacy in space. For men, peeing is rather simple, using a condom-like device to capture urine. For women, the process isn't quite so simple. For Apollo astronauts, going number-two was no easy task. No, they didn't have a space-toilet. They had waste bags, basically small plastic bags, with adhesive that would essentially glue the bag to your bottom, and you would go, right there in the Command Module with your comrades just nearby. Without gravity to pull what NASA calls “egesta” down into the bag, they created two small protrusions into the bag, which let you use your fingers to direct the waste, much like a scientist puts his arms into the gloves built into an experiment station. Another complication of waste in zero-gravity is that there is no gravity to make your bladder feel full. Additionally, the bladder doesn't fill up in a normal fashion with a gradually rising level. Surface tension is a powerful force in zero-g, so the surface tension of the liquid will cause your bladder to be completely lined with urine, and to fill from the outside in. The same goes with your stomach; stomach fluids will line the inside of your stomach, not settling to the bottom. This makes drinking carbonated drinks quite unpleasant, as any gas buildup leading to a simple burp on Earth, will lead to what NASA calls “burps plus.”