Zero Phase

by Gerald Brennan

  “It might be a little dustier than we’ve seen in the past,” I say after I hop down to the footpad. “The footpads look like they’re a couple inches in.” I hop back up to make sure I can get back to the bottom rung of the ladder. Despite the distance, it’s an easy jump. “Mobility is fine. And I’m ready to step off the LM.”

  I step off.

  “Ex Luna Scientia.” (Our mission’s motto. Inspired by the Naval Academy’s: Ex Scientia Tridens.) “From the moon, knowledge. The first pure science mission in Apollo, and our first round of exploration is under way.” Apollo 11 was about learning to land on the moon. Apollo 12 was about learning to land accurately. And now that we can do both of those things, it’s time to get some work done. Targeted landings close to important geological—or rather, selenological—features. Real science.

  The surface checklist, which is mounted on my wrist, says to spend a couple minutes getting used to the lunar gravity. Learning to walk anew. (We’ve practiced a little, back in the Vomit Comet, so it’s somewhat familiar.) There are a few methods: kangaroo hop, skip, slow stride. It isn’t physically hard, but your body feels so buoyant that it almost gets away from you. (It occurs to me this is something they got wrong in 2001. They did an incredible job filming the 0 g scenes and the artificial gravity scenes on the ship. But in the lunar scenes, everyone’s walking normally.)

  At last, I get a good look around. There are some very light radial streaks from the descent engine etched in the gray lunar soil. Other than that, everything’s pristine. Like a new snowfall. Leaving footprints makes you feel both guilty and gleeful. But the moon’s rough, too. So more like a beach or a desert. Bright sun, black sky. No stars as long as the gold LEVA visor’s down. Strange and inviting and new. Nothing man-made but the LM. Aluminum and fake gold Mylar.

  “Jim, you look like you’re having a blast out there,” Fred says.

  “It’s like bouncing on a trampoline. Except I’m all bundled up.” It is neat. But also time to get back to business. “Mobility seems to be good. The LM struts are evenly depressed. It seems we landed on a forward slope.” Still, I can’t resist one last little bit of fun, as the first Annapolis grad on the moon. “Also, somebody tell Buzz the Army-Navy game is now tied at one.”

  Another chuckle from Mission Control. “OK, Jim, we’ll pass that along.”

  •••

  Houston does at least understand that we’re busy. That there are certain things we have to do and other things that will just get squeezed in when we can get to them. We only talk to the Capcom, who’s always a fellow astronaut. But officially the flight director on shift (Kranz, Griffin, Frank or Windler) is in charge of the overall mission. I’m in charge of the spacecraft, but we have to listen to Flight. Chris Kraft, the original, wrote something into the rulebook a while back: The flight director may, after analysis of the flight, take any action necessary for the successful completion of the mission.

  Now obviously, they’re not up here to make us do anything. So there have been pissing matches here and there between astronauts and controllers. And that tends to be bad for the astronaut’s career. But most of us are team players, and by and large we work extremely well together. And there’s an unspoken acknowledgement that we’ll make a good faith effort to get everything done, and they won’t press us unless something’s absolutely crucial.

  A lot of tasks fall into a middle ground. Like stirring the cryo tanks on the CSM. Among Ken’s other tasks is to stir them periodically. Otherwise they separate into layers and the ground has a hard time taking accurate measurements of our liquid oxygen, hydrogen and helium. And of course, without accurate measurements, you can’t make sound decisions. There’s a general schedule to things like the cryo stir, but if other things pile up and it happens an hour later, no one minds. Or if a sensor starts acting up, they might ask for it a few hours early. But normally it isn’t a problem. Just another task on the list.

  •••

  Our first indication something’s wrong happens when I’ve been outside for about 15 minutes.

  “Aquarius, Houston. We need to hold off on the two-man EVA, over,” the Capcom says.

  “Roger, Houston.” Fred sounds unperturbed.

  Per the checklist, I’ve retrieved the 70mm Hasselblad from the transfer bag. The scenery’s gotten a little boring now that I’ve been outside a few minutes. It’s hilly but by no means rugged. Nothing as jagged as Bonestell painted, although the adrenalin of actually being here makes up a lot of the difference. Magnificent desolation, Buzz said on 11, and that sounds about right. (I’m hoping we’ll see some nice panoramas once we’re at a higher elevation.) I can see Fred through the window, finishing up some circuit breaker changes.

  “OK, Houston, we are standing by,” I add. I look around again. You can see long shadows looking up-sun, but it gets incredibly bright, even with the visor. And down-sun, the closer you get to zero phase, the more boring it looks. All washed out. You get a lot of backscatter. And finally all shadows are hidden by the objects that cast them. There’s only your own shadow to relieve the blandness.

  “Uhh…Jim, we’re working through a comm problem with Odyssey.” The Capcom sounds distracted. “Possibly a telemetry issue. In the meantime, we’d like you to go ahead and grab the contingency sample.”

  This is a quick scoop of lunar soil. We’re always supposed to grab one soon after landing in case we have to lift off early. We practice for every contingency. And normally the contingency sample is just that. But something about McCandless’s tone is off.

  I get the sample scoop from the MESA and grab a loose pile of soil.

  “Houston, I’m picking up a sample about 100 feet from the LM at the 11 o’clock position.”

  “Uhh, roger, Jim,” McCandless replies. More delay than normal.

  My sample goes in an airtight plastic bag. The entire landscape’s a bleak panorama of grey and beige. But up close the soil appears black as coal. I’m standing on the moon and I still can’t tell what color it is.

  “OK, Houston, I’ll get started on pictures,” I add. I’m supposed to take a 360⁰ panorama, so I start snapping. I can remember family vacations where I wasted time taking pictures and got home and everything looked flat and boring, because I was no longer there, no longer feeling that excitement. I’m wondering if that will happen here.

  “Aquarius, we won’t have time for that,” McCandless replies. “Jim, we need you to get back in the LM.”

  “Roger, Houston. Do we have a timeframe for resuming EVA, over?”

  “Jim, we’ve had a problem with Odyssey. We need to do an off-nominal closeout and a liftoff and rendezvous on rev 18. Please acknowledge, over.”

  My heart sinks.

  When my late great friend Ed White did America’s first EVA back on Gemini 4, they had to call him back inside once the spacecraft was nearing orbital night. Glorious panoramas, floating free in space—and then back in the tin can with the tiny window, wondering if you’ll ever be out there to see it all again. Ed was a dedicated astronaut, a West Pointer and an Air Force major, devoted and disciplined. And when they summoned him back inside he said: “This is the saddest moment of my life.”

  This is the first thing that flashes through my mind. Ed wouldn’t make it back up there, but he didn’t know it. I know I’ll never be back.

  Then: This must be serious.

  “Roger, Houston. Liftoff on rev 18.”

  Just under two hours away. But I can’t stay outside. There is work to be done.

  I bound back to the LM and put the camera back in the transfer bag for Freddo to haul it in. “Any details on the problem, Houston?”

  “Jim, we had Ken do a cryo stir and he heard a bang. Comm dropped briefly. Now we’re back up, but the O2 Tank 2 pressure is off-scale low. He had a main bus undervolt and a couple fuel cells dropped off. And he’s having problems stabilizing the spacecraft.”

  “Roger, Houston. How soon can I talk to him?”

  “Jim, he’s almost
overhead, but we’ll lose VHF line-of-sight in a few minutes. We’re gonna set you up on the S-band once you’re in the LM.”

  “Roger, Houston. Heading inside.” I take a few quick swipes at my moon suit, which has barely had time to get dirty. And I realize I haven’t looked up to see the earth from out here. It seems stupid to stop and look, but something tells me I should. I know it’s high, almost vertical. I grab the ladder and crane my head back and there it is. Far more beautiful than the moon from the earth. Round and inviting. Everything. I only allow myself a brief glance.

  Then: a smudge in the sky. Far closer than earth, straight above, moving fast like a meteor.

  “Oh, Christ.” I get a cold black feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Say again, Jim,” Houston says, but I’m already swiveling to try and see the CSM again before it passes over the horizon.

  “Houston, I caught sight of Odyssey on this pass. And it seemed to be surrounded by…a cloud of some sort.”

  “Jim, Ken said he was seeing gas and debris outside the window.”

  “But you still have comm.”

  “Roger, Jim, the CSM Capcom is talking to him right now.”

  “Do we have a revised checklist for end of EVA so I can get on there?”

  “We’ll make some adjustments and get you up on the S-band right away. Then we’ll circle back.”

  Freddo interjects: “We’ll do a rapid version of the rapid closeout. Just dust off your suit and throw away the LEC on your way in.”

  I respond: “I’m already cleaned up.”

  I have my hands on the handrails and I’ve already taken the short fateful hop off to the bottom rung. I’ve taken my last footsteps on the moon. I don’t care anymore.

  •••

  The CSM orbits the moon every two hours, give or take. Our trajectories on the way out always aim for a spot just ahead of the leading edge of the moon. (The left, if you’re looking from the Northern Hemisphere.) And that determines the plane and direction of the CSM’s orbit. It always disappears over our western horizon (the direction of the LM windows) and reappears over the east, behind us.

  48 minutes of its orbit is spent in complete communications blackout, with the bulk of the moon blocking radio transmissions to and from earth, and keeping us from communicating with them as well.

  Right now we have a brief window where we could talk directly to Ken on the VHF, but it’ll only last until the CSM goes below the lunar horizon. About six and a half minutes from when Odyssey was directly overhead. With the S-band, our words have to go from moon to earth and back, so there’s more delay. But we’ll be able to talk until Ken passes behind the moon.

  •••

  Ordinarily once I’m inside the LM, we’d get ourselves on Aquarius’ oxygen and repressurize the LM. But I’m barely through the hatch before Fred starts reconfiguring circuit breakers to get us back on the S-band. The normal checklist has gone out the window.

  Soon, we’re up. “Odyssey, Aquarius. How do you read, over?”

  Nothing.

  Again, I call: “Ken, this is Jim. How do you read, over?”

  A long pause. About five seconds. The laws of physics refuse to bend to our urgency.

  At last: “Clear enough, Jim.”

  “All right, Ken, what’s the situation?”

  I wait.

  Then: “Jim, there appears to be a cloud of debris around me. O2 Tank 2 is still off-scale low. I think it exploded during the cryo stir.”

  “What are the levels on Tank 1?” The tanks are next to one another. Which is obviously bad. Everything’s been designed with a certain percentage reliability. The thinking being that if Tank 2 has a .999999 reliability rate, then when the .000001 happens, the other one should still be good. Probability on your side. Another branch on the tree. But probability assumes these are independent events. Whereas when Tank 1 is a few inches away from Tank 2, and Tank 2 blows up, the reliability of Tank 1 is suddenly going to be less than .999999. And we need Tank 1 to get home.

  A response: garbled.

  “Odyssey, Aquarius, say again, over.”

  I wait.

  At last: “…still steady, Jim. I thought I saw a fluctuation earlier, but I think we’re OK.”

  It occurs to me that it’s a good thing the explosion didn’t happen earlier in the flight. If Tank 2 had been any fuller, the explosion might have knocked out Tank 1 as well.

  “How are you on power?” Another concern. If the electricity isn’t stable, we can’t gimbal the SPS and do a proper burn. We’d be liable to end up tumbling. Or off course. Somewhere other than earth.

  “Fuel cells 1 and 3 dropped offline…been able to restore 1. The spacecraft was rattled around a bit and I almost lost the alignment, but we are still OK.” Ken sounds curt, businesslike. I’m glad he’s up there. He knows the CSM better than anyone. “We need to keep the platform…so much debris I don’t think I could do another alignment.”

  This is undoubtedly serious. They designed the guidance system with three gyroscopes. If you move into certain attitudes, they will lock up. Then you have to do another star alignment, otherwise you can’t do an SPS burn to get home. And he’s saying we can’t do another alignment. (A fourth gyroscope would have prevented this problem. But they decided on three years ago. And there’s no point getting worked up about it now.)

  “Understood, Odyssey.”

  McCandless interjects: “Jim, we’re not confident about the condition of the SPS, over.”

  In the space program, short sentences speak volumes. The SPS is the CSM’s main engine. Our only ticket home. And because they couldn’t make it redundant, they made it as reliable as possible. But there are a few failure modes. It’s powered by hypergolics. Fuels that ignite on contact. So it’s simple. But if the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide lines have been ruptured, we’re in trouble. If the hypergolics come together outside the combustion chamber, there will be an explosion. Possibly far worse than what already happened. If the SPS doesn’t work at all, we’re stuck in lunar orbit until we run out of power and oxygen. If it doesn’t work precisely, we’re Lord knows where. Orbiting the sun, maybe. Lost in space.

  In short, anything less than perfect will be fatal.

  But there is no point dwelling on this. I look out at the stars and the perfect blackness in between. I am only thinking about what needs to be done. “Understood, Houston. Can we do anything about it?”

  I wait for their answer.

  At last: “We’re working on that now, Jim.”

  •••

  I’ve rarely been afraid when out in nature. I understand the dangers in a theoretical sense. But emotionally I’m at peace. You look at the surface of the sea and the average person will let their mind run wild. Their head will conjure up all the ways they can die. Storms, sinkings, sea serpents. I just see the sea.

  I never realized until I went to space that I’d never really been in nature. Statistically speaking. What we see as normal is anything but. I think of the Greeks and their classical elements: fire, earth, air, water. When you are in orbit you see the great black space beyond all of this. The Greeks thought their four elements represented everything. They had no concept of zero. They couldn’t know how much of everything is nothing. 0.99999999 and on, to Lord knows how many decimal places. When you look at it that way, we are insignificant.

  •••

  “Forward hatch closed and locked. Dump valve to auto,” I tell everyone. We are doing a cabin repress and getting ready for liftoff. Taking comfort in routine.

  “Cabin repress breaker closed,” Freddo says. “And the cabin is repressurizing.”

  From Houston: “Sounds good, Aquarius.”

  “Pressure regulators A and B going to cabin. PLSS oxygen off.”

  “PLSS O2 is off,” I echo.

  “Let’s go PTT,” Freddo says.

  I know what this means: Let’s talk without everyone listening. “Going to PTT,” I announce. Again I think of the astronauts talking
in the pod in 2001. Trying not to be overheard. Houston is our HAL. But they’re trying to keep us alive.

  “I’m not confident about the condition of the SPS,” Freddo says.

  “What choice do we have?”

  “Do the mission. Go to Cone Crater.”

  “We’d still have the same issue tomorrow.”

  He shrugs.

  Obviously we could, if we so choose, be the first humans to die on the moon. I’m wondering if this is what he’s suggesting. Ordinarily not something either one of us would contemplate, but this is obviously not an ordinary situation.

  (In the movies, I suppose there could be a real argument here. Tension, frustration, disagreement, shouting. But we’re both adults. We both know the stakes. So what purpose would any of that serve? There’s enough to be tense about without us adding to it.)

  At last I reply: “When we were up here on 8, since we were gone on Christmas, I arranged to send Marilyn a fur coat with a note. ‘Merry Christmas from the Man in the Moon.’ Trying to make light of things. Because it was tense. Frank’s wife was convinced the SPS would fail. That we’d be stranded in lunar orbit. And obviously none of us plans for failure. But one night I couldn’t sleep. Not worried, just thinking. And it occurred to me: They’d probably take our wives in to the MOCR and let them say their goodbyes. And then we would have just turned the radios off.”

  Fred cocks his head.

  “That way it’d all be hazy in their minds. If they wanted to, even years later, they could just look up at the moon and say, ‘He’s still up there.’ Well, if we had a zero probability of return here, if the CSM crashed in front of us, that’d be one thing. But if that probability isn’t zero, I wouldn’t want my family thinking I’d done anything to minimize it. So as much as I want to see Cone Crater, I’m not gonna be the Man in the Moon.”

  Freddo nods. Or maybe it’s a nod. I don’t ask.

  We’re resetting a few circuit breakers and doffing our gloves when Houston comes on: “Jim, we’re going to have Ken do a quick SPS burn at 10% thrust before we go LOS on the CSM. That should let us give you more data.”