Launch on Need

by Daniel Guiteras

  “Tomorrow, Atlantis is scheduled to be moved from the orbiter processing facility to the vehicle assembly building, where huge cranes will lift Atlantis to a vertical position, allowing Atlantis to be mounted to the huge brownish-colored external fuel tank and white solid rocket boosters…”

  Chapter 40

  NBL, Houston, Texas

  Columbia Flight Day 11

  Sunday, Jan. 26

  6:20 AM EST

  BOTH THE ENVIRONMENTAL-CONTROL and the breathing-gas teams were nearly finished with their morning start-up procedures at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Within 10 minutes, the NBL’s test team, consisting of 50 personnel, would begin its pretest checklist. Lap swimming for the staff would come next. And before 7:30, before Garrett and Mullen arrived for their pre-brief with the test conductor, the suit and tool teams would deliver all the necessary equipment to the NBL pool deck.

  “Al, come on, where’s your sense of adventure?” Stangley said, ribbing his cameraman and turning to start his third bout of knocking at the NBL’s unmarked service entrance door.

  “There’s adventure, and there’s I don’t want to lose my job,” Al said. “Remember, different rules apply to my side of the camera. If this little stunt of yours doesn’t go well, I’ll likely lose my job, while you’ll go deeper into the history books as a journalist willing to go the extra mile to get his story.”

  “I’m a little surprised at you. All the years we’ve worked together. I thought you had thicker skin.”

  “Yeah, well things have changed quite a bit since you’ve been gone, you know, post-9/11 and all. Security’s a bitch. Your little stunts won’t be seen in the cute light they once were. Things are more serious now. Not just here at NASA, but across the country.”

  Stangley had begun his fourth assault on the door when it unexpectedly opened.

  A maintenance worker, dressed in black work pants and an NBL logo’d polo shirt, appeared in the doorway and immediately raised a flattened hand to his forehead, shading his eyes from the glaring morning sun. “Is everything okay out here?” the man asked. His expression of concern quickly changed to one of skepticism as his gaze fell on Stangley’s CNN press credential.

  “Ah, actually, we were wondering if it was possible to reach the NBL pool’s observation deck from here?” Stangley said, feigning innocence.

  “You what?” the worker mouthed in confusion, as if it were the most ludicrous question he’d ever heard. The rules for press admission to the NBL had been clearly explained to all workers, at every level of service. All visitors, including members of the press, were to enter only at the designated entrance at the front of the building. Now that the rescue mission was under way, a huge influx of visitors and press representatives was expected; consequently, stricter admission procedures had been implemented.

  Before the maintenance employee could even begin his speech about the rules for admission, Stangley hurled another question.

  “Let me ask you,” Stangley said, looking down at the man’s ID card. “Andrew, is it?” The man nodded yes. “Andrew, do you think the observation deck would be a good place for us to get some shots of the overall facility? I hear you can get a really great sense of the pool dimensions from up there.” Stangley posed the question not in a rhetorical sense, but as if he needed and valued the man’s opinion.

  Somewhat surprised at himself, the man proudly answered. “Yes, of course. I’ve been up there. The view is great, but…”

  “Right, well, we’ve been assigned to get some shots for an upcoming program on the NBL,” Stangley interrupted, implying it was NASA-sanctioned work.

  “I know who you are; I’ve seen you on TV. But this isn’t a public entrance. I heard banging on this door and thought someone might be in real trouble. That’s why I opened the door.”

  “Well, it’s just the two of us, my cameraman and me,” Stangley pressed.

  The man reluctantly leaned forward through the opening, assessing the situation, checking to see if anyone was hiding behind the opened door.

  “We won’t be more than five minutes, ten tops. You can prop the door, then leave. We’ll even wait a few, give you a chance to clear out. No one has to know it was you who let us in.”

  Stangley paused to gauge the man’s response. Before the guy could utter the word “no,” a response Al, at least, thought for sure was coming, Stangley came at the worker with more. “Come on, man, it’s for the rescue mission. We’re all caught up in the drama just like you are. We’ll only be a few minutes, then we’ll go back and join the rest of the reporters at the front of the building, promise.”

  Stangley looked back at Al to give him an “I hope you’re watching this” smile, but suddenly felt the door close gently against his toe. He turned back toward the door, but the man was gone. There had been no sound of a heavy self-closing exterior door coming to rest against its jamb, no familiar metal-clunk sound of a latching mechanism, no sound of rejection. Stangley looked down and confirmed the door was being held open by his shoe. Not quite certain whether the man had intended for the door to stay open, he held his hopeful foot in place, and waited.

  “I don’t know how you do it, John.”

  “Do what?”

  “Man, it’s like you stun their brains or something,” Al said. “If someone told me about how you get people to do the stuff you do with just words, you know, I simply wouldn’t believe them. But man, I’ve seen you do it myself so many times. Like the way you get cashiers to accept your out-of-date coupons.”

  Stangley’s ability to pass off out-of-date fast-food coupons never failed to amaze Al. Stangley would wait as the cashier read what the coupon was for, such as a buy-one-get-one-free or free drink with purchase. As soon as the cashier glanced down to read the coupon’s expiration date, Stangley would ask in an upbeat voice: “You guys really busy today?” or “What sandwich do you like here?” The cashier would be distracted just enough to let Stangley’s expired coupon right on through.

  “It’s like some freaky kind of voodoo,” Al said. “You confuse them with irrelevant questions and statements. Never seen anyone pull the bullshit you do.”

  Stangley acknowledged Al with a quick smile then glanced at his watch to mark the start of their wait.

  Feeling that his chance to get his exclusive footage was slipping away, Stangley waited only two minutes before slipping through the NBL’s obscure service entrance door.

  The men moved quickly through the bowels of the NBL. Stangley followed a crude map, a faxed copy of a sketch drawn on a slip of paper that his contact assured him would lead them from the nearly unknown door up to the well-known observation deck.

  “Okay, now we have to do this quickly,” Stangley told his cameraman. “If they catch us up here, they will likely ban us entirely.”

  “Gee, ya think? But hey I’m not worried,” Al said. “You’d probably talk your way out of that, too.”

  When the two reached the observation deck, they found it empty—exactly the way Stangley’s contact said it would be at this early hour.

  Al squatted to quickly check his camera’s battery and light levels, then confirmed he was ready to start filming. “You need to do anything before we start?” he asked.

  “No, I’m ready, been here countless times before. I think I can do it straight from memory,” Stangley said, quickly taking the microphone in hand and backing up, placing his back against the deck’s railing.

  Al hoisted the camera to his shoulder. “Alright then, we go in five, four…”

  Stangley reminded himself to control his pacing. Whenever his potent level of excitement was mixed with a subject he knew well—like the NBL—he tended to rush his speech like a teenager in front of his English class.

  He spoke to the camera’s red record light with fervor, as if the light was his target audience: living, breathing beings, the most interested pupils he’d ever known, people just like himself who shared his love for NASA’s manned spaceflight program, and man’s arduou
s quest for knowledge.

  “If you were led blindfolded to where I’m standing now, which is the observation deck of NASA’s neutral buoyancy laboratory,” Stangley began, “known simply as the NBL here in Houston, your other senses would swiftly register the mildly humid air tinged with the odor of chlorine, and the high-ceiling echoey acoustics one typically associates with indoor pools. But if the blindfold were removed, you’d gasp in shock as your brain tried to comprehend all that your eyes would see.”

  Stangley reached out over the railing, pointing to the boundaries of the huge room, and the camera followed, panning from left to right before zooming down for a closer view of the world’s largest indoor pool.

  Below the observation deck, the camera captured a half-dozen staff members swimming laps. They left delicate streamers of froth in the deliciously blue chemically balanced pool water. Along the far end of the deck, team members had begun unloading a bevy of gear from commercial-grade dollies.

  “So this is where astronauts come to learn how to perform spacewalks. They practice using specially designed power screwdrivers and wrenches, and practice specific assembly procedures required for the construction of the International Space Station. But as we’ll see later this morning when we join Mission Specialists Garrett and Mullen poolside, astronauts sometimes come to the NBL to learn last-minute rescue procedures for a marooned shuttle crew.”

  Stangley moved to the end of the observation deck to allow the camera to capture the long view of the pool.

  “Now, the NBL began training astronauts in January 1997. So this is a relatively new facility, replacing the much smaller weightless environment training facility. The NBL pool measures two-hundred-two feet in length, one-hundred-two feet in width, and forty feet in depth. The pool’s designers were able to achieve a depth of forty feet by placing twenty feet of the pool’s depth below ground. To get a sense of how big this pool is—and those of you with swimming pools at home will appreciate this—the NBL pool is so large, it took twenty-eight days to complete the initial filling and six-point-two million gallons of water.

  “So why use a pool to learn how to spacewalk, you ask? Can’t the simulations be done with a computer or some other method, you wonder? Well, the answer is that some spacewalking simulations can be accomplished with computer simulation, but no matter how fancy the programming, it lags far behind the authenticity that astronauts experience while performing spacewalk tasks fully suited, breathing space suit air, and working on life-size mock-ups underwater.

  “If you look down through the surface of the water, you’ll begin to understand what I mean about authenticity.” The camera zoomed for a tight shot of the water.

  “Even though the NBL pool has the volume of ten Olympic-size pools, you don’t see any lane lines painted on the bottom, or floating lane markers stretched along the pool’s length. Instead, NASA engineers constructed lifelike mock-ups, then lowered them carefully to the pool’s bottom using those bright-yellow deck-mounted jib cranes and the two overhead bridge cranes, each capable of lifting ten tons. The engineers created the ultimate astronaut playground,” Stangley said.

  The cameraman panned across the water while zooming in close. The mock-ups of a shuttle payload bay and trusses of the International Space Station all glistened beneath the pool’s surface like strange sunken space treasures.

  Terry Mullen called ahead to the hoist-stand support team, “Hey, you boys ready to go swimming?” His voice was nearly lost amid the cacophony of voices and clanking metal hardware.

  “We’re ready,” a technician fired back without looking at the approaching pair of astronauts. “We’re just waiting for the two clowns who are supposed to wear these space suits. Anyone seen…? Wait, here they are now,” the technician said, looking up at them with a smile.

  Mullen and Garrett strode cockily along the edge of the pool’s 202-foot length, their self-esteem obviously unaffected by their appearance, not even with better than 100 reporters strewn about the perimeter of the pool, poised for note-taking.

  Two of NASA’s finest, clad in black Teva sandals, adult diapers and long underwear.

  “Nice outfits, guys!” a technician teased the astronauts as they arrived at the hoist stand. There was no end to the cracks made about the standard long underwear-and-diaper combo worn by all space-suited astronauts. It seemed no matter what level of fitness an astronaut maintained, no matter how provocative the feminine curves, or how formidable the Romanesque pectorals and biceps, no quantity or quality of physical human gift could overcome the decidedly unfashionable space suit undergarments.

  Of course, the components of NASA’s fashion combo, like everything else in the unique other world of space travel, had fancy names and corresponding acronyms. The diaper was known as the Maximum Absorbency Garment, or MAG, and was essentially a disposable adult diaper. The Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, or LCVG, which was worn over the MAG, bore a striking resemblance to long underwear, but was significantly more sophisticated. The LCVG combined long sleeves and pants in a somewhat-lumpy one piece. But hand-sewn between layers of spandex material were over 90 meters of plastic tubing. When the LCVG was worn by an astronaut in a powered-up space suit, water chilled to 37 degrees Fahrenheit circulated through the plastic tubing and whisked away unwanted body heat, thereby helping to regulate the astronaut’s body temperature.

  “One-eighty-seven,” Shane Garrett called out as he stepped off the scale. The technician quickly wrote down Garrett’s weight, then busied himself with some calculations he’d use to figure the exact amount of ballast Garrett’s space suit would need in the pool. The goal was to have the astronaut neutrally buoyant, not sinking to the bottom or floating to the top, thus giving the best possible simulation of floating in space.

  Mullen bent down and released the clips of his Teva sandals, then hesitated briefly as he glanced at the foot beds of the scale. It was a subtle pause, but Garrett saw it: Mullen’s concern about the cleanliness of the scale, his unspoken wish that a paper towelette or something could be put down on the scale before he stepped on.

  “One-seventy-two,” Mullen finally said after the scale came to rest. He stepped directly from the scale back to his sandals, carefully and deliberately avoiding contact with the wet pool deck.

  “Okay guys, while the suit techs are finishing up with your BC settings, I gotta go over a few reminders I know you’ve heard a hundred times before,” the test director said.

  Mullen and Garrett had heard the warnings and precautions repeated more than they cared to remember. But their military training had taught them to respect the wearisome recitation of safety procedures. It was quite possibly the only time the two of them were serious about anything.

  Microgravity simulations in the NBL were in fact fraught with danger. There was an unending concern for the astronauts that the unthinkable could happen while they worked at a depth of 30-plus feet. Their equipment was relentlessly checked by the suit team. Materials were refurbished, rubber seals replaced, metal latches realigned; no single piece of equipment made it to the pool deck without first being inspected and recertified. So it wasn’t catastrophic failure that anyone feared. Rather, it was a fear that, sometime during the methodic and tedious process of donning a suit, one metal part wouldn’t seat exactly with its counterpart the way it should, a piece of rubber would be pinched or cut, allowing water to seep in, slowly at first, innocuously, but then faster and faster as if the water itself were searching for the source of life.

  The Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU, was what NASA called the space suit astronauts used to perform spacewalks. The suits used in the NBL pool were of the same type and size used in space. The suits weighed upwards of 280 pounds, so entering the pool using stairs or ladders was not practical. Instead, EMU-suited astronauts were lowered into the pool by way of a large metal hoist-stand. To help counter the EMU’s weight, the torso portion of the suit, minus the helmet, was connected directly to the hoist-stand. First, an astronaut don
ned the pants of the space suit, and then was assisted by suit technicians onto the hoist-stand, where his or her arms and head were carefully directed up through the suspended torso section of the suit. Once all the suit joint-connections were checked (two ankle, two wrist, one torso), the helmet was locked into place and checked.

  By 8:55 that morning, Mullen and Garrett found themselves fully suited and standing in the hoist-stand above the pool edge. Communication checks rang inside their helmets and camera flashes came from every direction.

  “Okay, guys, you look good,” Mullen and Garrett heard the test director say. They each returned a thumbs-up.

  The crane inched the hoist-stand out over the water, giving the astronauts their first good look at how the NBL’s engineering group had configured the mock-ups for the rescue-mission simulation.

  “So that’s supposed to be Atlantis,” Garrett said to Mullen, pointing to the mock-up of a shuttle payload bay resting on the bottom of the pool.

  “Right,” Mullen confirmed over the comm loop. “We’ll arrive on orbit for rendezvous, and sneak up on Columbia from below.”

  A second overhead crane rig had been moved over the submerged Atlantis mock-up to simulate Columbia’s relative position in space after rendezvous. Attached to this second crane were ropes that hung down into the water to the depth of the Atlantis mock-up payload bay floor. On the ends of the ropes were weights that allowed the ropes to move freely from the light water chop created by the divers.

  The method of transferring astronauts via ropes had never been attempted in space, and that was why Mullen and Garrett were going into the pool now—to test the procedure and identify potential hazards.

  The hoist-stand finally broke the water. As if on cue from a Hollywood director, eight scuba divers entered the pool by falling back onto their tanks. They separated into two teams, four per astronaut. Mullen and Garrett each had his own cameraman and tool/equipment specialist, plus two others to physically assist him into the required positions for the EVA simulation. But the divers also were responsible for monitoring the astronauts for any physical signs of distress, suit leaks or respiration problems, and handling any communication problems.