Launch on Need

by Daniel Guiteras

  The immersion continued, water creeping up over the toes of their boots, past their knees and then up to and past their waist connections.

  The test director broke in during a moment of silence on the comm line. “Hey you two. Any wet panties?”

  “I’m dry,” Mullen replied first, “watertight at my waist.”

  “He meant your MAG, Mullen. He was wondering if you peed yourself,” Garrett said with a laugh.

  “How about you, Garrett, your suit good?”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said, still laughing. “I’m good.”

  Even the most seasoned astronauts found the prospect of EVA simulations in the pool a test of their susceptibility to claustrophobia. Some even had nightmares of drowning in the space suit, which seemed unlikely given the fact that each astronaut in the pool always had four scuba divers tending to his or her needs. But astronauts who dared to speak of their nightmares told similar stories of near-drowning. They would wake from their dreams with pulses racing, having imagined themselves ensnared in heavy, power-tool-laden space suits filling with water. In these dreams, shouts turned to screams that would go unheard due to water-shorted electrical circuits. Rescue divers seemed impossibly distant and were always looking away at the critical moment. The medical team was present, ready and capable, but unaware of any problem. Can’t anyone see I’m in trouble? With eyes bulging in terror, the astronauts knew that even if they could manage to reach the surface, they wouldn’t be able to remove their helmets without help.

  “Remember, guys,” the voice from the NBL control center instructed the two now fully submerged astronauts, “in this first sim Garrett will be the rescued and Mullen will be the assist.”

  “Garrett here, copy that.”

  “Roger that, we’re on our way to position,” Mullen responded, as two members of his scuba team guided him down to the floor of the mock-up Atlantis payload bay.

  When Garrett arrived on his mark, he rotated himself length-wise, lowering his head, so he could more easily view Mullen over the lower aspect of his helmet. Mullen had maneuvered himself into position and was standing on the floor of the shuttle payload-bay floor mock-up, about 25 feet below. For a moment, Garrett was able to ignore all that would not be present in space—the blue water, the International Space Station truss mock-up to his left, and the eight untethered wet-suited bodies that were moving around him in the liquid space. Next, he imagined looking down from Columbia to the rescuing ship Atlantis, and how Earth would be rotating behind Atlantis, filling his peripheral vision. When he finished setting the scene in his mind, he suddenly remembered with concern that several of Columbia’s crew had no previous EVA experience. As a highly experienced EVA astronaut, Garrett felt the view Columbia’s crew would see as they looked down the boom to Atlantis would be quite daunting.

  “Hey I just thought of something,” Garrett said, interrupting a conversation on the loop between a technician and Mullen.

  “Ah, go ahead, Garrett,” The test director said, leaning toward his microphone as he watched Garrett on one of the NBL’s 25 control-room monitors. “What’s up?”

  “Well, now that I’m in position looking down from Columbia at what will be Atlantis during the EVA, I gotta tell you, our virgin spacewalkers aboard Columbia might get a little overwhelmed by the visuals.”

  “What choice do they have?” They have to go down the boom if they want to go home,” Mullen said.

  “Well, of course,” Garrett said. “I just wonder if we should give them some sort of a heads up…”

  The sim supervisor broke in, “Ah, you bring up a good point, Garrett. We are in the process of putting together an EVA briefing package for the crew of Columbia. I too think it would be helpful to uplink them video from the sims we do here in the pool so they can get a sense of the expected vantage point.”

  “Roger that,” Garrett said.

  Chapter 41

  White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico

  Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003

  EVEN ON A GOOD DAY, when the sea is flat, the wind is calm, and the sky is clear, the business of landing an F/A-18C on the deck of an aircraft carrier can still scare the hell out of the best pilots. There is hardly a carrier pilot alive who does not have at least one recurring nightmare about what almost happened—or what did happen, and how he or she somehow managed to survive.

  As Dana Avery climbed aboard the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA), the memory of her worst night as a Navy aviator flashed in front of her now, just as it did whenever she took the left seat. Usually she relived only a scene or two, but sometimes the whole thing unfolded from beginning to end, and when it did, she let it come freely, waiting for whatever lesson would present itself this time.

  That awful night, the word about their mission had come down suddenly during a prolonged lull in the wind. The mission objectives were conveyed to the carrier pilots assembled in the ship’s ready room, their questions answered directly and with military-grade brevity. The wind speed had fallen to within the established safe-flying parameters; it was one of those “now or never” moments.

  So the frantic work began. The blue shirts sent planes up to the flight deck via the ship’s aircraft elevators, while the yellow-shirted handling and catapult officers scrutinized the moves of the various deck crews, assuring each plane’s ordinance and fuel-level was correct.

  No time was wasted. As soon as planes began arriving at the flight deck, pilots climbed aboard for their pre-flight checks, while support equipment quickly positioned planes at the catapult. Steam vapors slithered up through the shuttle-track, danced like ghostly figures, then were blown by the headwinds across the deck and out over the ocean, where they vanished.

  The steam-powered catapult piston recoiled and repressurized rhythmically, and with each new discharge it sent a pair of seething afterburners off into the arid night. One followed another until all 18 planes were off and away.

  Barely an hour-and-a-half later, Avery and her squadron had turned and burned, having dropped 100,000 pounds of MK-83s on an Iraqi position in Kuwait. The squadron had met no resistance while executing its mission, and now it was heading home to the USS Saratoga, nervously steaming north-northwest along the Red Sea.

  Avery, flying at the head of the traffic pattern, was first in line to land. The rest of the squadron was right behind her—a swarm of hornets returning to its nest—crowding the airspace. The carrier’s coordinates were locked in; her plane knew exactly where it was going.

  On the return flight, the prevailing Egyptian winds had returned, and were punching and pushing the planes around; gusts from one direction died out only to immediately attack from another. It was the end of January, Avery thought, much too early for “khamseen,” the Egyptian word for the hot spring wind that blows south across the country and down to the Red Sea.

  She was less than 10 miles out and had a visual of the 1,200-mile-long, 190-mile-wide Red Sea. She could not see her carrier yet, at least, not in the way you can see a cruise liner at night, obscenely lit up as they are against the blue-black water. Her night vision goggles were powered up, so through them she saw silver-green “hot spots” against a dark-green background. The carrier was such a massive ship, and yet it seemed to be illuminated by nothing more than a paltry bare-bulb porch light.

  Fortunately, Avery’s aircraft was no old-school relic. Besides goggles, she also had a full color digital map of the terrain below, forward-looking infrared and a heads-up display. The plane was returning to the ship as if it were being called, or had no other option.

  Finding the ship wasn’t what she was worried about. It was the damn wind. As she neared the ship, she imagined how the wind was likely churning and whipping up the water, moving the ship, and causing her runway target at the stern of the Saratoga to heave up and down.

  The carrier’s silver-green wake shimmered faintly from the waxing quarter-moon, but Avery’s night-vision goggles gave no extra clues as to the magnitude of the winds blowing over the ship’s fligh
t deck. Fancy gizmos aside, she knew she would have to bring the plane aboard amidst the hostile desert wind.

  Avery had her angle of attack dialed in and was riding the wind slightly to the right of the ship’s wake. She stole a glance at her landing-gear indicators; they confirmed all three were down and locked. She had peeled back her goggles in order to distinguish between the red, green and orange lights of the ship’s optical carrier landing aide, an array of lights known simply as the “meatball.” If the pilot saw green lights, it meant the approach was too high and that touchdown would be long, missing the ship’s arresting cables. Red lights meant the pilot’s approach was too low and that a crash into the end of the ship was likely. Orange lights meant you were at the proper angle of attack.

  The last 30 seconds before touchdown went badly. The meatball’s colors changed like lights in a disco: red, orange, red, green, orange, green, red, red, red, red. She fought to keep the plane on course, the wind interfering constantly, and then suddenly the meatball began flashing: She had been waved off.

  “Damn it!”

  She switched to full power and aborted the descent and quickly rejoined the landing traffic pattern. Modern jets were great for getting you out of trouble, she thought. You could just jam the throttle forward and the jet would climb right back for another approach. But all that power came at a tremendous cost, of course, in the form of fuel—something that was now starting to concern her.

  Avery called out her fuel load as she approached again; the landing signals officer knew her fuel situation and wanted to give her all the room she needed. This time, she made it to the deck, but did what aviators call a “bolter”: Her tail hook hit the deck and bounced over the four arresting cables—another miss. She had already begun to apply the throttle as she hit the deck, but when she missed the cables she went balls to the wall, and added a three-second squeeze on the afterburner for good measure.

  On the third attempt, Avery finally brought the plane aboard. She had nailed the “3-wire,” dropping the tail hook between the second and third arresting cables, which was ideal, except that she was dangerously low on fuel. Her fuel was so low, in fact, that during her approach she had twice fingered the yellow-and-black-striped ejection handle that looped up between her legs, just to remind herself that the option was available.

  Avery felt the familiar vibration through her seat meld with the distinctive whine of spooling twin Rolls Royce Turbofans, a sensation sufficient to tug her free from her reverie. There were voices in her headset, checks and confirmations, and then she heard the flight instructor say “Here we go,” and the shuttle training aircraft began rolling. Black lines painted on the runway soon ticked off under the nose of the aircraft like distinct seconds on a watch, and then the lines blurred into a solid black line just as the nose wheel lifted from runway one-seven.

  Since the very beginning of the Space Shuttle Program, the White Sands Space Harbor (WSSH) in New Mexico had served as a backup landing facility for the shuttle. It was third in line, following the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 113 shuttle flights, however, only once had an orbiter landed at WSSH. It was Columbia, returning from NASA’s third shuttle mission, designated STS-3. And so it hardly seemed worth the trouble and expense to keep the two 15,000-foot hard-packed gypsum runways ready, annually recertified as they were for shuttle weight requirements, and groomed to a laser-leveled tolerance of plus or minus 1 inch per 1,000 feet of runway.

  The facility served not only as an alternate landing site, but also was available for emergency landings—specifically the abort-once-around (AOA) landing that would be implemented if the main engines failed to take the shuttle to a sustainable orbit. If this were to occur, the orbiter would circle Earth once before landing, a process that would take about 90 minutes from time of launch.

  When the shuttle wasn’t flying, the WSSH was used for training astronauts using the shuttle training aircraft (STA). Since the north-south and east-west runways at the WSSH were oriented similarly to the runways at the Kennedy Space Center and Edwards Air Force Base respectively, astronauts were able to train for specific runways in an area with wide-open vistas and relatively low air traffic.

  Astronaut Dana Avery busied herself in the left seat of the STA making final preparations for the simulation. The instruments in front of her looked as if they had been plucked from an actual orbiter; they replicated exactly what she would see on the flight deck of Atlantis. Her view out the windshield and the side windows of the STA had been masked off, allowing her only the views she would see through Atlantis’s windows.

  In the seat next to Avery, the flight instructor used standard Gulfstream instrumentation. It was his job to fly the STA to an altitude of 35,000 feet, where the simulation would begin. Designed as a corporate Gulfstream II aircraft, the plane presented no problems for the instructor during his pre-simulation segment of the flight.

  In the middle seat behind Avery and the instructor sat the flight-simulation engineer, who readied the software of the Advanced Digital Avionics System, which was at the heart of the STA. The ADAS software contained thousands of actual orbiter data points culled from previous orbiter landings—critical data such as rudder, flap and elevon orientation at various airspeeds and altitudes. The programming technique called “model following” allowed the STA to mimic the characteristics of an actual orbiter on its final approach for landing.

  Avery had done all this before; she had practiced approaches and landings in the STA, and had even landed both Endeavor and Discovery on two previous shuttle missions. This practice session was designed merely to refresh her brain, so that on landing day when the time came to switch off Atlantis’s Digital Auto Pilot, her touch on the stick would be perfect.

  Atlantis, like all orbiters, would come back to Earth as a glider with engines off and a dead stick. Pilots dubbed the orbiter “the flying brick.” She would get only one chance at a landing—hit the touchdown markers on the shuttle landing strip, or crash. That was it; there were no other options. There were no wave-offs, no go-arounds, and no afterburners. No option to eject and ditch.

  Avery made a final check of her gauges; she was ready. This was arguably the biggest commander job in space shuttle history, and NASA had given the job to her.

  “The software’s been initialized; it’s ready to go,” the engineer called through the plane’s communication system.

  “Copy that,” the instructor said. “Avery, are you ready?”

  “Let the pig loose,” Avery responded with a smile. The customary phrase referred to the way the STA handled during a simulation—lethargic, heavy and slow.

  “All right, then,” the engineer said. “Avery, she’s all yours on my mark, in five, four, three, two, one. Mark.”

  Avery took over control of the STA as it transitioned from corporate jet to orbiter. She banked the plane over to the Heading Alignment Circle (HAC), an imaginary downward corkscrew the orbiter flew for alignment with the runway below. This would be the first of 10 simulated approaches and landings. The sky was clear, and the wind was out of the west at 4 knots.

  “Entering the HAC,” Avery called out. She held the plane in a right-hand bank to begin an overhead right-hand turn of 290 degrees. The STA was heading down and falling fast.

  “Alignment’s good at the one-eighty,” the instructor said, letting Avery know she was on course.

  “Roger that, on at the one-eighty.”

  She continued on around the circle, carefully guiding the plane, preparing for her next set of maneuvers.

  “On at the ninety.”

  “Roger on at the ninety,” Avery confirmed. As soon as she had completed the circle and the crosshairs were aligned in her display, she called out her next set of moves. “Throttles back to idle. Okay engines at idle. Applying reverse thrusters.”

  In addition to the ADAS, the STA’s modifications also included changes to its reverse thrusters. On commercial flights, pilots typically activat
ed reverse thrusters just after touchdown to assist in slowing a plane on the runway. But engineers had modified the STA’s reverse thrusters so they would be active during flight, allowing them to produce huge amounts of drag, and giving hopeful shuttle pilots the closest possible approximation to taking an actual orbiter stick in hand.

  The STA nosed over into a dramatic 18-degree glide slope, a dive that was seven times steeper than a commercial airliner approach. Avery could not hold back the instant butterflies in her stomach. No matter how many times she had done this maneuver, it always shocked her system and defied her pilot’s instincts: Nosing over this far on an ordinary approach in any other plane usually meant serious trouble. Once when asked by a reporter what the dive in the STA felt like, Avery responded with, “Imagine sitting in an airplane that’s been pushed off the top of a building. It’s just like that.”

  Her view forward now held little sky and a swiftly growing Earth.

  “Deploying main landing gear,” Avery called out.

  “Main gear down and locked,” the instructor confirmed.

  The plane slowed even more from the increased drag of the landing gear. The STA was descending at a rate of 10,000 feet per minute now, a rate about 10 to 12 times that of a normal approach by a commercial aircraft.

  “I have a visual of the runway.” Avery had the STA right where she wanted it—aimed at a point 7,500 feet down the runway.

  She put the heading display flight path marker on the end of the runway, bleeding off altitude and correcting with slight adjustments of the stick until the STA had dropped to an altitude of just under 1,800 feet.

  “Initiating flare to one-point-five,” Avery said as she decreased the STA’s dive angle from 18 degrees to just 1.5. The STA slowed to an airspeed of 5 feet per second. She would not actually land the STA as part of the simulation, but she would bring it very close.