Launch on Need

by Daniel Guiteras

  His retirement years had finally looked promising.

  And now this!

  How could this happen?

  Human error. It was as simple as that. Always the least-controllable variable.

  The safety signs were virtually everywhere throughout the facility. You couldn’t turn a corner in the orbiter processing facility without being reminded that safety came first. The workers had all attended a mandatory pep talk safety meeting just five days earlier. Jensen had given the talk himself and had stressed the importance of no mistakes, no accidents.

  As the workers listened intently to their well-respected leader, Jensen had told them they were facing the most intense, most critical work effort ever put forth by a NASA ground crew. “This,” he had told his workers, “has to be your best work, your best effort. There are enough technical reasons why we might not be able to rescue the crew in time, but let’s not add a preventable accident to the list of possible failures. Seven lives depend on us doing everything right. America is counting on us.”

  Still, somehow, it had happened.

  Jensen parted his hands so he could again see the incident report that lay on his desk beneath his elbows. He shook his head in disbelief as he scanned the page. Reading it over and over had not lessened the blow; his reaction was the same: Fuck.

  He focused on the box marked, “Explain the nature of the accident or injury in your own words.” This was the part of the form an employee was required to complete following an accident.

  He read again what the employee had scribbled: “While walking on the upper catwalk at the conclusion of my shift, carrying a five-gallon bucket filled with tools/supplies, I tripped and fell. When falling, I released my grip on the bucket handle. The bucket fell from the catwalk and apparently struck Atlantis’s left payload bay door. The bucket fell approximately 20 feet before making contact.”

  “Can we still do it?” Jensen wondered aloud as he leaned back in his chair, clasping his fingers behind his damp fleshy neck. The entire rescue timeline hinged on the assumption that there would be no failures. And now, just four days into the 26-day timeline to launch, the first failure had occurred.

  Will this be the incident that causes the crew to perish in space?

  In 1985, Jensen was well aware, a similar mishap occurred. A worker dropped an object on an orbiter while it was being prepared for launch. Ground crews spent two weeks repairing damage caused by that accident.

  We don’t have two weeks, he thought. We don’t even have two days! He thought of all the systems that might need to be rechecked as a result of the accident. Depending on where the orbiter was struck, this could include electrical lines, payload door operation, hydraulic lines and virtually everything in the payload bay.

  Witnesses said the tools had scattered on impact.

  Jensen rotated left in his chair to better view Atlantis’s workflow chart mounted on the wall. In doing so, he felt a twang of heartburn rip through him like a sword piercing his abdomen. This particular bout got his attention for its focused pain, but it was nothing new. He’d had terrible indigestion ever since the rescue mission was first announced. Best he could tell, he was weeks away from even thinking about seeing a doctor. He had so many things that needed his attention that when his body reminded him of his indigestion problem, the only response he could muster was, “Get in line.”

  He looked back at his work-flow chart. “STS-300, Milestones to Launch.” According to the 3-by-4-foot chart, to stay on schedule Jensen and his crew needed to have Atlantis ready to roll out of the orbiter processing facility by Sunday, Jan. 26. That was less than two full workdays away. The OPF team had been given seven days to complete its part of the preparation. Now with five of the seven days spent, Jensen feared he was facing the mother of all setbacks.

  He looked at the chart desperately, hoping to find an extra day or two he could carve from the already tight work flow, trim a little fat from the schedule. Maybe even a few hours. Did the shuttle really need to sit on the pad for 11 days before launch? Jensen knew the answer, of course. Yes, it did, and, besides, no other team would be willing to give up any of its days. Who could predict what other setbacks might be coming?

  Jensen was the lead man in a relay race against time. He knew how relays worked—he knew, for example, that you weren’t supposed to drop the baton.

  Then his phone rang. Oh, God, here comes the damage report, he thought. With the bad news only seconds away, he felt another spike of pain. The phone rang again and again. He finally reached for the phone with his left hand and touched the receiver with his fingers. Just then, a searing pain ripped through his left shoulder blade and out through his chest wall like it had been shot from a crossbow. Jensen flipped the receiver off the cradle in a last desperate move. It landed on its side, facing Jensen.

  He knew he was in trouble.

  His eyes flashed around his office walls and to the framed family photos that were neatly arranged on his desk. Was this his final life inventory?

  There was another brief bolt of pain. His fists clenched and his legs straightened, extending in tetany. His desk teetered and rattled on its legs. He felt as if he were in the clutches of a giant tourniquet. The feeling lasted several intense seconds and was followed immediately by a sudden release, which left him slumped over, covering the blotter on his desk.

  “Wally, you there?” asked the caller. “Good news—we just finished inspecting the payload bay doors…”

  The line was void of any noise, any life.

  “Hey, Wally?”

  Chapter 38

  BEFORE GETTING INTO BED, Stangley, who had always preferred a cold room when he slept, had set his hotel room air conditioner to its coldest setting. Once in bed, he wrapped himself in a top sheet and two blankets and pulled up the comforter well past his chest.

  He’d fallen asleep to CNN’s news recap at the top of the eleven o’clock hour, nearly 40 minutes earlier, and now the TV served as the only source of light in the room, flickering and flashing against the walls in muted hues of blue. As peaceful as he might have seemed to anyone observing him, his motionless crescent form served as a clever disguise for someone who was actually locked deep inside a terrible nightmare. He tried to thrash his arms and legs and free himself from the relentless volley of terrifying images that had left him in a defenseless paralytic state. The top sheet, soaked with perspiration, clung to Stangley’s now-fetal shape like the embalming wrap of an Egyptian mummy. The images kept coming.

  The huge metal scaffold-like apparatus of launch pad 39A, the rotating service structure, had been moved back into the servicing position, placing Atlantis in a protective cocoon, allowing ground crews access to Atlantis’s vital parts. A series of electrical sensors had failed, possibly due to some step in processing that was missed, or skipped, or botched—no one knew for sure. But it was clear she wouldn’t fly today or tomorrow, and certainly not before life ran out aboard Columbia.

  For the crew of Columbia, Atlantis simply wasn’t coming.

  The inevitable painful decision was finally made—NASA was going to bring Columbia in—take its chances—and hope and pray for the best possible outcome. The astronauts had made it perfectly clear to Mission Control that they were not waiting up in space for the end to come.

  Any chance of repairing the hole in the wing was now hopelessly overdue. STS-107’s mission management team listened to pleas by engineers—last-ditch attempts to better prepare Columbia for what was certain to be a tumbling inferno on reentry—but the team quickly came to the conclusion that the crew had neither the physical nor the psychological resources left to endure a two-man, six-plus-hour, unrehearsed spacewalk.

  There had been talk of jettisoning everything possible from Columbia’s payload bay to lighten her for reentry. Another idea had involved repairing Columbia’s wing by carefully packing the hole with materials that could survive reentry, namely heat-resistant tiles harvested from less-vulnerable areas of the orbiter’s skin. But a s
pacewalk to perform those objectives had also been deemed too difficult for the wrung-out crew of Columbia. It would be asking far too much.

  These combined procedures, the engineers had argued, might buy the crew extra time. Orbiter structural integrity was needed at least until reentry speed was subsonic and altitude was below 35,000 feet; if they could make that, then there was a chance the crew could survive a bailout.

  The STS-107 mission management team was having none of those heroics.

  But what they did hope to do was feather Columbia in, place her on a meandering flight path of left-and-right hand banks and bleed off some speed. They would also reduce her drag profile from the normal 45 degrees to 40 degrees, lessening Columbia’s atmospheric angle of attack. They hoped the maneuvers would reduce her friction and keep the wing from burning up. No one knew if these measures would do anything at all to improve the crew’s chances for survival.

  “What about… rescue? What about… Atlantis?” Stangley muttered in poorly formed words while turning to his left side, his hand brushing in gross movements about his face as if waving away a swarm of gnats. He did not wake, but seemed somewhat aware of the cold air attack. The temperature in his hotel room was now in the low 60s. Reflexively, he pulled the blankets up over his head.

  More images.

  From an altitude of 185 nautical miles, flying upside down and tail first, the commander and pilot of Columbia began their deorbit burn by firing the orbital maneuvering system engines for a total of three minutes and thirteen seconds. After the burn, Columbia was righted relative to Earth with her nose tilted up.

  “Okay, this is it,” the commander said, after completing the maneuver. “God be with us!”

  Columbia began falling toward Earth, belly first.

  Atmospheric molecules increasingly collided with Columbia’s protective tiles and wing leading edges, friction increasing with time, and soon temperatures reached 2,500 degrees. So far, everything was normal. She was coming in as all orbiter’s had, without power, and with no way to stop the reentry process once initiated.

  But superheated plasma gases quickly found Columbia’s mortal wound and exploited her weakness, cunning like a cheetah spotting the one gazelle out of 50 with the slightly irregular gait. In the harsh environment of space, Columbia was easy prey.

  In response to the heat, Columbia’s thermal wing sensors spiked quickly, then went dead, melted. However, neither the crew nor Mission Control knew about the failure, since these sensors were sending their information to Columbia’s onboard modular auxiliary data system—a system that archives important data for review after landing.

  Like a pelican barreling in on its prey, Columbia came scorching in over the shimmering Pacific at more than Mach 24, 300 miles west of the California coastline, and at an altitude of 240,000 feet.

  The crew had no idea what was happening outside.

  The internal wing components held their shape for as long as they could and then crumpled, reduced suddenly into liquid metal that scattered aft inside the wing. The aluminum wing components had little chance of surviving reentry, where wing temperatures normally reached 2,800 degrees.

  Above California, Columbia’s luminescent reentry arc was punctuated with bright flashes of light, a telltale sign portions of her wing were being liberated. The flashes continued at random intervals as Columbia entered Nevada air space, then Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

  She was still flying, but the sensors clearly indicated things were not going well. Four left-wing hydraulic return temperature sensors had gone dead within seconds of each other. Then the talk-back sensors that indicated the main-and-nose landing gear positions went dead.

  The tire pressure sensors failed next. Engineers cringed at the thought of the two left main landing gear tires blowing out inside their wheel well—with forces on par with two bombs detonating inside Columbia’s left wing.

  Super-heated plasma gases danced over the wing edges, lighting the flight deck windows for the crew in brilliant wisps of orange.

  Protective tiles flying off zipper-like.

  Communication ending in garbled static.

  Bright cabin flashes aboard Columbia.

  “Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.”

  Tumbling. Tumbling. Tumbling.

  Thousands of meticulously machined parts jettisoned.

  Columbia was finished. She was a proud bird that had tried to make it home, and did make it at far as Texas—nearly to the doorstep of Mission Control.

  The crew never had a chance.

  At the Kennedy Space Center, thousands were getting impatient. Seasoned viewers knew Columbia was late, and that NASA didn’t do late. They checked their watches, and gazed in horror at the countdown clock that was now displaying the number of seconds she was overdue. L+10, +30, +60—a telltale sign something was wrong—that Columbia wasn’t coming back.

  “No!,” John Stangley heard himself yell into the live TV camera. “This can’t be happening!” He had waited for NASA to break the silence—to negate the certain agony he sensed was coming. He had hoped for a miracle—a crackle over the radio that hinted communication with the crew might return.

  Stangley sat up sharply in his bed, still yelling, carrying the horror of his dream into reality. His hair, pajamas and bed nearly dripped with sweat. He felt an immediate chill in his fiercely air-conditioned hotel room. He grabbed the remote control and began frantically switching between CNN, Fox News, and the three major networks, desperate for any news of the shuttle. The time was 2 A.M.

  “Damn commercials!”

  On his third go-around, he saw a flash of the NASA logo and fingered the volume-up button.

  “At the Kennedy Space Center yesterday,” Stangley heard himself say, and then watched his own face as he gave the report he’d taped hours before. “A panel of engineers reported continued progress in preparing Atlantis for her upcoming late-February rescue mission…”

  Stangley fell back in exhaustion, allowing the icy-damp sheets to calm his mind and slow his racing heart.

  Chapter 39

  Kennedy Space Center, Florida

  CNN Mobile Studio

  Columbia Flight Day 10

  Saturday, Jan. 25, 2003

  JOHN STANGLEY GAZED down at the ground while holding two fingers to his earpiece, waiting for his cue. Stephanie Lance focused intently and self-consciously at the papers on the set’s broadcast desk while waiting for the CNN promo audio to finish. Then in the professional, practiced way she had done thousands of times before, she looked up from her papers directly into camera one, and began reading from the prompter.

  “Good morning. It’s Saturday, January 25th, I’m Stephanie Lance, and these are our top stories.” Then Lance looked down, turned her head to the right, shuffled her papers and looked up into camera two.

  “In a press conference held late yesterday afternoon,” Lance continued, “a panel of NASA engineers and managers expressed their continued optimism for the Columbia rescue mission, and assured reporters who were on hand at the Kennedy Space Center that Atlantis was in fact on schedule. Standing by live with us now from the Kennedy Space Center is John Stangley. Good morning, John.”

  “Good morning, Stephanie.”

  “Now, John, you were at the press conference yesterday, correct?”

  “That is correct, Stephanie.”

  “John, were you surprised when the representatives from NASA reported everything was going relatively well? That Atlantis was only 10 hours behind schedule, and that the accident that occurred early yesterday morning had not produced days of delay but merely minimal damage to the orbiter?”

  “Well, I can tell you that the other reporters present at the conference, as well as myself, were quite surprised, dare I say even shocked. For those viewers out there who missed this story yesterday, NASA revealed in a press bulletin that a worker had accidentally fallen on a catwalk in NASA’s orbiter processing facility, or OPF, and had dropped a bucket—a 5-gallon bucket—onto Atl
antis’s open payload bay door. At the time, NASA seemed concerned that the damage might be severe enough to cancel the rescue mission altogether. But, as you said, Stephanie, NASA now reports processing is only 10 hours behind schedule.”

  “Just another hill in this roller coaster of a story, John.”

  “Yes, it certainly is. And let me add one more thing, Stephanie. We’ve had reports that the OPF supervisor, a man named Wally Jensen, died at his desk yesterday of a heart attack. Jensen was the supervisor of the worker who had the accident, and many are speculating that Jensen may have succumbed to the incredible pressure he was under to get Atlantis ready for launch, and that the accident and its potential to foil the rescue attempt mounted the pressure even higher. I talked to several OPF frontline workers after hearing the news about Jensen. They all said the same thing about him, that he always had passion for his work. That he demonstrated a lot of pride every day, and expected others to do the same. One worker told me that there’s a further heightened vigilance to ready Atlantis for flight with the passing of Jensen. That worker told me and I quote, ‘We owe it to him to make this rescue happen.’

  “There is one final tragically ironic note, Stephanie. We’re told Jensen’s heart attack occurred just minutes before the damage assessment team determined that there was no significant damage to Atlantis from the accident.”

  “Thank you, John, for that report. Our sympathies go out to the Jensen family.” Lance paused, attempting to show authentic respect for the dead man, then continued.