Launch on Need

by Daniel Guiteras

  Brown gave Stangley a long look. “I never read the book or saw the movie,” he said, looking away and back again. “How do you come up with this crap? Actually a better question might be why?”

  Stangley shrugged.

  Those in charge of NASA’s public affairs were well aware they had taken a very serious problem and made it the basis of a brilliant marketing campaign. Tim Stevens’s plan had been executed perfectly. The media had chased every bone thrown to them by NASA. The public was showing unprecedented interest in the mission. NASA’s web site administrators had been forced to add servers to handle the dramatic increase in Internet traffic. Through NASA’s web site, in a stroke of marketing genius, the public was able to register for one of four random drawings for tickets to view astronauts Mullen and Garrett training for the rescue, be part of a group that would taste-test samples of astronaut food, see the rollout of the shuttle stack, or watch the launch itself. In the three days since the site went live, tens of thousands of NASA faithful had registered for tickets.

  The NASA-inspired “Space Camp” in Alabama, a learning camp already popular among U.S. kids, had been inundated with inquires and bookings. Parents of relentless children were happily paying full tuition for dates a full year in the future, and some were even paying twice the tuition for immediate enrollment.

  In a perfectly choreographed manner, the NASA spokesman wrapped up his presentation and pointed to the south-facing doors of the VAB. A local high-school band, winner of a contest among high-school bands across Florida, began playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” just as the huge steel doors started rolling up in sections like a roman shade.

  The lower portion of the crawler-transporter came into view first, followed by the lower portions of the orange external tank and white solid rocket boosters. Since she was on the north side of the shuttle stack, Atlantis was still hidden from view. Atlantis would be hidden from view until the transporter had moved well out onto the crawler-way.

  The crawler-transporter crept out of the VAB with its twin 2,750-horsepower diesel engines screaming. The Shuttle Stack towered over the crowd like a skyscraper, creeping along at one mile per hour past awe-struck spectators.

  It was a one-float parade of American pride, a larger-than-life rocket ship on its way to rescue the country’s marooned astronauts.

  “It amazes me every time I see it,” Stangley exclaimed as the Stack passed. It’s incredible.”

  “Eighteen million pounds,” Brown said in a similar tone of wonder. “You know we only have ten engineers certified to drive the transporter?”

  “I’ve heard that, and doesn’t it take like a year to become certified?”

  “Something like that,” Brown replied, realizing that despite his own decades of work at NASA, Stangley had been reporting on space travel for nearly two decades, and there were probably few facts about the space program Stangley didn’t know.

  “One mile an hour, one-hundred-fifty gallons of fuel per mile,” Stangley offered to what had become a pissing match of facts.

  Presently, Atlantis came into full view of the crowd. The north side of the crawler-transporter was adorned with typical pre-launch banners, but included one neither Stangley nor the rest of the world had ever seen: “Go For Rescue.”

  As Atlantis marched off farther into the distance, Brown found himself checking his watch. He had seen enough. “This is going to go on for another five to eight hours before Atlantis reaches the pad—of course, that’s if we continue to have clear weather and no transporter breakdowns.”

  “I heard the weather was supposed to be good the rest of the day,” Stangley said.

  “We should grab lunch before all these people get in line ahead of us,” Brown urged.

  Stangley looked back at the shuttle stack and then at Brown. “Yeah, I guess I’ve seen enough, too,” Stangley said, trying to be agreeable. In reality, he would have been happy to walk beside the shuttle stack all the way out to the pad.

  As they began walking, Brown placed his arm around Stangley’s shoulder. “It’ll give you a chance to catch me up on how the world has been changed by this rescue mission.”

  Early that evening, the crawler-transporter carrying Atlantis and the assembled Shuttle Stack arrived at the 5-percent grade ramp that leads up to launch pad 39A.

  The crawler’s 16 jacking, equalization and leveling bearings worked in unison to keep the Shuttle Stack vertical while climbing the grade. When the crawler-transporter reached the pad, engineers used a laser-guided docking system to bring the Shuttle Stack to within a quarter-inch of the desired launch position.

  NASA was just two hours behind schedule when Atlantis finally settled in at launch pad 39A.

  Chapter 45

  Columbia Flight Day 16

  Friday, Jan. 31, 2003

  STANGLEY’S BUICK CENTURY rental car sat parked a few rows down from the entrance to the temporary media parking lot at the Kennedy Space Center. He noticed that even by 8:50 in the evening, there were still very few empty parking spaces.

  He didn’t mind the walk in the night air. Having been in front of the camera for most of the day, he welcomed it in fact. He felt alive. He should have felt exhausted, should have been too tired to eat. He’d gone on the air at 6 A.M. that morning, broadcasting from CNN’s booth at the Kennedy Space Center. But now, instead of feeling wrung out, he felt energized by his work. Rescue mission coverage had expanded to nearly around the clock. As he approached his car, he found himself wishing it had been parked another quarter-mile away—his legs felt that fresh.

  He started driving back to his hotel in Cocoa Beach, figuring he would stop for something to eat if a suitable place caught his attention. As he drove, he found it hard to stop thinking about the rescue mission and the impact the story was having on him and the rest of the country, too, it seemed. The rescue mission was all anyone was talking about. And that was just the way Stangley thought it should be. The general public finally cared about the space program again. Stangley heard it in the way people talked; there was a certain newfound optimism spreading across the country. People believed that the astronauts could be rescued, that NASA could pull it off. But the sentiment went much deeper than that. The rescue mission was giving people the feeling that America could be great again, that it was safe for Americans to rise up, to cheer for a team they had not been sure could win. The mission was restoring a collective sense of dignity, and helping to close and heal some of the wounds of 9/11. It was time to buff things back to a shine.

  Stangley’s thoughts were interrupted by his ringing cell phone. He fished it from the car’s center console and answered the call. “John Stangley.”

  “Hey, you eat yet, you big TV star?”

  “Uh,” Stangley laughed and hesitated as he searched for a comeback. “No, I haven’t. I’m on my way back to Cocoa Beach. I think I’m leaning towards Flaminia’s.”

  “Won’t they be closed by the time you get there?”

  “No, the restaurants have been open late because of the crowds. Maybe you’ve heard about the rescue…”

  Brown cut him off, “Very funny. Hey, you want company?”

  “Uh, yeah, Ken, that sounds good, actually.”

  “All right, I’ll meet you there. Probably take me twenty minutes or so.”

  “See you there.”

  Stangley closed his phone with a practiced hand and smiled. He was feeling good about his growing friendship with Brown. They understood each other; both were widowed and both were passionate about the space program. Stangley hoped Brown’s presence would help him stave off the memories of Claire that were likely to return at the restaurant.

  Stangley had been to Flaminia’s Famous Italian Kitchen many times with colleagues, but only once with Claire. By the way she talked about it after just the one visit, though, one would have thought it was her all-time favorite restaurant. She had loved the food, especially the homemade breadsticks—an important point, since Claire considered herself a connoisseur of
bread. He smiled, remembering how she would pour, with a chemist’s care, two equal-size pools onto her bread plate, one of olive oil, the other of vinegar. But the dipping technique was what was most important. “You’ve got to dip the bread in the vinegar first,” Claire would insist. “If you dip it in the oil first, the oil seals off the bread so the vinegar can’t soak in. Do that, and you’ll end up with a mostly oily taste because the ratio is all wrong.” It was her little habits, her “Claireisms,” as Stangley called them, that he missed most.

  Stangley reached for the radio in hopes of finding a little diversion from what was quickly becoming a saddening focus. After scanning the FM band and finding nothing that suited his mood, he switched to AM to check the local talk-radio stations.

  “It’s six minutes after nine on a Friday evening, thanks for joining me. I’m Craig Randall, sitting in for the vacationing Jack Sanchez. You’re listening to AM 790 WSPX, Florida’s choice for news and talk, up and down the Space Coast.”

  Stangley adjusted his back against the seat, settling in, and figured he would give this segment a chance.

  There was a moment of dead air and then Randall began.

  “All right, this hour I want to talk to you about an aspect of the rescue mission that you might not have given much attention to. Now, before you think about tuning away because you think you’ve heard all you can about the rescue mission and you wish NASA would just launch Atlantis already and get it over with, bear with me for a minute. Indulge me.

  “Tonight I want to explore another angle of the rescue mission. If you have considered it, then we certainly want to hear from you, hear your thoughts. We will be taking your calls in just a minute, at one-eight-hundred seven-nine-zero WSPX. But before we go to the phones I need to set something up for you. So close your eyes if you have to. Free yourself up in whatever way works best for you, so you can give a little thought to what I’m about to say. Now if you’re a part of our driving audience tonight then we of course don’t want you closing your eyes. Those of you who are driving will have to do the best you can with your eyes open, or I guess you could pull off the road or something. See, at WSPX, we’re always looking out for your safety,” Randall said with a chuckle, and light laughter could be heard from the studio background.

  “All right, tonight I want you to imagine that you are among the seven astronauts marooned on Space Shuttle Columbia. You’ve been in space sixteen full days now, and if your mission had been going as planned you’d be home now. You’d be back on Earth, your mission would be over, you’d be celebrating and carrying on or whatever it is that astronauts do when they get home from being away in space.

  “But of course that’s not how it’s gone at all, so here you are now, heading into flight-day seventeen and you find yourself, instead, only halfway through your mission. And to top it off, you don’t know if you are going to live or die. NASA officials, through the various media channels, have made it patently clear over the past ten days or so that it will be one way or the other, with no shades of gray. They live or they die. I don’t mean to be melodramatic here. I’m simply trying to covey how grim the astronauts’ situation really is.

  “So imagine yourself helpless in your spacecraft. All the training you’ve endured as an astronaut means little in terms of your being able to help yourself. You hope and pray NASA has carefully screened your fellow crewmates and that no one on board loses it. Hell, you hope you don’t lose it. So you’re forced to wait. You are expected to sleep extra hours and you haven’t exercised in weeks, all in the name of minimizing your CO2 production.

  “Your critical astronaut’s mind, the one that was so gifted at math and engineering and everything to do with science, is gasping for something to work with, starved by the lack of information. You have so many questions. It’s your fundamental nature. But you’re an astronaut, and so from NASA’s perspective, you’re on a need-to-know basis.

  “There’s nowhere you can go to be alone with your thoughts, except maybe your minuscule sleep compartment, but you’re concerned about what your fellow astronauts will think if you crawl in there during the day.

  “The artificial lighting throughout the crew compartments is bleak, anemic, and grim even. In a given ninety-minute period, bright natural light spills into the cabin through too few windows for a precious sixty minutes. And then you wait thirty minutes more until the next cycle, your mood cycling with the sun.

  “Looking out the window used to be a magnificent experience, bright colorful images of Earth turning in the window. Every time you looked out you did your best to identify geographic landmasses. Earth begged for your attention. But now somehow it has become the enemy, a relentless reminder of a place to which you may never return.

  “Mealtime too has grown into a solemn occasion. Oh, there’s some small talk, with everyone trying to be optimistic about the rescue, but it’s obvious what’s on everyone’s mind.

  “It’s a little like being in solitary confinement, and you’ve been told that at the end of thirty days one of two things will happen: You’ll hear either the hiss of poison gas seeping into your cell, or the thud of the cell door’s locking bolt sliding back, signaling your freedom.”

  Randall allowed several seconds of dead air to pass.

  “So, I want to hear your thoughts on this. What goes through your mind as you wait for rescue, or possibly death?

  “One-eight-hundred seven-nine-zero WSPX. Jason on a cell phone, you’re first up.”

  “Hey Craig, thanks for taking my call, great topic. Well, I can tell you, I’m married, I mean I have a wife and kids, two boys actually, and I can’t imagine what my wife would be going through if it were me up there in Columbia.”

  “Can’t imagine being a spouse of one of the astronauts,” Randall said.

  “That would be awful. Do we know what communication abilities they have up there? I mean, are these astronauts going to make videos that NASA can send to their families, like a final farewell or something, you know in case they don’t make it back?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure but I’d imagine the astronauts have the ability to downlink videos to their families. We know they have e-mail capabilities and they’ve had live video communications several times during their mission so far. I guess each astronaut could go to a corner of the orbiter, into the abandoned SpaceHab module possibly or maybe up on the flight deck one at a time to videotape private messages to the families. Something to think about, thanks for the call, Jason.”

  Stangley found it hard to listen without squirming in his seat. Obviously, he’d heard questions from Randall’s show that he absolutely knew the answers to. Sure he could call in, set the record straight for Randall and his audience. Because of his celebrity, Stangley would likely get moved to the front of the caller queue. But instead of calling in or talking back to the radio, he played along with Randall’s scenario, letting his imagination run.

  “Samantha, you’re on WSPX.”

  “Hi, Craig, how are you?”

  “I’m fine this evening, thanks. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I just wanted to know. This may seem like a dumb question, but I mean aren’t the astronauts trained to handle problems, I mean when stuff goes wrong up there? They get special psychological training for just this sort of thing, right?”

  “Well, they’re trained to handle problems, NASA calls them contingencies, but I can assure you none of them signed up for this, not this kind of problem, that’s for sure. I know that in Special Forces training, for example, elite soldiers are put through a series of very difficult training operations that may include periods of starvation, prolonged fatigue and sleep deprivation. I’m not that familiar with the details of astronaut training and what sort of tests like this that they may be exposed to. Maybe someone can call in and answer that for us.”

  “But it’s their job. They’re astronauts.”

  “Well, sure it’s their job, Samantha, but really…”

  “Well, I’m
just saying they shouldn’t be too surprised that something went wrong with their spaceship, ya know?”

  “So, Samantha, you’re saying that the astronauts should just suck it up and not act too surprised to find themselves in a predicament that no other group of astronauts has ever had to endure? You do realize this rescue scenario is a first in the history of manned spaceflight? Samantha? Sam… Well, I guess she hung up.

  “All right, we have time for one more caller before the break. Elliot, you’re on WSPX.”

  “Hey Craig, how’s it going?”

  “I’m fine thanks. What are your thoughts on being stranded in space?”

  “Well, if you ask me the whole thing strikes me as such a mind f… ”

  “Whoa, Elliot, watch the language, man. Steve, did you catch that in delay?”

  Randall had turned from his mike. Unintelligible voices could be heard in the background.

  “Okay, Steve’s nodding his head,” Randall said, now back at his mike, “I can see him through the glass. He’s giving me a thumbs-up. Okay good, man, thank God for technology.

  “Now, while we’re waiting for the delay to catch up. For those of you who just joined us, we’re talking about what it would be like to be stranded on Columbia. I’ve asked listeners to imagine themselves in space in place of the Columbia astronauts, to imagine how the astronauts are handling their days and nights up in space. We invite your thoughts on this at one-eight-hundred seven-nine-zero WSPX.

  “Steve?” Randall was half turned from the mike.

  “Okay, Steve’s given me the sign that we’re back in delay. Elliot, are you still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here, sorry for the F-bomb man, it’s just that this topic just really gets to me, gives me gooseflesh, you know.”

  “I don’t think you’re alone on that one, Elliot.”

  “I’ve been following the space program for a long time. I’m one of those space nuts you know, and I can’t even imagine what those astronauts are going through, what their families must be going through. We all like need to say a prayer or something that they make it back. They’re up there trying to explore and stuff and do science, they don’t need this kind of stress. I mean this rescue mission thing has been interesting and all, but man it must suck to be up there right now, you know, up there in Columbia.”